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What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these coul
by rdsubhas 5y ago
What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.
- chabes 5y agoA grid based exclusively on 7 power plants would be highly centralized. If one of those goes down, there goes 14% of your country’s entire supply.
- LatteLazy 5y agoThat's the average. But you'd need a few more for peak demand and a few more for when these are offline for maintenance, refuelling etc.
- dahfizz 5y agoA bit of pumped hydro storage would also satisfy those needs.
- sascha_sl 5y agoPSH could not bridge demand for long enough. Maintenance cycles on nuclear reactors can be quite long.
- krasin 5y agoMake it 8 stations instead of 7 to have an excess of energy and then use the extra energy, when there's not enough demand, to produce fertilizers or other energy-intensive goods.
- londons_explore 5y agoI suspect in today's world of maximizing capital efficiency, and being able to contract in large numbers of people, the very expensive power plant won't be offline for long for maintenance. They'll probably shut the plant down, and have 500 workers come in to replace everything that needs to be replaced, and then power it up again within a few days, and let it run for another 6 months or so. Everything will be planned on workplans, and most won't require specialist knowledge... Eg. "Replace pump 205 in building C with this pump. Required skills people: 2x plumber, 2x electrician".
- akiselev 5y agoMost reactor downtime is due to refueling, since that requires cooling down the core through several stages. AFAIK it's not practical to do it safely and economically in under a few weeks. Most reactor maintenance is already done during refueling so there isn't much more room to optimize that downtime. (though that may change the older a reactor gets)
- _n_b_ 5y agoMost reactor downtime is actually for maintenance during refueling windows. As I mentioned in another comment, there is experience doing refuelling-only outages in <10 days. If everything goes well, you can startup a PWR from cold shutdown to hot full power in 3 12 hour shifts
- _n_b_ 5y agoThat is exactly how nuclear outages work. Everything is planned in a resource-loaded schedule and many of those resources are just there for the outage. Finland is actually somewhat known for running short (1 year) cycles with very very short (<10 days for refuelling is not unheard of) refuelling outages every other cycle alternating with slightly longer maintenance outages. A more typical scenario in the US would be 18 month cycles with a 30ish day outage. Some plants are moving to 24 month cycles with slightly longer outages. Capacity factor for nuclear plants in the US is consistently around 93% (similar figures in many other countries as well), which is significantly higher than other generation sources.
- ncmncm 5y agoRushing maintenance costs more, and nuke operating cost is already radically more than renewables + storage.
- anonporridge 5y agoIdeally, you overbuild and have some flexible consumer of electricity that can arbitrarily ramp consumption up or down to suck off any excess supply whenever inflexible basal civilization demand doesn't match supply, e.g. ramp up when everyone is asleep and ramp down if a reactor needs to go offline. This is called demand response, https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/grid-modernization-and-smart-grid/demand-response https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/..., and it's probably as important of a component to future grid management as energy storage.
- retrac 5y agoRight. A useful sink for surplus energy could be something like surplus heat or electricity to synthesize carbon-neutral fuels. We're not likely to get large electric aircraft anytime soon.
- anonporridge 5y agoElectric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks ahead of time. Bitcoin mining is commonly promoted as this kind of ideal electricity consumer. Hydrogen production could be another. However, I think more interesting for this community would be to build some kind of demand response general computing datacenter. Basically, sell computing resources with poor availability guarantees, but at a cheaper rate than standard datacenters. i.e. we'll run your batch jobs very cheaply, but we can't give you strong guarantees about how long it will take because we have to wait for excess grid electricity to have the energy to run them. Best case that's every night. Worst case we won't be able to run anything for weeks because Texas is going through another freak winter storm.
- Gare 5y ago> Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks ahead of time. I think you misunderstood. The parent comment implied that excess electricity could be use to produce synthetic fuels (via carbon capture) to power conventional airplanes, ships or other machinery.
- parksy 5y agoBy population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade. (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't they be able to - and - obviously they don't)
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
- jddil 5y agoNext time start by not writing a comment that doesn't add value and is against HN rules. What in particular is wrong about their analysis?
- Octoth0rpe 5y agoFor one, it assumes the average human consumes as much electricity as the average Finn.
- somebodythere 5y agoThe average human consumes much less energy than the average Finn. (Though that number is likely to grow as the world becomes more industrialized.)
- parksy 5y agoThat's a good point, people in Finland use more per capita than 80% of the global population, so if everyone were to have the same energy standards as Finland we'd probably need more like 10k reactors and 600 per year give or take. Or we stick with the status quo, force everyone into their lane, and probably need like 3000 to 4000 reactors to serve current needs, and 150 to 200 per year. Give or take. I think that's still in the same ballpark orders of magnitude-wise.
- sandworm101 5y agoIt is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification, especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only incrementally more powerful than those already running at the facility. "The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling water reactors (BWRs), each producing 890 MW of electricity, together comprising 22% of the country's electricity generation for 2020.[1] A third reactor, Unit 3, is expected to be online in January 2022, and at 1,600 MW, will by itself satisfy 14% of the country's electricity demand." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoIf those EVs are mainly charging at night, where does the extra peak load come from? Or is this just a case of not being able to shut off as much NG/Hydro generation at night (since nuclear can’t really be turned on and off at will)?
- at_compile_time 5y agoElectrification goes beyond cars. Think of how much fuel they need for heat in Finland. Electrification means replacing that fuel with electricity. And many reactors are able to modulate their output, either by absorbing neutrons to slow the chain reaction, or by letting steam bypass the turbines. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-ways-nuclear-more-flexible-you-might-think https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-ways-nuclear-more-flexi...
