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It is a matter of long-term planning. You don't build a nuclear power plant for it to last 5 years. If a "pro eco" person is against building of a new nuclear p

by Fnoord 7y ago

It is a matter of long-term planning. You don't build a nuclear power plant for it to last 5 years. If a "pro eco" person is against building of a new nuclear power plant perhaps their argument is that we should instead invest more in renewable energy instead. Is that feasible? Lets see. Denmark is fully self-reliant on energy. They invested a lot in wind. [1] Quote: "[..] The Danish Government has introduced the following targets for national energy policy: * Eliminating coal from power production by 2030. * Providing all electrical and heating from renewable sources by 2035. * Providing 100% of Denmark's energy requirements in electricity, heating and transport from renewable sources by 2050." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark

bilbo0s 7y ago
Yep. Our last nuclear plant cost right around 30 billion. (And the cost overruns still haven't stopped with Vogtie. In the end it will cost more.) Now even if you get rid of any and all regulations, you're still talking about 2 to 5 billion to build one of these things. And it's transitional in nature. It will be shut off when the renewables take over. So that's the problem. Energy investors can take this enormous risk on nuclear, that will be going away, but they don't really know when? So the gamble is, will I make my money back before the renewables do my plant in? Or Those same investors can just slap up windmills everywhere and start making their money back right away, and continue generating income on each windmill for the life of the equipment. Even energy investors like Pickens have switched over to the "slap up a windmill" strategy. (Or in his case, I guess it's more of a "slap up so many that no one else can compete with you" strategy.) Point is, Pickens is old, stodgy, conservative, has a preference for big energy projects, and is not prone to rash action. If you can't even convince guys like that to back nuclear in actual deed instead of screed, you really are just not being realistic about the challenges faced by nuclear investors. It's not just regulation, it's all the other energy options that offer far better returns. If we want nuclear, the American tax payer will have to foot the bill for it, and that's just not terribly likely to happen.
- wil421 7y ago
  If Westinghouse didn’t go bankrupt we would probably have 1 of 2 nuclear reactors online this year in Georgia. Total cost is about $25 billion so far.
  - jsnider3 7y ago
    If nuclear plants can't be built without the company going bankrupt, then that's a strong sign they aren't economical.
    - wil421 7y ago
      You don’t expect delays if a company goes bankrupt during a massive construction project? At the same time one of the power companies backed out of a purchase agreement. The project is continuing after the bankruptcy. It is the only nuclear power project in the US.
      - selimthegrim 7y ago
        The other one had banks demanding 30% interest on bridge financing to continue
isostatic 7y ago
In the UK we require a peak load of 40GW, average about 35GW. Wind varies a lot. On May 4th in the UK it was generating nearly 9GW, but on May 1st was generating 220MW. Over the last year it's generated 15% of the UKs electricity demand, so increasing by 10 fold would mean it could generate everything, if there was infinite storage. Lets assume we start off with 100 lots of South Austrailia batteries - so 13 GWh of storage, and fully charge them on May 13th 2018 at 22:30. After 40 minutes we've added 5.5GWh, but we've taken out 12GWh, and in the next few minutes it stops. OK, lets