27 ms·

> While the reliability and 24-hour availability of power from a reactor is part of their appeal, the fact that the plants cannot easily be shut down and restar

> While the reliability and 24-hour availability of power from a reactor is part of their appeal, the fact that the plants cannot easily be shut down and restarted means that they sometimes operate at a loss when there is ample supply on the market. That, he said, makes the DOE support program one of the only ways to keep some nuclear plants online as a carbon-free resource. This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about. Solar energy is inherently variable as the sun rises and sets but also with weather changes. Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. Energy storage continues to be one of the big gaps in our clean energy strategy.

steeve 5y ago
Which is why most countries turning to intermittent renewables are using gas as backup, and why without massive energy storage (TWh), we're screwed using those.
ghouse 5y ago
In the US, most of the pumped hydro energy storage was built during the nuclear build out (because of the operating characteristics you note above). While chemical energy storage is growing quickly in the US, pumped hydro energy storage remains dominant.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Pumped hydro is great, but we are in a situation where most obvious pumped-hydro stations have been already turned into pumped-hydro. The remaining areas have political / water issues, or insufficient geography. Chemical storage doesn't seem like it'd operate anywhere close to pump-hydro scale, but chemical storage will be a component of frequency-regulation, and maybe anything involving 30-minutes or less of storage. This is still useful, but pumped hydro is so much bigger than all other forms, that its hard to imagine an adequate replacement moving forward. CAES looks promising. Still smaller than pumped hydro, but there's more geography that works with it.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    You commit a common error. While on-river hydro (including pumped) is rather limited, the potential resource for off-river pumped hydro is enormous. http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Globally there's about 9,000 gigawatt hours of pumped hydro, annually we produce about 1388.85 TWh worth of Ammonia (mostly for fertilizer) so chemical storage of electrical energy as green hydrogen/ammonia has a fairly clear growth path.
dragontamer 5y ago
IIRC, newer nuclear designs use the control rods to control the speed of the reaction, as opposed to purely being a safety measure.
- polski-g 5y ago
  Those are called "load-follow" designs. Not "newer designs". They are almost as old as the discovery of fission itself. American nuclear submarines use them, as does France's power generating reactors.
- bogomipz 5y ago
  Interesting. I was under the impression that the control rods were always used to regulate the reaction. How were they used chiefly as a safety measure? Similarly what was used for controlling the rate of reaction when the primary purpose of the rods were purely for safety?
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    I don't know the details. What I do know is that the older reactors weren't really the type that could "spin up" or "spin down". Control rods always existed on nuclear power plants, even the oldest designs. ------- In any case: "Connecting" those rods up to a computer so that the reaction can get hotter or run cooler would be the basis for variable power output.
    - Lascaille 5y ago
      >would be the basis for variable power output. This has been done literally forever. Why do you think nuclear plants run at 100% capacity 24/7?
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        > Why do you think nuclear plants run at 100% capacity 24/7? The primary reason would be economic. Fuel costs IIRC are really low but capital-expenses (especially safety engineering / politics / convincing the people nearby that the plant is safe) is so costly. When you have cheap-fuel but expensive machines, it makes sense to run closer to 100%. If you have expensive fuel but cheap machines (ex: Gas turbines), it makes sense to run in a "peaker" fashion. ----- That being said: I've heard that older nuclear plants are "baseload" designs, in that they _CANNOT_ turn off or feasibly regulate their power output. I mean, they obviously "can" turn off, they all have control rods for safety. But they're clearly not using them to regulate the power output.
gruez 5y ago
>>the fact that the plants cannot easily be shut down and restarted means that they sometimes operate at a loss when there is ample supply on the market >This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about. this "quirk" should be a non-issue with a functioning energy market. if renewables are flooding the market with cheap electricity, but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night, then the deficit would cause prices to go up and make the remaining generating capacity (natural gas, nuclear) more profitable.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night Only if you assume the demand stays constant, but it doesn't; Demand is usually the highest when PV output is also the highest, the middle of the day when everybody is at work, using all kinds of electricity drawing machines.
  - peter422 5y ago
    It also would heavily advantage power plants that could turn on and off quickly to only produce power when the cost of that power is high. Especially if these plants produced a lot of pollution that was also not accounted for.
  - infinityio 5y ago
