15 ms·

I bet the Fukushima backup power system would have fit this explanation perfectly: > in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel

by tda 5y ago

I bet the Fukushima backup power system would have fit this explanation perfectly: > in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working. Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns? The most likely (and I think underestimated) risk for Nuclear plants is a systemic change due to a large (climate?) crisis and/or war. Think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that definitely increased risk and reduced maintenance budget for a few Nuclear plants. Any significant sea level rise, drought or flood could very well trigger such events (even if the reactor is not affected directly, the society around it will be). That is why I think nuclear is a risky option to reach net-zero; every plant you build is a bet on the future stability of society for at least 75 years (time until the plant will be safely decommissioned by future generations). I would feel much safer in a world covered in solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines (and highly variable spot pricing) than in one with nuclear plants that require constant care by experts and that even in the best case incur a huge cost on society to safely decommission. > In 2016 the European Commission assessed that European Union's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded by about 118 billion euros, with only 150 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 268 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs covering both dismantling of nuclear plants and storage of radioactive parts and waste. France had the largest shortfall with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74 billion euros of expected costs [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning

konschubert 5y ago
I agree with your risk assessment, but I have to say that given the choice between a climate apocalypse and a nuclear power buildout, I would choose the latter.
- tda 5y ago
  If only it was a conscious choice... I fear significant climate has happened already, and even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow will continue for a long time to come. Putting up a few km2 of solar in e.g. the Sahara now is surely less effort than decommissioning dozens of nuclear plants in 50 years.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    This is my issue with the debate between Nuclear proponents and Renewable proponents (most of whom seem to be nuclear detractors): They usually compare what is possible in a future state with renewables to what is currently possible with Nuclear technology from decades ago. I want people to start imagining what innovation in Nuclear can look like again. If you want to compare current state to current state, then neither are going to move the needle enough. But let's imagine what can be possible, especially if we poured in the same tax dollars and incentives to Nuclear as we are with renewables. We don't have to imagine that we will be decommissioning the same honking reactors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Let's imagine what's possible with next-gen plants.
    - koide 5y ago
      I think your assessment of what is currently possible with nuclear technology is somewhat skewed. The time from start to plan to put in production of an old technology nuclear plant is seven years on average (which honestly sounds optimistic). Whereas utility scale solar can be deployed in half the time (which will likely be reduced because most of that time is permits and other legal requirements.) All this is current tech for both. And honestly, solar panel and energy storage technology improvements are already coming down the pipeline whereas the next-gen nuclear has been "almost ready" for decades.
      - dundarious 5y ago
        Precisely. There are numerous non-political, but rather purely technical and operational reasons, why any appreciable new nuclear builds are probably a decade plus away, even if significant resources are devoted to start right away. The picture for most renewables as a fossil energy replacement is much rosier, even considering the generation profile problems that some renewables present. I'd be happy for there to be some amount of investment in new nuclear builds, just to maybe prove me wrong, but right now it seems like a good thing nuclear is not much of a focus.
sovnade 5y ago
And we're putting in wind and solar at record rates, but that still doesn't cover us at night or when there's no wind. Batteries or other energy storage cannot meet the demand yet. Nuclear is still the best option for continuous weather-independent power among all the low-polluting options.
- koide 5y ago
  It can, according to some, here are a couple of sources: https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-energy-and-the-grid-debunked https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e... https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-wind-intermittency-myth-to-bed-please-6872e4cb7203 https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-win...
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    It can't, source, gas prices in Europe now. Which we are paying. To a dictator who's overtly planning to invade the East. Because the sun isn't shining and batteries are three orders of magnitude too expensive. Renewables get exactly as much credit for what might happen in future as Communists or NFT sellers get for how awesome their plans are. Nuclear already delivered, in some places still does, winter heat. Its detractors are responsible for gas reliance.
    - koide 5y ago
      This is patently untrue. If you had followed some links there you would have seen that there are renewable plants today that are cheaper than fossil alternatives. The current gas crisis is, if anything, due to bad choices of electricity companies that tried to do financial games with gas prices. You can't win that game against a crooked political operator. Renewables can and do deliver winter heat too. Nuclear did and could have been something, but now it's not. We should build the best option for the future. And right now that's not nuclear for technological, political and technical reasons.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      But neither can nuclear reactors that do not exist yet. Sure, there are a couple that got shut down, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to total consumption. If you want to get an alternative to gas in 15 years or so then maybe nuclear would work. But a better bet is to get people to install heatpumps and drive those with solar and wind in a few years time. Far more effective use of resources, and far quicker from start to finish.
a-dub 5y ago
whatever did happen to pebble bed and all the other emerging nuclear technologies from 20 years ago that were supposed to move the bar into passive fail-safe territory and eliminate the waste problem through spent fuel reprocessing?
- soperj 5y ago
  passive fail-safe already existed 20 years ago. CANDU Reactor is exactly that. Doesn't even need enriched uranium.
  - mydeskistoosm 5y ago
    So what happened? Why aren't we in a world of abundant energy?
    - soperj 5y ago
      If you use these reactors, you have no other reason to produce weapons grade uranium. That's the only thing that sticks out to me.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      Simple answer; Infinite greed and lust for (political) power…
    - Gwypaas 5y ago
      Turns out a steam based thermodynamic cycle is expensive even with "free" energy.
      - soperj 5y ago
        Current price of Nuclear in Ontario (generated by CANDU reactors) is 5.9 cents per kWh.
        Gwypaas 5y ago
        That is very expensive. Given that they came online in the 70s and early 80s we can assume the initial capital investment is paid off by now and that cost is only the marginal running cost. (OPEX) Now, currently we are building solar farms in desert areas for ~1.5 cent per kWh. Including both CAPEX and OPEX. On-shore wind is built at ~3 cents per kWh and ~6 cents per kWh for off-shore. This is where the explosion of renewables is coming from, they currently undercut the marginal cost of traditional power sources.
JetSetWilly 5y ago
Interestingly hunterston - a nuclear power station on the west coast of Scotland - had a failure of its backup diesel generators. Wikipedia describes it as: > In December 1998, an INES Level 2 incident occurred after severe winds and sea spray disabled all four power lines to the site during the Boxing Day Storm of 1998. After multiple grid failures in a short period of time, emergency diesel generators failed to start. Normally, in the absence of power for the reactor cooling pumps, the reactor would be passively cooled. However, the emergency control system which would have initiated passive cooling failed to act, as it had not been reset. Reactor cooling was reinstated after four hours. It seems the safety margin was twenty hours of no reactor cooling. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_sta...
- bshanks 5y ago
  Seems like a bit of a misnomer if the "passive" cooling had to be activated.
  - randomswede 5y ago
    Well, "passive cooling" means that it requires no external power to cool. Doesn't necessarily mean it's normally plumbed into the circuit. Most probably it would not normally be, as the passive cooling would definitely decrease the power output (it is, after all, what it is designed to do). So there was probably one or more valves that did not get switched, as the system somehow didn't think they needed to, due to something not being configured as they should.
jfindley 5y ago
While these are real risks, it's worth pointing out two things: - This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away. - The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that. The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).
- tomatotomato37 5y ago
  I don't think a lot of people realize just how old the power plant actually was; it went online a year before Chernobyl even started construction, and it's own construction started when the Soviets we're still winning the space race.
- teamonkey 5y ago
  > The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that. That's the point, though, isn't it? One of the richest and most developed nations failed to decommission the plant in a timely manner, even under excellent conditions, in order to save costs. It's not the technology that's the problem.
  - andrewaylett 5y ago
    There's a circular problem here, though: anti-nuclear activists block development and deployment of new technologies and plants, then complain that everything's old and outdated. The cost of nuclear has to include all the decommissioning costs while Coal and Hydro get to externalise their major environmental costs. I understand that single incidents are more visible than long-term low-level harm. But as a civilisation we really aren't paying enough attention to the overall cost of everything that's not nuclear.
gs17 5y ago
> Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns? That was sadly not an unknown at all. TEPCO was definitely aware of the possibility given that flooding in the generator rooms had happened before, and they deliberately ignored studies finding they were not prepared for a tsunami. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Prior_safety_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Pri...

