5 ms·

Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in th

by danhor 5y ago

Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build. Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate change. Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others. The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest, strong local and national (e.g. the minimum distance that wind farms need in germany, eliminating most of the possible options), opposition to new projects, strong opposition to new transmission lines, strong opposition to losing the jobs in the legacy markets (especially visible in the USA with "clean" Coal) and no burning desire to honestly consider the storage issue (both in regards to demand shifting and building of new storage facilities using hydrogen or synthetic gases and similar things). Our problems aren't solved because solving them isn't a high enough political (and thus also economical, due to the negative externality not being financially relevant) priority around the world, not because we're not using nuclear for everything.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
I think by "nuclear society", your parent meant a united society that works together, not one powered by nuclear fission.
- panick21 5y ago
  No, absolutely not.
pyrale 5y ago
> nuclear power plants take forever to build. In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years. The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program. The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I think large part of it is increased scrutiny and standards. Which is entirely justified. And most of issues could be solved as said with knowledge and proper pipeline of keeping people who already gained experience from past projects on new ones.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    As an amateur, I read everything I can about why the US's current nuclear construction attempts have failed, and my conclusion is exactly the reverse. The problem is a lack of scrutiny and attention to detail, poor planning, bad logistics, and general incompetence. The NRC reviews only the safety of reactors, not if it's a constructible design. If somebody had held Westinghouse to the standard of having constructible designs, in addition to safe designs, maybe the disasters at Vogtle and VC Summer might have been avoided.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      At least in the US, we can’t seem to build any large projects of any kind. I just don’t see nuclear happening here.
  - liketochill 5y ago
    I think the problem is the compensation model. None of the people building the plant have any skin in the game. At some level the people doing the work aren’t paid enough to care enough to prevent the issues that plague new nuclear projects, or they don’t have the resources, or they don’t have any incentive to go the extra mile to ensure project success. Are there stock options and equity for the engineers and project managers? Any ambitious engineer graduating in the last 15 years probably went to tech, not utilities. I’m in the energy sector
- juahan 5y ago
  Well, currently the French are buildin a new nuclear power plant in Finland. Construction started 2005 and it was supposed to be ready in 2009… they are still building it and _maybe_ next year it finally will be connected to the grid. So 17 years give or take.
merrywhether 5y ago
It’s impossible to say, but it’s highly likely that an alternate history where we went much more strongly into nuclear power would have yielded far more active investment and development of variations on reactors than we have today. We could be much further along the fast or thorium (or something newer) reactor timeline for instance, or have more advances in safety and speed of setup that don’t exist without much larger demand. We also could’ve irradiated much more of the Earth if things had gone wrong, but ultimately I don’t think you can use the problems of nuclear today against someone who wishes we’d been all in on nuclear for the past 50 years.
keewee7 5y ago
>Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs >nuclear power plants take forever to build That is because of overregulation in North American and Western Europe. The overregulation is because of hysteria and coal lobbyists. Nuclear is working fine in the rest of the world with more plants under construction: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
- epistasis 5y ago
  > overregulation in North American and Western Europe. Nearly all large construction projects have huge delays and go massively over budget, not just nuclear! Weakening nuclear regulations (which ones?) will not solve the construction problem, because at best it will turn them into the other projects with big delays.
panick21 5y ago
> since nuclear power plants take forever to build Even PWR don't take 'forever' to build if you actually build a large number. The problem is that, specially in the West, we have gone to a policy where its like 'lets do a tiny bit of nuclear' and that leads to basically 1 plant being in construction supported by a increasingly small nuclear industry getting endlessly delayed because nobody working on it has ever done it before. Learning effects in nuclear building are massive and well researched. You need to have teams that have done it before and it goes much faster. Even the most shitty PWR could be built in 4-5 years as we have seen in France, US or South Korea. Of course, if you were serious today about doing this, you wouldn't use 60s PWRs anyway and if you use modern reactors you don't need to do a massive civil engineering project. Ironically in many way the civil engineering is gigantic part of the cost, not the nuclear itself. > Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth Well of course 'all' problems would not be solved, but the fact is we could have had clean energy for 40 years had nuclear continued and new types of reactors had come along. It's my opinion, and I know most people don't agree that if you have real mass manufacturing of nuclear reactors, it would actually be viable to competitively produce green fuel. Maybe some subsidies or tax on non green version to push it faster. I would have favored making all cars into FFV (Flex Fuel) and having a 5%-80% methanol requirement (increasing every few years). That methanol could then increasingly be made with nuclear power as your capacity grows. Today we have lithium batteries for most of transportation so that is no longer as relevant as it would have been if we had done this in the 90s. I still a good idea for aviation and other needs of chemical energy. > Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others. Power is still a huge issue for countries, if we had mass produced reactors, exporting them in those countries is a very viable option to get green energy to those people at a cheaper rate then coal they are actually building. If emerging countries could call the US and say 'we like 50x500MW reactors' deployed over the next 10 years. They would very much want to do it. > The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest The same could be said for nuclear as well. > strong opposition to new transmission lines Renewables break the traditional local production concept for power and force an ever increasing amount of energy transportation. Because of non uniform wind and weather patterns and lack of economically viable storage you compensate by transporting energy. I much favor having nuclear reactor, say 500MW units being deployed everywhere where it makes sense as close to consumption as viable. And for places this makes no sense also having a much smaller 100MW reactor type that you can deploy in shipping containers everywhere needed. Reliable base load close to consumption combined maybe a few heat batteries (or hydro if available) can is the perfect solution. In theory modern reactors could be load following quite well, but its really a question of what is cheaper, lower utilization or energy storage. This is exactly how Ontario (Canada) and Sweden have a green grid. > not because we're not using nuclear for everything. In my opinion part of the political problem is because what is attempted is so difficult and puts so many changes on people. Simply deploying nuclear reactors in the same location current coal plants are leads to basically no change in the overall gird. Its literally build whatever number of 500MW modular reactors right next to each other in the same building (these building are very small if its a modern reactor) and put them right next to the coal plant and reuse the same transmissions lines. Literally 95% of people would never even know that anything what so ever had changed. No fields of solar panels, no gigantic wind turbine, as little as possible increase in energy transportation (or even a decrees). Had the world actually made progress on nuclear technology (as I suggest was the problem) it would simply be an economic way for politicians to transition out of coal. Sure some regions where coal is produced have coal lobby, and in some regions you might have local opposition to nuclear being able to stop or delay the building. Overall however most people don't care. When I say we are not a nuclear society, what I mean is that we are missing everything from a vibrant nuclear industry with startups and big players, a efficient regulatory framework and an agency that is motivate to actually make forward progress (FCC and SpaceX working together), and some public or semi-public organization to manage the fuel cycle and waste. Literally all of that is missing. Nuclear industry is mostly just producing fuel for PWRs, nuclear startups are 50x hard then even space startups, the regulatory body that took over from the nuclear commission has basically destroyed any and all progress and has made any deployment of advanced nuclear essentially impossible (regulation hard code technology dependency) and no solution for nuclear fuel cycle (politics being deadlocked over the idiocy of Yucca despite billions that have already been paid and is sitting around). Thankfully Canada regulators have realized this and we see a emerging industry. Canada even seems to think about the fuel cycle in a more imaginative way then 'dig hole dump in'.