    Based upon the UK's National Grid Data (https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/) I would disagree with you - It seems that peak demand lies at about 6PM, and solar peaks about 11:30AM - This leads to a significant increase in fossil fuel consumption around this time
    - freeflight 5y ago
      The UK is a curious example to use for this, afaik a big part of that "peak demand" is people starting up their electric tea kettles in a phenomenon known as TV pickup [0] For contrast, here are the stats for Germany [1] and the consumption peaks during the day contrast very well with the night consumption. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup [1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_generation/13.02.2022/16.02.2022/today/ https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electric...
api 5y ago
A fully nuclear grid would require some battery storage for this reason. Large nuclear plants aren't that great at load leveling.
- godelski 5y ago
  To be honest, a full anything grid would be a terrible idea. There's not a one size fits all energy solution. Different regions have different demands. They have different advantages and disadvantages. We also don't want to put all our eggs in one basket for energy security reasons.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    There are some geographical exceptions - Norway literally does not need anything else other than hydro.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    I actually really like Japans system they had to inadvertently invent - the north part of the country and south operate on different power standards ( I believe the phase? ). This led to them building MASSIVE insanely high voltage DC to DC connections between the two grids so one side could still supply the other with power. But the other plus is that ( I believe ) one side can also not take the other out or draw too much power. China is investing heavily in super high voltage long distance power transfer and I suspect the US could do the same and use it to connect different areas of the country. Also much lower transmission losses.
    - api 5y ago
      The US has gigantic wind resources down the middle that could help power the coasts if transmission was there.
- VBprogrammer 5y ago
  A fully nuclear grid probably wouldn't make sense. France has a 60-70% nuclear electricity grid and manages just fine. Some of their reactors use grey rods which can be inserted into the core which have less effect than the normal control rods but don't distort the shape of the reaction as much as a partially inserted rod.
rosndo 5y ago
Wait, are you saying that people were lying in all those cryptocurrency threads when they told us that “excess electricity” doesn’t exist? Shocking.
rr808 5y ago
Its also an accounting misunderstanding. Nuclear power has huge fixed costs and negligible variable costs. If a station costs $1B/yr that's 3mil/day to keep running. If network power is cheap today and the plant will only make 2mil it is making a loss only if you distribute the fixed across evenly, its contribution margin still makes it worthwhile to run on those days as you aren't saving much money by turning it off.
- p1mrx 5y ago
  There are cases where electricity prices go negative, and nuclear plants must pay to put power on the grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pricing#Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pricing#Electricity
  - tedivm 5y ago
    Smaller plants combined with energy storage seems like it would help here. When prices go negative store the extra energy until prices also go back up.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      If energy storage solutions were sufficient, there wouldn't be any negative priced energy! Obviously, everyone who can store energy maxes out their battery banks during these times of negative-cost energy. The reason why prices are negative is because the sum of market participants still has a shortage of storage. We have a shortage of storage because the amount of energy our grid uses is on a behemoth scale, barely comprehensible. Dozens-of-GW-hr pumped hydro stations fill up their storage to the brim on a constant basis.
      - tedivm 5y ago
        Energy storage has gotten a lot better in the last few years, just as solar and other things have. Most of the plants in the US are decades old. That said, I'm not saying it'll completely solve the problem- just increase efficiency and reduce the problem.
steelstraw 5y ago
They could store it in the form of digital energy (Bitcoin). With that you're able to capture what would otherwise be wasted energy. "The gas, which would otherwise have been burned off, is instead routed to a bitcoin processor. For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it’s 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields. The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring.." https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/conocophillips-is-selling-extra-gas-to-bitcoin-miners-in-north-dakota.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/conocophillips-is-selling-ex...
- popol12 5y ago
  And how do you convert back bitcoin into electricity ? How do you turn money into energy ? Can the FED print some money to fill back the empty oil fields ?
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Pay poor people to turn cranks on magnets. Efficiency losses of only 99.9% /s
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I'm not advocating for "use excess energy to mine bitcoin", but you don't need to convert it back into energy--the theoretical nuclear plant is calibrated so its power output is equal to the max power demand and any excess due to lower-than-max demand is channeled to bitcoin mining.
