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I'm sure it is and apologies to the fellow HNers who didn't find my comment funny. If you prefer a more serious answer, Nuclear is overpriced garbage. Sure, th

I'm sure it is and apologies to the fellow HNers who didn't find my comment funny. If you prefer a more serious answer, Nuclear is overpriced garbage. Sure, the industry keeps promising cheap and plentiful energy but what they deliver is Hinckley C.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Nuclear is extremely low-carbon baseload energy with very low land, waste, death, and raw material footprints. In a world of increasing carbon-related challenges, it's very challenging to write off. We're currently building high-carbon fracked gas plants like crazy because they're cheap. Put some kind of price on carbon emissions and instantly fracked gas is expensive and nuclear is cheap. Nuclear's low-carbon nature is not valued in markets, and that's a great shame. Look to the Koreans and Chinese if you want to see economical and effective nuclear projects.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  In the US, CO2 taxes would have to exceed $300/ton for new nuclear plants to pencil out, vs. new gas combined cycle plants. This means nuclear is an extremely poor way of reducing CO2 emission here. There's a vast array of alternatives that become viable at much lower CO2 taxes. It's not climate friendly to be choosing uneconomical approaches. It's almost as if you're using climate as a rationalization for a position you reached by other means.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    That feeling when you work to improve deployment of a 24/7 low-footprint energy source that previously scaled at 20 GWe/yr and emits a mere 12 gCO2eq/kg and someone tells you that you're delusional. :o Just FYI I got into nuclear specifically for climate reasons. Climate has been the goal from before I knew what nuclear reactors really were. The assumption that all new nuclear plants in the US will be as bad as the most recent two is wild, especially when one understands the details of what went wrong in those projects. I don't think the current build process in the West is acceptable. I want to improve serialization and standardization of nuclear deployments to help with climate change quickly. A la Offshore Power Systems. $30/tonne is expected to be fine. See e.g. Table 2.1 in MIT's report [1] [1] http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Future-of-Nuclear-Energy-in-a-Carbon-Constrained-World.pdf http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Future-...
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      We have to go with the data we have. Nuclear has a long history of promising more than it delivered, when it comes to cost. Investors can't ignore this. And I can't ignore it either, no matter how much you want yet another do over. All the "but next time will be different" doesn't change that. Nuclear's competitors don't have to resort to this increasingly desperate salesmanship. Renewable installations come in within 10% of initial cost estimates. They're fundamentally easier technologies to plan, work with, and deliver. Screw up 1% of the module installs in a PV field and your output is down 1%. Screw up 1% of the concrete pours, or 1% of the welds, in a nuclear plant, and it's world of hurt time. The complexity and interdependency of big plants means they are going to be difficult and expensive to build.
      - acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Current renewable costs quoted are generally the cost when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing (which is about 30% and 45% on average in most places). The other times, we're burning fracked natural gas. This is highly warming fossil fuel from pipeline leaks (methane) and from combustion (CO2). Nuclear proponents questioning the economic viability of civilian nuclear power is extremely well documented from 1945 to about 1965, after which it did well for about 4 years before falling into a wild ride of a comparison with coal (also increasing in price due to air pollution controls in the 1970s) and more recently with natural gas. At the moment, France's standardized nuclear fleet is about 20% cheaper than natural gas. Not too shabby. Certainly worth deploying to help, you know, save the planet. Some builds in the West have been bad. Many have been good. We understand today how to make them all good: pick a design and build a lot of them. How do you feel about the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of renewable energy systems as energy storage system fraction ramps up? This paper [1] says it drops from 12:1 down to 3:1 and then stabilizes at 5:1, well below what's often quoted as necessary to sustain industrialized civilization. [1] Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, et. al, Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies, Energy Strategy Reviews, Volume 26, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399.

acidburnNSA 7y ago

Nuclear is extremely low-carbon baseload energy with very low land, waste, death, and raw material footprints. In a world of increasing carbon-related challenges, it's very challenging to write off. We're currently building high-carbon fracked gas plants like crazy because they're cheap. Put some kind of price on carbon emissions and instantly fracked gas is expensive and nuclear is cheap. Nuclear's low-carbon nature is not valued in markets, and that's a great shame. Look to the Koreans and Chinese if you want to see economical and effective nuclear projects.

pfdietz 7y ago
In the US, CO2 taxes would have to exceed $300/ton for new nuclear plants to pencil out, vs. new gas combined cycle plants. This means nuclear is an extremely poor way of reducing CO2 emission here. There's a vast array of alternatives that become viable at much lower CO2 taxes. It's not climate friendly to be choosing uneconomical approaches. It's almost as if you're using climate as a rationalization for a position you reached by other means.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  That feeling when you work to improve deployment of a 24/7 low-footprint energy source that previously scaled at 20 GWe/yr and emits a mere 12 gCO2eq/kg and someone tells you that you're delusional. :o Just FYI I got into nuclear specifically for climate reasons. Climate has been the goal from before I knew what nuclear reactors really were. The assumption that all new nuclear plants in the US will be as bad as the most recent two is wild, especially when one understands the details of what went wrong in those projects. I don't think the current build process in the West is acceptable. I want to improve serialization and standardization of nuclear deployments to help with climate change quickly. A la Offshore Power Systems. $30/tonne is expected to be fine. See e.g. Table 2.1 in MIT's report [1] [1] http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Future-of-Nuclear-Energy-in-a-Carbon-Constrained-World.pdf http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Future-...
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    We have to go with the data we have. Nuclear has a long history of promising more than it delivered, when it comes to cost. Investors can't ignore this. And I can't ignore it either, no matter how much you want yet another do over. All the "but next time will be different" doesn't change that. Nuclear's competitors don't have to resort to this increasingly desperate salesmanship. Renewable installations come in within 10% of initial cost estimates. They're fundamentally easier technologies to plan, work with, and deliver. Screw up 1% of the module installs in a PV field and your output is down 1%. Screw up 1% of the concrete pours, or 1% of the welds, in a nuclear plant, and it's world of hurt time. The complexity and interdependency of big plants means they are going to be difficult and expensive to build.
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Current renewable costs quoted are generally the cost when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing (which is about 30% and 45% on average in most places). The other times, we're burning fracked natural gas. This is highly warming fossil fuel from pipeline leaks (methane) and from combustion (CO2). Nuclear proponents questioning the economic viability of civilian nuclear power is extremely well documented from 1945 to about 1965, after which it did well for about 4 years before falling into a wild ride of a comparison with coal (also increasing in price due to air pollution controls in the 1970s) and more recently with natural gas. At the moment, France's standardized nuclear fleet is about 20% cheaper than natural gas. Not too shabby. Certainly worth deploying to help, you know, save the planet. Some builds in the West have been bad. Many have been good. We understand today how to make them all good: pick a design and build a lot of them. How do you feel about the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of renewable energy systems as energy storage system fraction ramps up? This paper [1] says it drops from 12:1 down to 3:1 and then stabilizes at 5:1, well below what's often quoted as necessary to sustain industrialized civilization. [1] Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, et. al, Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies, Energy Strategy Reviews, Volume 26, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399.