go for 130GWh Storage - or 1,000 SA batteries. That's great, we're doing well. Until May 14th at 07:50, when the battery is full, so we throw away the energy. That's great, we can last until May 17th - less than a week. So we start with a battery that's got a total capacity of 10,000 SA batteries - 1.3TWh, and starts off full. Unfortunately on June 1st it wasn't very windy, and we've been drawing down on our batteries for 2 days. The lights go off on June 1st at 10:50. For the UK to be wind powered for the last year, we'd need 1) 10 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 13 TWh -- that's 100,000 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia. Or 1) 100 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 300 GWh -- that's 2,500 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia. Or 1) 1000 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 500MWh -- that's 3 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia. I'm not sure if it's possible to get 1,000 times as much power from wind as we currently do (21TW of production, generating 57TWh over the course of the year), but it would generate an insane amount of excess energy at windy times.
- lolc 7y ago
  That simplistic calculation is an entirely fictitious scenario. It ignores the fact that energy grids are integrated. Once your wind plants are distributed in a wider area they won't all see the same weather and the differences even out much better. I thought it was acknowledged in the industry that interconnects need to be built out to distribute wind power better. Why did you choose to ignore that in your calculations?
  - abricot 7y ago
    Well.. brexit means brexit
666lumberjack 7y ago
Denmark gets to use all of Scandinavia as a hydroelectric battery, though. It's a bit of a stretch to suggest that any country could replicate its success without that enormous geographical advantage. Current renewable technology is very vulnerable to certain kinds of interruption. In the case of a bad storm, for example, wind turbines have to be shut off (as happened in Denmark in 2005) to avoid damage and the sky is likely to be too overcast for significant solar generation, so a country using 100% intermittent renewables faces blackouts unless they've invested trillions of dollars in multiple days of battery capacity (for my country, the UK, 48 hours of battery capacity at current prices works out to be 2.58 trillion USD). The alternative to battery backup for wind+solar is to have natural gas plants on-site to fill in demand, but even when they're rarely used they leak so much methane that much of the relative CO2 savings from the renewables they're backing are wiped out. Nuclear (fission) energy has lots of ugly flaws, and if it does rescue us from the climate crisis it won't be in the form of monolithic one-off generating stations, but I think going all on on wind and solar is a huge mistake. (I'd much rather see a carbon-tax based blind incentive structure designed to encourage fair competition between sources than specific subsidies to any specific one, but I'm not sure that's feasible on the timescale we're talking about)
- pjc50 7y ago
  > even when they're rarely used they leak so much methane that much of the relative CO2 savings from the renewables they're backing are wiped out. This is not true.
  - cygx 7y ago
    Yeah, I need a citation for that as well: As far as I'm aware, significant leaks only happen at production sites, but not the plants. Also note that natural gas infrastructure can substiture for 'geographical advantages': Germany can store several hundreds TWh that way, which is more than sufficient. Recent claims of power-to-gas-to-power roundtrip efficiency are at 80%, though I've no idea about associated costs.
    - pjc50 7y ago