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  This is a good use of bitcoin. A better solution would be to interconnect the electricity grid with neighbouring grids. With sufficient size, time-dependent peaks and troughs would be smoothed out.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous. Think about how many people have to be involved in their operation, versus the operation of a solar farm. People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium? Their cost of construction per GW is not competitive with wind and solar - it's typically thousands of euros per kw. Whereas wind and solar can go from construction to energy production (and carbon paypback) on a timescale of months, nukes take years to build.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  How much of that economic cost is tied up in regulations and NIMBYism? >Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium? I'd be willing to wager significant money that on a MW for MW basis, the environmental impact is higher for solar just due to the energy density alone.
- brtkdotse 5y ago
  > People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium? While I agree with you in general, the amount of uranium needed to run a power plant should be orders of magnitude smaller than is necessary to build and equivalent solar farm
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Amount of uranium 235, maybe. Amount of ore and environmental degradation, no. But I do worry about the 8g/m^2 of cadmium mounted on top of houses some of which will burn down.
- morning_gelato 5y ago
  > Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous The United Nations Economic Commission For Europe released a report in 2021 on the life cycle emissions (including construction, operation, and decommissioning) of various power generation options and found nuclear to be the lowest overall at 5.5 gCO2eq/kWh [1]. [1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf
Spooky23 5y ago
Solar is awesome in that yield scales with load peaks. The problem with nuclear is an example of why deregulation was stupid. As a society of electricity consumers, we are sitting on lawn chairs on a railroad track with an electric train approaching us. It's obvious to anyone with a pulse that electric cars are ramping up and will displace the current fleet, and equally obvious that that operating model (plug in your car at night) will increase base load requirements. So because we've detached planning from electrical generation and distribution, we have 50 different sets of cartels optimizing for short term returns on the spot market. The various electrical shit-shows in California and Texas are like failed-state levels of dysfunction. North of NYC, electrical supply rates are up 50% because we turned off a massive reactor complex and replaced it with volatile natural gas. We're decommissioning nuclear at a point in time just before we need it, environmentalists were bought by gas extraction people and Wall St. accounting is very bad at dealing with capital assets with 50-100 year lifecycles. If you think about it the "energy storage" problem is absurd. Installing millions of inefficient distributed battery cells in potentially millions of buildings, for want of adequate electrical generation is beyond dumb, and the scale of waste and wasted value is staggering. It is solely a byproduct of a market designed to maximize producer profit.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  > Solar is awesome in that yield scales with load peaks. This might be true in California but peak in Poland and many other places is after sun sets.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    And in some places in winter. And in some places in summer. Sometimes by HUGE multiples that operate inversely with the availability of solar power. For long periods that batteries struggle store power for.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    Its a problem here in the US too, though probably to a lesser degree. South facing solar is the most efficient in total energy produced, but it starts to drop off just as A/C loads start to accelerate toward their peak. West facing panels help, but the ROI isn't as good without variable energy pricing.
littlestymaar 5y ago
> Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. It's not as clear cut. Cold start up and shut down of nuclear reactors take time, but there's lot of in between and nuclear still has quite a lot of flexibility: for instance, you can quickly modulate the power output down to 50% without special considerations (you can also go lower, but then it starts using the uranium quicker[1]), or you can even go off while staying hot and in pressure, which means only the fission divergence needs to be redone, this is usually done during the week-end. And keep in mind that modern (= high yield) fossil plants also have limited flexibility: a supercritical coal plant takes a lot of time to warm up, and so does a CCGT. [1]: or more precisely, since the power is controlled by top-down control rods, you end up burning uranium in the bottom more than in the top, which means replacing the fuel earlier.
Manuel_D 5y ago