by danhor 5y ago

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

I think by "nuclear society", your parent meant a united society that works together, not one powered by nuclear fission.

panick21 5y ago
No, absolutely not.

pyrale 5y ago

> nuclear power plants take forever to build. In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years. The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program. The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.

Ekaros 5y ago
I think large part of it is increased scrutiny and standards. Which is entirely justified. And most of issues could be solved as said with knowledge and proper pipeline of keeping people who already gained experience from past projects on new ones.
- epistasis 5y ago
  As an amateur, I read everything I can about why the US's current nuclear construction attempts have failed, and my conclusion is exactly the reverse. The problem is a lack of scrutiny and attention to detail, poor planning, bad logistics, and general incompetence. The NRC reviews only the safety of reactors, not if it's a constructible design. If somebody had held Westinghouse to the standard of having constructible designs, in addition to safe designs, maybe the disasters at Vogtle and VC Summer might have been avoided.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    At least in the US, we can’t seem to build any large projects of any kind. I just don’t see nuclear happening here.
- liketochill 5y ago
  I think the problem is the compensation model. None of the people building the plant have any skin in the game. At some level the people doing the work aren’t paid enough to care enough to prevent the issues that plague new nuclear projects, or they don’t have the resources, or they don’t have any incentive to go the extra mile to ensure project success. Are there stock options and equity for the engineers and project managers? Any ambitious engineer graduating in the last 15 years probably went to tech, not utilities. I’m in the energy sector
juahan 5y ago
Well, currently the French are buildin a new nuclear power plant in Finland. Construction started 2005 and it was supposed to be ready in 2009… they are still building it and _maybe_ next year it finally will be connected to the grid. So 17 years give or take.

merrywhether 5y ago

It’s impossible to say, but it’s highly likely that an alternate history where we went much more strongly into nuclear power would have yielded far more active investment and development of variations on reactors than we have today. We could be much further along the fast or thorium (or something newer) reactor timeline for instance, or have more advances in safety and speed of setup that don’t exist without much larger demand. We also could’ve irradiated much more of the Earth if things had gone wrong, but ultimately I don’t think you can use the problems of nuclear today against someone who wishes we’d been all in on nuclear for the past 50 years.