by tda 5y ago

konschubert 5y ago

I agree with your risk assessment, but I have to say that given the choice between a climate apocalypse and a nuclear power buildout, I would choose the latter.

tda 5y ago
If only it was a conscious choice... I fear significant climate has happened already, and even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow will continue for a long time to come. Putting up a few km2 of solar in e.g. the Sahara now is surely less effort than decommissioning dozens of nuclear plants in 50 years.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  This is my issue with the debate between Nuclear proponents and Renewable proponents (most of whom seem to be nuclear detractors): They usually compare what is possible in a future state with renewables to what is currently possible with Nuclear technology from decades ago. I want people to start imagining what innovation in Nuclear can look like again. If you want to compare current state to current state, then neither are going to move the needle enough. But let's imagine what can be possible, especially if we poured in the same tax dollars and incentives to Nuclear as we are with renewables. We don't have to imagine that we will be decommissioning the same honking reactors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Let's imagine what's possible with next-gen plants.
  - koide 5y ago
    I think your assessment of what is currently possible with nuclear technology is somewhat skewed. The time from start to plan to put in production of an old technology nuclear plant is seven years on average (which honestly sounds optimistic). Whereas utility scale solar can be deployed in half the time (which will likely be reduced because most of that time is permits and other legal requirements.) All this is current tech for both. And honestly, solar panel and energy storage technology improvements are already coming down the pipeline whereas the next-gen nuclear has been "almost ready" for decades.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      Precisely. There are numerous non-political, but rather purely technical and operational reasons, why any appreciable new nuclear builds are probably a decade plus away, even if significant resources are devoted to start right away. The picture for most renewables as a fossil energy replacement is much rosier, even considering the generation profile problems that some renewables present. I'd be happy for there to be some amount of investment in new nuclear builds, just to maybe prove me wrong, but right now it seems like a good thing nuclear is not much of a focus.

sovnade 5y ago

And we're putting in wind and solar at record rates, but that still doesn't cover us at night or when there's no wind. Batteries or other energy storage cannot meet the demand yet. Nuclear is still the best option for continuous weather-independent power among all the low-polluting options.