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Nuclear plants can alter their output by more aggressively cooling the reactor. This wastes heat, but can be used to curb electrical output in a pinch. But it doesn't reduce operating costs like running a gas plant for reduced hours. The overwhelming majority of nuclear power's cost lies in construction, and reducing output doesn't result in any savings.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I'm of the impression that molten salt reactors address this by storing thermal energy in the molten salt for later use?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  If there were any, yes, in principle. Attempts at molten-salt storage (which would be even more useful for solar) have run into corrosion and leakage problems.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
It's a big headache and one of the most annoying things about armchair energy planners who think solar can solve everything. It should surprise nobody that energy planning is very difficult.
leishman 5y ago
Bitcoin mining ftw
R0b0t1 5y ago
Nuclear reactions can be modulated quickly, they just aren't designed to and are prevented from doing so due to red tape. It's economically tricky because the fixed costs of a nuclear plant mean you don't want to underutilize it now, but you can make them variable.
2ion 5y ago
As power autarky and energy stability is a major backbone of economic and defense capabilities a mere billion here or there should be absolutely worth it. You need an energy source mix in the end, and this is part of that.
trcarney 5y ago
>Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. As far as electrical output is concerned, nuclear power is just as variable as any other turbine based power generation system. Just divert the steam away from the turbines and you are no longer making electricity. Therefore, through creative plumbing, you could easily adjust the amount of power generated by controlling how much steam is going to the turbine. The issue is that while you are diverting steam, you are wasting money by running the reactor.
- mkoubaa 5y ago
  I wonder if someone made a machine that did carbon removal whose only inputs is power AND there was a bounty paid to remove carbon if you could install them onsite at power plants to deal with this
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    That will happen, but it will be driven mainly from solar arrays. A nuclear reservation is generally a good place to lay out solar and wind arrays, whether the plant itself still operates or not.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Great idea if it worked at all decently - any excess power could go directly toward removing atmospheric carbon. Or some other environmental process that is beneficial. Water purification? Climate modeling datacenters?
  - onenukecourse 5y ago
    You don't have to actually remove carbon with excess power. In fact that would be bad environmentally since all you accomplish is removing carbon but you still have process inefficiency. Your statement is globally equivalent to doing something that would be done anyway but is tolerant to interruptions. There are power consumers that can do this and they have a power preferential rate (i.e. they're willing to shut down when the power company calls). Also, what you're saying can be done by, for example, electrolysis of water to make hydrogen. I'm currently working on fuel cells that can be operated in reverse; that is they generate electricity from fossil fuels when needed (at very high efficiency) but absorb excess electricity by producing hydrogen. Really what you're proposing is accomplished more efficiently by stored energy. The problem is that we've tapped out the easy ways to redistribute load, or store energy decades ago.
patrickwalton 5y ago
Not just storage, but transmission. From what I understand were far from a plant on the east coast being able to fill needs on the West. Interstate and international transmission lines would solve a lot of problems easier than more storage.
- duped 5y ago
  We already have pretty good long distance transmission lines (HVDC lines are commonly used today in both remote areas and in undersea lines, there's even a 53 mile long line from SF to Pittsburgh under the Bay). But there's always going to be some point at which it's more economical to build up local power generation along distances. We really don't want to be pumping gigawatts over fire prone areas, for example. We are going to need to figure out how to handle more intense seasonal weather in the south east US. Florida has already done a decent job hardening their transmission lines and making sure their grids can stand up to cat 5 storms (the way they weathered Irma was incredible, compared to Maria in Puerto Rico just weeks later) but transmission lines are easier to replace than generators.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  You need both, because long-distance transmission is subject to interruption. Then, transmitted power is cheaper, but storage serves when transmission drops. The effect is amplified when transmission is from or through another country.
inthegreenwoods 5y ago
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Wouldn't this mean pairing with wind/solar is a natural fit? I don't really see a big issue if we could have a holistic plan.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Capitalism has difficulty with holistic plans. Carbon taxes and credits help retrofit, if you can get them enacted.
Melatonic 5y ago
Lots of things the government pays for though is not supposed to be hugely profitable - no one questions why we have Fire departments for example and they are a huge "loss" when everyone is just sitting around. The power not stored though is of course still just a problem in general for efficiency sake - I wonder if there is something we could pair with nuclear plants that would use the otherwise wasted energy to accomplish something productive.