keewee7 5y ago

>Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs >nuclear power plants take forever to build That is because of overregulation in North American and Western Europe. The overregulation is because of hysteria and coal lobbyists. Nuclear is working fine in the rest of the world with more plants under construction: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

epistasis 5y ago
> overregulation in North American and Western Europe. Nearly all large construction projects have huge delays and go massively over budget, not just nuclear! Weakening nuclear regulations (which ones?) will not solve the construction problem, because at best it will turn them into the other projects with big delays.

panick21 5y ago

> since nuclear power plants take forever to build Even PWR don't take 'forever' to build if you actually build a large number. The problem is that, specially in the West, we have gone to a policy where its like 'lets do a tiny bit of nuclear' and that leads to basically 1 plant being in construction supported by a increasingly small nuclear industry getting endlessly delayed because nobody working on it has ever done it before. Learning effects in nuclear building are massive and well researched. You need to have teams that have done it before and it goes much faster. Even the most shitty PWR could be built in 4-5 years as we have seen in France, US or South Korea. Of course, if you were serious today about doing this, you wouldn't use 60s PWRs anyway and if you use modern reactors you don't need to do a massive civil engineering project. Ironically in many way the civil engineering is gigantic part of the cost, not the nuclear itself. > Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth Well of course 'all' problems would not be solved, but the fact is we could have had clean energy for 40 years had nuclear continued and new types of reactors had come along. It's my opinion, and I know most people don't agree that if you have real mass manufacturing of nuclear reactors, it would actually be viable to competitively produce green fuel. Maybe some subsidies or tax on non green version to push it faster. I would have favored making all cars into FFV (Flex Fuel) and having a 5%-80% methanol requirement (increasing every few years). That methanol could then increasingly be made with nuclear power as your capacity grows. Today we have lithium batteries for most of transportation so that is no longer as relevant as it would have been if we had done this in the 90s. I still a good idea for aviation and other needs of chemical energy. > Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others. Power is still a huge issue for countries, if we had mass produced reactors, exporting them in those countries is a very viable option to get green energy to those people at a cheaper rate then coal they are actually building. If emerging countries could call the US and say 'we like 50x500MW reactors' deployed over the next 10 years. They would very much want to do it. > The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest The same could be said for nuclear as well. > strong opposition to new transmission lines Renewables break the traditional local production concept for power and force an ever increasing amount of energy transportation. Because of non uniform wind and weather patterns and lack of economically viable storage you compensate by transporting energy. I much favor having nuclear reactor, say 500MW units being deployed everywhere where it makes sense as close to consumption as viable. And for places this makes no sense also having a much smaller 100MW reactor type that you can deploy in shipping containers everywhere needed. Reliable base load close to consumption combined maybe a few heat batteries (or hydro if available) can is the perfect solution. In theory modern reactors could be load following quite well, but its really a question of what is cheaper, lower utilization or energy storage. This is exactly how Ontario (Canada) and Sweden have a green grid. > not because we're not using nuclear for everything. In my opinion part of the political problem is because what is attempted is so difficult and puts so many changes on people. Simply deploying nuclear reactors in the same location current coal plants are leads to basically no change in the overall gird. Its literally build whatever number of 500MW modular reactors right next to each other in the same building (these building are very small if its a modern reactor) and put them right next to the coal plant and reuse the same transmissions lines. Literally 95% of people would never even know that anything what so ever had changed. No fields of solar panels, no gigantic wind turbine, as little as possible increase in energy transportation (or even a decrees). Had the world actually made progress on nuclear technology (as I suggest was the problem) it would simply be an economic way for politicians to transition out of coal. Sure some regions where coal is produced have coal lobby, and in some regions you might have local opposition to nuclear being able to stop or delay the building. Overall however most people don't care. When I say we are not a nuclear society, what I mean is that we are missing everything from a vibrant nuclear industry with startups and big players, a efficient regulatory framework and an agency that is motivate to actually make forward progress (FCC and SpaceX working together), and some public or semi-public organization to manage the fuel cycle and waste. Literally all of that is missing. Nuclear industry is mostly just producing fuel for PWRs, nuclear startups are 50x hard then even space startups, the regulatory body that took over from the nuclear commission has basically destroyed any and all progress and has made any deployment of advanced nuclear essentially impossible (regulation hard code technology dependency) and no solution for nuclear fuel cycle (politics being deadlocked over the idiocy of Yucca despite billions that have already been paid and is sitting around). Thankfully Canada regulators have realized this and we see a emerging industry. Canada even seems to think about the fuel cycle in a more imaginative way then 'dig hole dump in'.