by Fnoord 7y ago

bilbo0s 7y ago

Yep. Our last nuclear plant cost right around 30 billion. (And the cost overruns still haven't stopped with Vogtie. In the end it will cost more.) Now even if you get rid of any and all regulations, you're still talking about 2 to 5 billion to build one of these things. And it's transitional in nature. It will be shut off when the renewables take over. So that's the problem. Energy investors can take this enormous risk on nuclear, that will be going away, but they don't really know when? So the gamble is, will I make my money back before the renewables do my plant in? Or Those same investors can just slap up windmills everywhere and start making their money back right away, and continue generating income on each windmill for the life of the equipment. Even energy investors like Pickens have switched over to the "slap up a windmill" strategy. (Or in his case, I guess it's more of a "slap up so many that no one else can compete with you" strategy.) Point is, Pickens is old, stodgy, conservative, has a preference for big energy projects, and is not prone to rash action. If you can't even convince guys like that to back nuclear in actual deed instead of screed, you really are just not being realistic about the challenges faced by nuclear investors. It's not just regulation, it's all the other energy options that offer far better returns. If we want nuclear, the American tax payer will have to foot the bill for it, and that's just not terribly likely to happen.

wil421 7y ago
If Westinghouse didn’t go bankrupt we would probably have 1 of 2 nuclear reactors online this year in Georgia. Total cost is about $25 billion so far.
- jsnider3 7y ago
  If nuclear plants can't be built without the company going bankrupt, then that's a strong sign they aren't economical.
  - wil421 7y ago
    You don’t expect delays if a company goes bankrupt during a massive construction project? At the same time one of the power companies backed out of a purchase agreement. The project is continuing after the bankruptcy. It is the only nuclear power project in the US.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      The other one had banks demanding 30% interest on bridge financing to continue

isostatic 7y ago

In the UK we require a peak load of 40GW, average about 35GW. Wind varies a lot. On May 4th in the UK it was generating nearly 9GW, but on May 1st was generating 220MW. Over the last year it's generated 15% of the UKs electricity demand, so increasing by 10 fold would mean it could generate everything, if there was infinite storage. Lets assume we start off with 100 lots of South Austrailia batteries - so 13 GWh of storage, and fully charge them on May 13th 2018 at 22:30. After 40 minutes we've added 5.5GWh, but we've taken out 12GWh, and in the next few minutes it stops. OK, lets go for 130GWh Storage - or 1,000 SA batteries. That's great, we're doing well. Until May 14th at 07:50, when the battery is full, so we throw away the energy. That's great, we can last until May 17th - less than a week. So we start with a battery that's got a total capacity of 10,000 SA batteries - 1.3TWh, and starts off full. Unfortunately on June 1st it wasn't very windy, and we've been drawing down on our batteries for 2 days. The lights go off on June 1st at 10:50. For the UK to be wind powered for the last year, we'd need 1) 10 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 13 TWh -- that's 100,000 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia. Or 1) 100 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 300 GWh -- that's 2,500 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia. Or 1) 1000 times the current wind production 2) A battery or other storage capacity of 500MWh -- that's 3 batteries the size of the one Musk delivered to South Australia. I'm not sure if it's possible to get 1,000 times as much power from wind as we currently do (21TW of production, generating 57TWh over the course of the year), but it would generate an insane amount of excess energy at windy times.

lolc 7y ago
That simplistic calculation is an entirely fictitious scenario. It ignores the fact that energy grids are integrated. Once your wind plants are distributed in a wider area they won't all see the same weather and the differences even out much better. I thought it was acknowledged in the industry that interconnects need to be built out to distribute wind power better. Why did you choose to ignore that in your calculations?
- abricot 7y ago
  Well.. brexit means brexit

666lumberjack 7y ago

Denmark gets to use all of Scandinavia as a hydroelectric battery, though. It's a bit of a stretch to suggest that any country could replicate its success without that enormous geographical advantage. Current renewable technology is very vulnerable to certain kinds of interruption. In the case of a bad storm, for example, wind turbines have to be shut off (as happened in Denmark in 2005) to avoid damage and the sky is likely to be too overcast for significant solar generation, so a country using 100% intermittent renewables faces blackouts unless they've invested trillions of dollars in multiple days of battery capacity (for my country, the UK, 48 hours of battery capacity at current prices works out to be 2.58 trillion USD). The alternative to battery backup for wind+solar is to have natural gas plants on-site to fill in demand, but even when they're rarely used they leak so much methane that much of the relative CO2 savings from the renewables they're backing are wiped out. Nuclear (fission) energy has lots of ugly flaws, and if it does rescue us from the climate crisis it won't be in the form of monolithic one-off generating stations, but I think going all on on wind and solar is a huge mistake. (I'd much rather see a carbon-tax based blind incentive structure designed to encourage fair competition between sources than specific subsidies to any specific one, but I'm not sure that's feasible on the timescale we're talking about)

pjc50 7y ago
> even when they're rarely used they leak so much methane that much of the relative CO2 savings from the renewables they're backing are wiped out. This is not true.
- cygx 7y ago
  Yeah, I need a citation for that as well: As far as I'm aware, significant leaks only happen at production sites, but not the plants. Also note that natural gas infrastructure can substiture for 'geographical advantages': Germany can store several hundreds TWh that way, which is more than sufficient. Recent claims of power-to-gas-to-power roundtrip efficiency are at 80%, though I've no idea about associated costs.
  - pjc50 7y ago