steeve 5y ago

Which is why most countries turning to intermittent renewables are using gas as backup, and why without massive energy storage (TWh), we're screwed using those.

ghouse 5y ago

In the US, most of the pumped hydro energy storage was built during the nuclear build out (because of the operating characteristics you note above). While chemical energy storage is growing quickly in the US, pumped hydro energy storage remains dominant.

dragontamer 5y ago
Pumped hydro is great, but we are in a situation where most obvious pumped-hydro stations have been already turned into pumped-hydro. The remaining areas have political / water issues, or insufficient geography. Chemical storage doesn't seem like it'd operate anywhere close to pump-hydro scale, but chemical storage will be a component of frequency-regulation, and maybe anything involving 30-minutes or less of storage. This is still useful, but pumped hydro is so much bigger than all other forms, that its hard to imagine an adequate replacement moving forward. CAES looks promising. Still smaller than pumped hydro, but there's more geography that works with it.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  You commit a common error. While on-river hydro (including pumped) is rather limited, the potential resource for off-river pumped hydro is enormous. http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Globally there's about 9,000 gigawatt hours of pumped hydro, annually we produce about 1388.85 TWh worth of Ammonia (mostly for fertilizer) so chemical storage of electrical energy as green hydrogen/ammonia has a fairly clear growth path.

dragontamer 5y ago

IIRC, newer nuclear designs use the control rods to control the speed of the reaction, as opposed to purely being a safety measure.

polski-g 5y ago
Those are called "load-follow" designs. Not "newer designs". They are almost as old as the discovery of fission itself. American nuclear submarines use them, as does France's power generating reactors.
bogomipz 5y ago
Interesting. I was under the impression that the control rods were always used to regulate the reaction. How were they used chiefly as a safety measure? Similarly what was used for controlling the rate of reaction when the primary purpose of the rods were purely for safety?
- dragontamer 5y ago
  I don't know the details. What I do know is that the older reactors weren't really the type that could "spin up" or "spin down". Control rods always existed on nuclear power plants, even the oldest designs. ------- In any case: "Connecting" those rods up to a computer so that the reaction can get hotter or run cooler would be the basis for variable power output.
  - Lascaille 5y ago
    >would be the basis for variable power output. This has been done literally forever. Why do you think nuclear plants run at 100% capacity 24/7?
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      > Why do you think nuclear plants run at 100% capacity 24/7? The primary reason would be economic. Fuel costs IIRC are really low but capital-expenses (especially safety engineering / politics / convincing the people nearby that the plant is safe) is so costly. When you have cheap-fuel but expensive machines, it makes sense to run closer to 100%. If you have expensive fuel but cheap machines (ex: Gas turbines), it makes sense to run in a "peaker" fashion. ----- That being said: I've heard that older nuclear plants are "baseload" designs, in that they _CANNOT_ turn off or feasibly regulate their power output. I mean, they obviously "can" turn off, they all have control rods for safety. But they're clearly not using them to regulate the power output.

gruez 5y ago

>>the fact that the plants cannot easily be shut down and restarted means that they sometimes operate at a loss when there is ample supply on the market >This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about. this "quirk" should be a non-issue with a functioning energy market. if renewables are flooding the market with cheap electricity, but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night, then the deficit would cause prices to go up and make the remaining generating capacity (natural gas, nuclear) more profitable.

freeflight 5y ago
> but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night Only if you assume the demand stays constant, but it doesn't; Demand is usually the highest when PV output is also the highest, the middle of the day when everybody is at work, using all kinds of electricity drawing machines.
- peter422 5y ago
  It also would heavily advantage power plants that could turn on and off quickly to only produce power when the cost of that power is high. Especially if these plants produced a lot of pollution that was also not accounted for.
- infinityio 5y ago
  Based upon the UK's National Grid Data (https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/) I would disagree with you - It seems that peak demand lies at about 6PM, and solar peaks about 11:30AM - This leads to a significant increase in fossil fuel consumption around this time
  - freeflight 5y ago
    The UK is a curious example to use for this, afaik a big part of that "peak demand" is people starting up their electric tea kettles in a phenomenon known as TV pickup [0] For contrast, here are the stats for Germany [1] and the consumption peaks during the day contrast very well with the night consumption. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup [1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_generation/13.02.2022/16.02.2022/today/ https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electric...

