5 ms·

> Many of the things you're saying aren't correct, see my other comment (sibling to yours) for references. I really wish that I was wrong instead of just semi-

> Many of the things you're saying aren't correct, see my other comment (sibling to yours) for references. I really wish that I was wrong instead of just semi-accurate and sloppy. > Nuclear is not cheap compared to photovoltaics, wind and hydro. The price of nuclear power is dominated by regulation. Running the power plant is quite cheap. The real cost is satisfying regulation and getting rid of the nuclear waste. If you use new reactor designs it promises to be really cheap. But currently regulation cost is so high that it's not happening any time soon. Similarly, nuclear fusion promises a lot. Maybe one day it will deliver. My point is that IFF you have dirt cheap nuclear energy, it would be quite appealing to convert it to hydrogen (or Methane/Methanol) and to replace natural gas and oil with it. But since that is not happening, renewables will NOT deliver enough energy to replace gas and oil completely any time soon. We have a factor of 10-100 to scale up for that to happen. > Since the former two are bursty, overcapacity in them leads to cheap excess energy at times, which needs to be stored. Wind and solar currently rarely have overcapacity because in many nations mandated by regulations the other sources will have to go offline instead. The problem is that if you really manage to build up wind and hydro to satisfy electricity demand on average the Hydrogen generators will only utilize somewhat in the region of 10% of their design capacity in average. They need to be very cheap to run at a profit for that. Also, if electricity is really cheap, we have a lot of uses for it. For example heating is ideally done using clean electricity. This substitution frees up a lot oil and gas that you can use instead of Hydrogen. > Which storage method is the best depends on multiple factors, particularly on the duration of storage, capacity required and frequency of charging/discharging. > Batteries are great for relatively short term storage, but for long term, seasonal storage, hydrogen and pumped hydro are the options we have. Pumped hydro capacity is limited, and the cost of hydrogen production and storage is coming down. So that's where hydrogen makes sense: Long term, high capacity storage. True. But if you have enough production capacity, you don't really need storage. You only store it if it is cheaper than simply generating more power when you need it. Instead of generating Hydrogen and storing it you could use a natural gas peaker plant. You have natural gas and storage solutions already available and installed. Hydrogen has to be cheaper than natural gas. You have some nice academic references while I only have anecdata that may be partially outdated by now. In my past experience Hydrogen and fuel cells have failed to deliver time after time, year after year while Lithium batteries have really taken off. Look at that figure: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S254243511830583X-fx1_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S25424351183058... Currently, Hydrogen is off the charts because it is too expensive but it is projected to come down and dominate the upper end in 30 years while Lithium batteries dominate all the rest. Lithium batteries are here today and the focus is on batteries. Natrium and other battery technologies may be ready by then and drop prices a further factor of 10. I do not deny that some Hydrogen from electricity makes sense. Especially if you need Hydrogen for your chemical processes. Maybe even for storage of excess electricity (or just adding it to the natural gas instead of storing it). But I don't see Hydrogen for small vehicles anytime soon.

ljf 6y ago
Nuclear power is only dirt cheap if the government/society picks up all the externalised costs for the storage and recycling of waste. Can you tell me which nuclear stations cover all their own costs? As far as I am aware, all nuclear power stations in the world do not bear that cost - it is always picked up by the government. They often figure that the long term cost is worth it for energy stability - not because nuclear is cheap - but because it is more stable than relying on energy imports from another country.
- manfredo 6y ago
  The cost of storing waste is miniscule. Because there's so little of it. The entirety of the US's nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 meters high [1]. The government did build a waste storage facility, which was planned to have cost $150 million [2]. Which is tiny compared to the tens of billions that nuclear plants themselves actually cost. The notion that cost of storing nuclear waste would make nuclear power considerably more expensive is incorrect. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    One way of thinking about it is that nuclear power is the only type of power we have at the moment where all of the negative externalities are baked into the process. I really want renewables to work but so far grid scale batteries just don't exist. The biggest lithium battery isn't even a blip, it's roughly equivalent to what the UK receives through French over production every 6 minutes.
  - roelschroeven 6y ago
    > The cost of storing waste is miniscule. Then how come that not a single country has yet developed a method for storing their nuclear waste safely and permanently? From your first link: > The fuel is either enclosed in steel-lined concrete pools of water or in steel and concrete containers, known as dry storage casks. > For the foreseeable future, the fuel can safely stay at these facilities until a permanent disposal solution is determined by the federal government. But from Wikipedia's page on dry cask storage, linked from your second link: > In the 1990s, the NRC had to “take repeated actions to address defective welds on dry casks that led to cracks and quality assurance problems; helium had leaked into some casks, increasing temperatures and causing accelerated fuel corrosion”. > With the zeroing of the budget for Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, more nuclear waste is being loaded into sealed metal casks filled with inert gas. Many of these casks will be stored in coastal or lakeside regions where a salt air environment exists, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is studying how such dry casks perform in salt environments. Some hope that the casks can be used for 100 years, but cracking related to corrosion could occur in 30 years or less. In other words the "safe" temporary storage is not really safe. From your second link: > In September 2007, it was discovered that the Bow Ridge fault line ran underneath the facility, hundreds of feet east of where it was originally thought to be located, beneath a storage pad where spent radioactive fuel canisters would be cooled before being sealed in a maze of tunnels. The discovery required several structures to be moved several hundred feet further to the east, and drew criticism from Robert R. Loux, then head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who argues that Yucca administrators should have known about the fault line's location years prior, and called the movement of the structures "just-in-time engineering."[80][81] In June 2008, a major nuclear equipment supplier, Holtec International, criticized the Department of Energy's safety plan for handling containers of radioactive waste before they are buried at the proposed Yucca Mountain dump. The concern is that, in an earthquake, the unanchored casks of nuclear waste material awaiting burial at Yucca Mountain could be sent into a "chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts".[82] How sure can we be there are no other fault lines waiting to be found? How sure can we be earthquakes won't cause problems in 100 years, or 500 or 5000 years? The Yucca Mountain repository is supposed to last 10000 years. How do we know it will? Storing nuclear waste is a huge unsolved problem. What's going to happen is that we're going to put it somewhere out of sight and let future generations deal with it. As other posters said: the nuclear industry externalizes all its difficulties to government, society and even future generations.

