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Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old, they simply can't be operated for centuries, instead the are becoming unreliable. In
by TomK32 5y ago
Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old, they simply can't be operated for centuries, instead the are becoming unreliable. In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production. Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules, OL3 in Finland with a 12 year delay. https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-union https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un...
You can build a lot of wind and solar parks in that time and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. All that decentralized, thus creating jobs all over the country.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules Given China appears able to build quality reactors quickly, this would seem to be the result of European policy preferences with respect to nuclear.
- ericd 5y agoNot saying they’re not, but I’d be curious what measures of reactor quality you’ve seen?
- GordonS 5y agoNumber of severe incidents divided by number of reactor days?
- rgbrenner 5y agoChina has the newest plants in the world: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-of-nuclear-power-capacity-in-selected-regions-2019 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-o... We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.
- littlestymaar 5y ago> but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants. That's a strange expectation to have. Ever heard of the bathtub curve ?
- natch 5y agoIn your formula, where do you envision the number of incidents being derived from? China excels at hiding important information from public view, so I would take their data, and data indirectly sourced from them, with a grain of salt. And oh, by the way, one could say the same about the nuclear industry and its captured regulatory bodies in general as well.
- GordonS 5y agoThat is true, which is why I specifically mentioned "severe" incidents - even if less severe stuff happens and is hushed up, it's impossible to keep radioactive particles blowing across the globe quiet, so we'd surely know of those.
- eru 5y agoWouldn't you want to normalize by Joules produced instead of by reactor days?
- philipkglass 5y agoChina also builds wind, solar, and electrical transmission projects faster and cheaper than Europe. China has lower wages and planners can ignore local objections to infrastructure projects more easily than in Europe. This leads to better outcomes by the numbers but it's not an unmitigated good.
- cm2187 5y agoIt's not just that. When you build reactors in series, you have economies of scales in term of accumulated expertise, amortising R&D costs, etc. France for instance finished building up its nuclear capacity at the end of the 80s, and every reactor built since has been unique, extremely costly and behind schedule. But the day they will replace their whole estate, the economics will likely be very different.
- eru 5y agoOf course, given public opinion, that day might never come.
- riffraff 5y ago> and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. can that be done in all cases? Most dams I've seen IRL didn't seem to have an area downstream big enough to collect the water to be able to pump it back up.
- lazide 5y agoLong distance (relatively) water pipelines are not to expensive as long as it isn’t vertical cliffs and unstable slopes on the way, so a catchment at the lower drainage or even a low dam can provide the necessary temporary storage, even if 5-10 miles or more away. Still not super cheap of course, so then the classic ‘what will this get us for the cost, and does it pencil out as profitable’ (generally a good proxy for worth the time and expense) starts to come into play.
- m4rtink 5y agoThinking about it, many hydropower schemes are already built as cascades - that could be retrofitted as pumped storage quite easily, if you can interconnect the dams for reasonably cost.
- lazide 5y agoNice info! Did a bit of digging and here is a detailed analysis of such a plan (recent) for the Indus River Valley I ran across. Pretty neat [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X21006344 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2...] Edit: According to the paper, it's economically viable when the output power price (post-pumping and running through the turbine again) can be > 2X the price of the hydropower, which with seasonal variation and spikey but 'free' sometimes power, could definitely help. Preferring something like solar over running a turbine could also help. The challenge of course is that many times hydropower is nearly free and available in large quantities, as the dams are also used for flood control, so they either toss large quantities of water over the spillways (wasting it), or run it through a turbine - but they can't NOT move the water.
- paganel 5y agoUnfortunately lots of windy locations in Europe are not good locations for hydro-works, too. I’m thinking Netherlands and Northern Germany (even though knowing the Dutch they might come up with something), and closer to me (I’m from Eastern Europe) the locations close to the Black Sea, which are excellent for wind farms yet are a poor choice for hydro solutions. Of course, you could let’s say transport the energy produced by wind farms from Northern Germany to hydro projects built in South Germany, but that opens a new can of worms: loss of energy because of the transport itself, extra costs, actually building the energy transport infrastructure (a huge task in a NIMBY world).
- ben_w 5y agoThe transport losses are by far the smallest part of that. HVDC is available at 3.5% loss at 1000km as a standard product, but if building it at the required scale was trivial we’d be doing it rather than talking about it.
- lazide 5y agoBiggest issue lately seems to be right of way/approvals - most of the paths between hydro and wind sources are overland. Most of the existing HVDC interconnects are undersea. You don’t need to deal with 10k different landowners each wanting their own special deal if you’re connecting Tunisia and Spain, vs North and South Germany.
- littlestymaar 5y ago> Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old Which is half of their lifetime by American standards. > In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production. That means 75% of availability. Good luck finding any renewable source with such a figure ;).
- debacle 5y agoHydro has close to 100% availability, especially if you aren't talking dams.
- littlestymaar 5y agoHydro is amazing when it comes to electricity generation, but for that reason it has already been developed as much as possible during the whole 20th century and there's really little room for enhancement (and when the technology progresses, it's quickly deployed). In fact, I like to say that the only viable option to get 100% RE is to lower our energy consumption until hydro can cover the majority of our needs.
- rsj_hn 5y agoHydro is great, but limited. IMO, most industrialized nations have already tapped hydro about as much as it can be tapped, given some constraints about wildlife habitat. But I'd be happy to be corrected -- what new hydro projects do you think we should be doing, and how much power do you think they'd provide?
- polote 5y agoTelling that nuclear is a bad technology (compared to wind and solar that are not even competing with nuclear) then suggesting to use a WAY worse technology (reverse dams). Is there any advantage of having a reversible dam compare to a nuclear plant ? I'm not asking of being better, but only ONE advantage, I don't see any. That's actually the positive thing about covid, is that we had a preview of how the climate crisis is going to be handled. That's going to be a mess, everyone will think they are an expert
- idiotsecant 5y agoI mean, obviously they have the advantage of not requiring nuclear fuel.
- pfdietz 5y agoOf course wind and solar compete with nuclear. At large penetration, wind and solar make the grid unfriendly to nuclear, as the price drops too often for a nuclear power plant to be economical. Both renewables and nuclear are inflexible, and are competing for the ability of the grid to deal with inflexible sources. If you look at model solutions to a renewable/storage/nuclear grid, the solutions tend to flip from "mostly nuclear" to "mostly renewable" with little overlap, depending on cost assumptions.
- redisman 5y agoNuclear should be subsidized to keep them online for sure. All governments should want a backbone that can work under any circumstances (excerpt flooding I guess )
- pfdietz 5y agoA bigger subsidy issue is wind/solar being given credits for power produced. So, they keep pumping out and putting power onto the grid even when prices go negative. Only when the negative price is lower than -subsidy do they curtail. This is terrible for existing nuclear plants. What the grid really needs is transparency at the customer level of real time power costs.
- m4rtink 5y agoYou can't easily turn just any dam to do pumped storage - you essentially need at least 2 dams, pumping from the lower one to the upper one. Normal dam will simply not have enough water "under" its single dam to pump up when needed. Not to mention the power transfer to pump water up & down being possibly a big multiple of what a regular hydro plant on that one spot would even need to transfer.
- pfdietz 5y agoOn the other hand, pumped hydro doesn't require the substantial average flow that a hydro generator would need. One build pumped hydro systems where there is no sustained source of surface water flow at all -- for example, in deserts. A proposed pumped hydro facility in Arizona would lose (to evaporation) an order of magnitude less water than a nuclear power plant with capacity = that hydro facility's average throughput.