api 5y ago

A fully nuclear grid would require some battery storage for this reason. Large nuclear plants aren't that great at load leveling.

godelski 5y ago
To be honest, a full anything grid would be a terrible idea. There's not a one size fits all energy solution. Different regions have different demands. They have different advantages and disadvantages. We also don't want to put all our eggs in one basket for energy security reasons.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  There are some geographical exceptions - Norway literally does not need anything else other than hydro.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  I actually really like Japans system they had to inadvertently invent - the north part of the country and south operate on different power standards ( I believe the phase? ). This led to them building MASSIVE insanely high voltage DC to DC connections between the two grids so one side could still supply the other with power. But the other plus is that ( I believe ) one side can also not take the other out or draw too much power. China is investing heavily in super high voltage long distance power transfer and I suspect the US could do the same and use it to connect different areas of the country. Also much lower transmission losses.
  - api 5y ago
    The US has gigantic wind resources down the middle that could help power the coasts if transmission was there.
VBprogrammer 5y ago
A fully nuclear grid probably wouldn't make sense. France has a 60-70% nuclear electricity grid and manages just fine. Some of their reactors use grey rods which can be inserted into the core which have less effect than the normal control rods but don't distort the shape of the reaction as much as a partially inserted rod.

rosndo 5y ago

Wait, are you saying that people were lying in all those cryptocurrency threads when they told us that “excess electricity” doesn’t exist? Shocking.

rr808 5y ago

Its also an accounting misunderstanding. Nuclear power has huge fixed costs and negligible variable costs. If a station costs $1B/yr that's 3mil/day to keep running. If network power is cheap today and the plant will only make 2mil it is making a loss only if you distribute the fixed across evenly, its contribution margin still makes it worthwhile to run on those days as you aren't saving much money by turning it off.

p1mrx 5y ago
There are cases where electricity prices go negative, and nuclear plants must pay to put power on the grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pricing#Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pricing#Electricity
- tedivm 5y ago
  Smaller plants combined with energy storage seems like it would help here. When prices go negative store the extra energy until prices also go back up.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    If energy storage solutions were sufficient, there wouldn't be any negative priced energy! Obviously, everyone who can store energy maxes out their battery banks during these times of negative-cost energy. The reason why prices are negative is because the sum of market participants still has a shortage of storage. We have a shortage of storage because the amount of energy our grid uses is on a behemoth scale, barely comprehensible. Dozens-of-GW-hr pumped hydro stations fill up their storage to the brim on a constant basis.
    - tedivm 5y ago
      Energy storage has gotten a lot better in the last few years, just as solar and other things have. Most of the plants in the US are decades old. That said, I'm not saying it'll completely solve the problem- just increase efficiency and reduce the problem.

steelstraw 5y ago

They could store it in the form of digital energy (Bitcoin). With that you're able to capture what would otherwise be wasted energy. "The gas, which would otherwise have been burned off, is instead routed to a bitcoin processor. For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it’s 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields. The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring.." https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/conocophillips-is-selling-extra-gas-to-bitcoin-miners-in-north-dakota.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/conocophillips-is-selling-ex...

popol12 5y ago
And how do you convert back bitcoin into electricity ? How do you turn money into energy ? Can the FED print some money to fill back the empty oil fields ?
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Pay poor people to turn cranks on magnets. Efficiency losses of only 99.9% /s
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I'm not advocating for "use excess energy to mine bitcoin", but you don't need to convert it back into energy--the theoretical nuclear plant is calibrated so its power output is equal to the max power demand and any excess due to lower-than-max demand is channeled to bitcoin mining.
joshuaissac 5y ago
This is a good use of bitcoin. A better solution would be to interconnect the electricity grid with neighbouring grids. With sufficient size, time-dependent peaks and troughs would be smoothed out.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous. Think about how many people have to be involved in their operation, versus the operation of a solar farm. People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium? Their cost of construction per GW is not competitive with wind and solar - it's typically thousands of euros per kw. Whereas wind and solar can go from construction to energy production (and carbon paypback) on a timescale of months, nukes take years to build.