koide 5y ago
It can, according to some, here are a couple of sources: https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-energy-and-the-grid-debunked https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e... https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-wind-intermittency-myth-to-bed-please-6872e4cb7203 https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-win...
- yodelshady 5y ago
  It can't, source, gas prices in Europe now. Which we are paying. To a dictator who's overtly planning to invade the East. Because the sun isn't shining and batteries are three orders of magnitude too expensive. Renewables get exactly as much credit for what might happen in future as Communists or NFT sellers get for how awesome their plans are. Nuclear already delivered, in some places still does, winter heat. Its detractors are responsible for gas reliance.
  - koide 5y ago
    This is patently untrue. If you had followed some links there you would have seen that there are renewable plants today that are cheaper than fossil alternatives. The current gas crisis is, if anything, due to bad choices of electricity companies that tried to do financial games with gas prices. You can't win that game against a crooked political operator. Renewables can and do deliver winter heat too. Nuclear did and could have been something, but now it's not. We should build the best option for the future. And right now that's not nuclear for technological, political and technical reasons.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    But neither can nuclear reactors that do not exist yet. Sure, there are a couple that got shut down, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to total consumption. If you want to get an alternative to gas in 15 years or so then maybe nuclear would work. But a better bet is to get people to install heatpumps and drive those with solar and wind in a few years time. Far more effective use of resources, and far quicker from start to finish.

a-dub 5y ago

whatever did happen to pebble bed and all the other emerging nuclear technologies from 20 years ago that were supposed to move the bar into passive fail-safe territory and eliminate the waste problem through spent fuel reprocessing?

soperj 5y ago
passive fail-safe already existed 20 years ago. CANDU Reactor is exactly that. Doesn't even need enriched uranium.
- mydeskistoosm 5y ago
  So what happened? Why aren't we in a world of abundant energy?
  - soperj 5y ago
    If you use these reactors, you have no other reason to produce weapons grade uranium. That's the only thing that sticks out to me.
  - blooalien 5y ago
    Simple answer; Infinite greed and lust for (political) power…
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    Turns out a steam based thermodynamic cycle is expensive even with "free" energy.
    - soperj 5y ago
      Current price of Nuclear in Ontario (generated by CANDU reactors) is 5.9 cents per kWh.
      - Gwypaas 5y ago
        That is very expensive. Given that they came online in the 70s and early 80s we can assume the initial capital investment is paid off by now and that cost is only the marginal running cost. (OPEX) Now, currently we are building solar farms in desert areas for ~1.5 cent per kWh. Including both CAPEX and OPEX. On-shore wind is built at ~3 cents per kWh and ~6 cents per kWh for off-shore. This is where the explosion of renewables is coming from, they currently undercut the marginal cost of traditional power sources.

JetSetWilly 5y ago

Interestingly hunterston - a nuclear power station on the west coast of Scotland - had a failure of its backup diesel generators. Wikipedia describes it as: > In December 1998, an INES Level 2 incident occurred after severe winds and sea spray disabled all four power lines to the site during the Boxing Day Storm of 1998. After multiple grid failures in a short period of time, emergency diesel generators failed to start. Normally, in the absence of power for the reactor cooling pumps, the reactor would be passively cooled. However, the emergency control system which would have initiated passive cooling failed to act, as it had not been reset. Reactor cooling was reinstated after four hours. It seems the safety margin was twenty hours of no reactor cooling. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_sta...

bshanks 5y ago
Seems like a bit of a misnomer if the "passive" cooling had to be activated.
- randomswede 5y ago
  Well, "passive cooling" means that it requires no external power to cool. Doesn't necessarily mean it's normally plumbed into the circuit. Most probably it would not normally be, as the passive cooling would definitely decrease the power output (it is, after all, what it is designed to do). So there was probably one or more valves that did not get switched, as the system somehow didn't think they needed to, due to something not being configured as they should.

jfindley 5y ago

While these are real risks, it's worth pointing out two things: - This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away. - The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that. The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).

tomatotomato37 5y ago
I don't think a lot of people realize just how old the power plant actually was; it went online a year before Chernobyl even started construction, and it's own construction started when the Soviets we're still winning the space race.
teamonkey 5y ago
> The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that. That's the point, though, isn't it? One of the richest and most developed nations failed to decommission the plant in a timely manner, even under excellent conditions, in order to save costs. It's not the technology that's the problem.
- andrewaylett 5y ago
  There's a circular problem here, though: anti-nuclear activists block development and deployment of new technologies and plants, then complain that everything's old and outdated. The cost of nuclear has to include all the decommissioning costs while Coal and Hydro get to externalise their major environmental costs. I understand that single incidents are more visible than long-term low-level harm. But as a civilisation we really aren't paying enough attention to the overall cost of everything that's not nuclear.

gs17 5y ago

> Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns? That was sadly not an unknown at all. TEPCO was definitely aware of the possibility given that flooding in the generator rooms had happened before, and they deliberately ignored studies finding they were not prepared for a tsunami. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Prior_safety_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Pri...