ljf 6y ago

Nuclear power is only dirt cheap if the government/society picks up all the externalised costs for the storage and recycling of waste. Can you tell me which nuclear stations cover all their own costs? As far as I am aware, all nuclear power stations in the world do not bear that cost - it is always picked up by the government. They often figure that the long term cost is worth it for energy stability - not because nuclear is cheap - but because it is more stable than relying on energy imports from another country.

manfredo 6y ago
The cost of storing waste is miniscule. Because there's so little of it. The entirety of the US's nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 meters high [1]. The government did build a waste storage facility, which was planned to have cost $150 million [2]. Which is tiny compared to the tens of billions that nuclear plants themselves actually cost. The notion that cost of storing nuclear waste would make nuclear power considerably more expensive is incorrect. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  One way of thinking about it is that nuclear power is the only type of power we have at the moment where all of the negative externalities are baked into the process. I really want renewables to work but so far grid scale batteries just don't exist. The biggest lithium battery isn't even a blip, it's roughly equivalent to what the UK receives through French over production every 6 minutes.
- roelschroeven 6y ago
  > The cost of storing waste is miniscule. Then how come that not a single country has yet developed a method for storing their nuclear waste safely and permanently? From your first link: > The fuel is either enclosed in steel-lined concrete pools of water or in steel and concrete containers, known as dry storage casks. > For the foreseeable future, the fuel can safely stay at these facilities until a permanent disposal solution is determined by the federal government. But from Wikipedia's page on dry cask storage, linked from your second link: > In the 1990s, the NRC had to “take repeated actions to address defective welds on dry casks that led to cracks and quality assurance problems; helium had leaked into some casks, increasing temperatures and causing accelerated fuel corrosion”. > With the zeroing of the budget for Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, more nuclear waste is being loaded into sealed metal casks filled with inert gas. Many of these casks will be stored in coastal or lakeside regions where a salt air environment exists, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is studying how such dry casks perform in salt environments. Some hope that the casks can be used for 100 years, but cracking related to corrosion could occur in 30 years or less. In other words the "safe" temporary storage is not really safe. From your second link: > In September 2007, it was discovered that the Bow Ridge fault line ran underneath the facility, hundreds of feet east of where it was originally thought to be located, beneath a storage pad where spent radioactive fuel canisters would be cooled before being sealed in a maze of tunnels. The discovery required several structures to be moved several hundred feet further to the east, and drew criticism from Robert R. Loux, then head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who argues that Yucca administrators should have known about the fault line's location years prior, and called the movement of the structures "just-in-time engineering."[80][81] In June 2008, a major nuclear equipment supplier, Holtec International, criticized the Department of Energy's safety plan for handling containers of radioactive waste before they are buried at the proposed Yucca Mountain dump. The concern is that, in an earthquake, the unanchored casks of nuclear waste material awaiting burial at Yucca Mountain could be sent into a "chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts".[82] How sure can we be there are no other fault lines waiting to be found? How sure can we be earthquakes won't cause problems in 100 years, or 500 or 5000 years? The Yucca Mountain repository is supposed to last 10000 years. How do we know it will? Storing nuclear waste is a huge unsolved problem. What's going to happen is that we're going to put it somewhere out of sight and let future generations deal with it. As other posters said: the nuclear industry externalizes all its difficulties to government, society and even future generations.