Karunamon 5y ago
How much of that economic cost is tied up in regulations and NIMBYism? >Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium? I'd be willing to wager significant money that on a MW for MW basis, the environmental impact is higher for solar just due to the energy density alone.
brtkdotse 5y ago
> People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium? While I agree with you in general, the amount of uranium needed to run a power plant should be orders of magnitude smaller than is necessary to build and equivalent solar farm
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Amount of uranium 235, maybe. Amount of ore and environmental degradation, no. But I do worry about the 8g/m^2 of cadmium mounted on top of houses some of which will burn down.
morning_gelato 5y ago
> Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous The United Nations Economic Commission For Europe released a report in 2021 on the life cycle emissions (including construction, operation, and decommissioning) of various power generation options and found nuclear to be the lowest overall at 5.5 gCO2eq/kWh [1]. [1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf

Spooky23 5y ago

Solar is awesome in that yield scales with load peaks. The problem with nuclear is an example of why deregulation was stupid. As a society of electricity consumers, we are sitting on lawn chairs on a railroad track with an electric train approaching us. It's obvious to anyone with a pulse that electric cars are ramping up and will displace the current fleet, and equally obvious that that operating model (plug in your car at night) will increase base load requirements. So because we've detached planning from electrical generation and distribution, we have 50 different sets of cartels optimizing for short term returns on the spot market. The various electrical shit-shows in California and Texas are like failed-state levels of dysfunction. North of NYC, electrical supply rates are up 50% because we turned off a massive reactor complex and replaced it with volatile natural gas. We're decommissioning nuclear at a point in time just before we need it, environmentalists were bought by gas extraction people and Wall St. accounting is very bad at dealing with capital assets with 50-100 year lifecycles. If you think about it the "energy storage" problem is absurd. Installing millions of inefficient distributed battery cells in potentially millions of buildings, for want of adequate electrical generation is beyond dumb, and the scale of waste and wasted value is staggering. It is solely a byproduct of a market designed to maximize producer profit.

KptMarchewa 5y ago
> Solar is awesome in that yield scales with load peaks. This might be true in California but peak in Poland and many other places is after sun sets.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  And in some places in winter. And in some places in summer. Sometimes by HUGE multiples that operate inversely with the availability of solar power. For long periods that batteries struggle store power for.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- _ea1k 5y ago
  Its a problem here in the US too, though probably to a lesser degree. South facing solar is the most efficient in total energy produced, but it starts to drop off just as A/C loads start to accelerate toward their peak. West facing panels help, but the ROI isn't as good without variable energy pricing.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. It's not as clear cut. Cold start up and shut down of nuclear reactors take time, but there's lot of in between and nuclear still has quite a lot of flexibility: for instance, you can quickly modulate the power output down to 50% without special considerations (you can also go lower, but then it starts using the uranium quicker[1]), or you can even go off while staying hot and in pressure, which means only the fission divergence needs to be redone, this is usually done during the week-end. And keep in mind that modern (= high yield) fossil plants also have limited flexibility: a supercritical coal plant takes a lot of time to warm up, and so does a CCGT. [1]: or more precisely, since the power is controlled by top-down control rods, you end up burning uranium in the bottom more than in the top, which means replacing the fuel earlier.

Manuel_D 5y ago

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Nuclear plants can alter their output by more aggressively cooling the reactor. This wastes heat, but can be used to curb electrical output in a pinch. But it doesn't reduce operating costs like running a gas plant for reduced hours. The overwhelming majority of nuclear power's cost lies in construction, and reducing output doesn't result in any savings.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I'm of the impression that molten salt reactors address this by storing thermal energy in the molten salt for later use?

ncmncm 5y ago
If there were any, yes, in principle. Attempts at molten-salt storage (which would be even more useful for solar) have run into corrosion and leakage problems.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

It's a big headache and one of the most annoying things about armchair energy planners who think solar can solve everything. It should surprise nobody that energy planning is very difficult.

leishman 5y ago

Bitcoin mining ftw

R0b0t1 5y ago

Nuclear reactions can be modulated quickly, they just aren't designed to and are prevented from doing so due to red tape. It's economically tricky because the fixed costs of a nuclear plant mean you don't want to underutilize it now, but you can make them variable.

2ion 5y ago

As power autarky and energy stability is a major backbone of economic and defense capabilities a mere billion here or there should be absolutely worth it. You need an energy source mix in the end, and this is part of that.

trcarney 5y ago

>Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. As far as electrical output is concerned, nuclear power is just as variable as any other turbine based power generation system. Just divert the steam away from the turbines and you are no longer making electricity. Therefore, through creative plumbing, you could easily adjust the amount of power generated by controlling how much steam is going to the turbine. The issue is that while you are diverting steam, you are wasting money by running the reactor.

mkoubaa 5y ago
I wonder if someone made a machine that did carbon removal whose only inputs is power AND there was a bounty paid to remove carbon if you could install them onsite at power plants to deal with this
- ncmncm 5y ago
  That will happen, but it will be driven mainly from solar arrays. A nuclear reservation is generally a good place to lay out solar and wind arrays, whether the plant itself still operates or not.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Great idea if it worked at all decently - any excess power could go directly toward removing atmospheric carbon. Or some other environmental process that is beneficial. Water purification? Climate modeling datacenters?
- onenukecourse 5y ago
  You don't have to actually remove carbon with excess power. In fact that would be bad environmentally since all you accomplish is removing carbon but you still have process inefficiency. Your statement is globally equivalent to doing something that would be done anyway but is tolerant to interruptions. There are power consumers that can do this and they have a power preferential rate (i.e. they're willing to shut down when the power company calls). Also, what you're saying can be done by, for example, electrolysis of water to make hydrogen. I'm currently working on fuel cells that can be operated in reverse; that is they generate electricity from fossil fuels when needed (at very high efficiency) but absorb excess electricity by producing hydrogen. Really what you're proposing is accomplished more efficiently by stored energy. The problem is that we've tapped out the easy ways to redistribute load, or store energy decades ago.

patrickwalton 5y ago

Not just storage, but transmission. From what I understand were far from a plant on the east coast being able to fill needs on the West. Interstate and international transmission lines would solve a lot of problems easier than more storage.

duped 5y ago
We already have pretty good long distance transmission lines (HVDC lines are commonly used today in both remote areas and in undersea lines, there's even a 53 mile long line from SF to Pittsburgh under the Bay). But there's always going to be some point at which it's more economical to build up local power generation along distances. We really don't want to be pumping gigawatts over fire prone areas, for example. We are going to need to figure out how to handle more intense seasonal weather in the south east US. Florida has already done a decent job hardening their transmission lines and making sure their grids can stand up to cat 5 storms (the way they weathered Irma was incredible, compared to Maria in Puerto Rico just weeks later) but transmission lines are easier to replace than generators.
ncmncm 5y ago
You need both, because long-distance transmission is subject to interruption. Then, transmitted power is cheaper, but storage serves when transmission drops. The effect is amplified when transmission is from or through another country.

inthegreenwoods 5y ago

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Wouldn't this mean pairing with wind/solar is a natural fit? I don't really see a big issue if we could have a holistic plan.

ncmncm 5y ago
Capitalism has difficulty with holistic plans. Carbon taxes and credits help retrofit, if you can get them enacted.

Melatonic 5y ago

Lots of things the government pays for though is not supposed to be hugely profitable - no one questions why we have Fire departments for example and they are a huge "loss" when everyone is just sitting around. The power not stored though is of course still just a problem in general for efficiency sake - I wonder if there is something we could pair with nuclear plants that would use the otherwise wasted energy to accomplish something productive.