- xyzzyz 5y agoIt’s not that extraordinary. For example, one power plant in Poland provides 20% of all electricity consumed in Poland. Sadly, it’s a coal plant, one of the biggest in the world. It also burns lignite, which makes it even worse.
- legulere 5y agoIf you have 7 of these and you find a flaw in its design you have to take down the power for the entire country. Something similar happened in France recently: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/safety-concerns-raised-for-third-french-nuclear-plant/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/saf...
- Aachen 5y agoIf only we could have both types of energy source. Cover the gaps in solar/wind with nuclear, cover the gaps in nuclear with solar/wind. Sprinkle a small amount of pumped hydro and battery storage on top and what a world it could be.
- est31 5y agoNuclear can't be shut down / turned on on a short term basis, there is a lot of inertia. It might be a solution for seasonal issues only, but in Germany, there's usually wind during the no-sun season, and sun during the no-wind season.
- Aachen 5y agoSun can be predicted. Not sure what the reaction time is and how far ahead we can reliably forecast wind, but even if there is zero response possible to wind fluctuations that still seems like a win. Afaik fuel is also not the biggest cost in nuclear so estimating on the high side might not be an issue (but this is admittedly where I veer into speculation).
- natmaka 5y agoUranium (as a nuclear fuel) cost may never become prohibitive, however ore grade may prove a major challenge as its decline leads to more emissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660554
- natmaka 5y ago
- mustyoshi 5y agoDue to usage fluctuations it's not quite that simple
- Aachen 5y ago> 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7 ...if you continue to heat with gas, drive on petrol, fly on petroleum... I don't want to be the party pooper but that renewable energy has to cover more than current electricity consumption does get overlooked continuously. Less by governments than by the media and general public, thankfully, but still.
- p_l 5y agoIt's IMO an often overlooked reason to combine nuclear with renewables, and instead of looking at scaling down energy usage to match renewables' intermittent nature, design for overproduction and push it into easy to switch on electrolysers to provide green hydrogen feedstock for steel production, fuels for systems that can't depend on batteries, even CO2-neutral syntin for aviation and space where batteries don't have the density or just don't work.
- gpm 5y agoAnd have no redunancy whatseoever, and if this is like most nuclear plants have no need to quickly spin up or down in response to load changes, and probably the math is done by averaging power usage, so only if you can somehow shift a ton of power usage away from prime time. But it is a lot of power.
- pavlov 5y agoWhat's depressing is that you'd need ten of these giant power plants to power Bitcoin mining. And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
- shaky-carrousel 5y agoYou'll need three times more to power all the standby devices in the US, and nobody is doing something as simple as to powering down their tv/console when they stop using it. People don't even unplug their chargers after their phone is charged.
- bamboozled 5y agoI know but... Bitcoin!!!!!!
- laurent92 5y ago> unplug their chargers after their phone is charged To me, that’s a flaw of the charger if it keeps working when no device is connected. As for TVs and others, we need to mandate a front-facing power switch, because most TVs/devices don’t have one anymore.
- phatfish 5y agoSeems like there are two colossal wastes of energy that need to be fixed.
- tomcam 5y agoFinlands's population is about the same as the Cape Town, Melbourne, or Boston areas
- logicallee 5y agoI found a link in its Wikipedia page: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116000447/http://www.hs.fi/talous/Suomenkin+uusi+ydinvoimala+maksaa+85+miljardia+euroa/a1305627982885 https://web.archive.org/web/20130116000447/http://www.hs.fi/... "Suomenkin uusi ydinvoimala maksaa 8.5 miljardia euroa" which translates to "Finland's new nuclear power plant will also cost 8.5 billion euros."
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoYep! And let me be provocative (and probably downvoted here)... it also works during windless nights!
- acchow 5y agoThis is because Finland has a population of 5.5M Luxembourg has 1/7th the population and could run off ONE of these. The USA has 60x the population so would need about 420 of these?
- chii 5y ago420 isn't an insurmountably large a number - it's 8.4 per state (lets' round it up to 10 for redundency). at an average cost of $10 billion per plant, that's 4.2 trillion dollars. I think the US has spent more than that on the iraq war and the afganistan war - 8 trillion according to https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar - which could've paid for these 420 plants twice over.
- ncmncm 5y agoOr, could build out solar, wind, and storage, leaving plenty over for universal health care, university education, clean drinking water and breathing air, mass transit projects, and even fixing bridges. But US decided to invade Iraq and Afghanistan instead of any of those.
- acchow 5y agoAt least we've established a stable Afghanistan for generations /s
- ajross 5y agoTo be clear: Finland has a slightly smaller population than Minnesota. This is a big plant to be sure, but it's fraction of the market says more about the size of the market than the size of the plant.
- andresp 5y agoNuclear is really the only solution at the moment. It is a shame it took a war for people to start realising this. At least we can all learn with Germany's mistakes now.
- jsnodlin 5y ago
- bigbugbag 5y agoWhat I find incredible is that this reactor is going online at all. Okiluoto started in 2003 and was supposed to cost 3 Bns and be ready in 2009. it took 18 years instead of 6 and total cost is difficult to know exactly but is over 12 Bns instead of 3. Building this plant (and the Flamanville one) put into light so many issues at so many levels that I am surprised it was completed and actually works. Though the previously completed EPRs in Taishan was stopped since last june after gas leaks have been found in the primary circuit and framatome asked the US for help. Current talks point to a design flaw and the possibility of not restarting this EPRs is on the table. If this is confirmed, this flaw could also affect Okiluoto and flamanville EPRs. With last winter trend of France finding design flaws in its reactors and being forced to stop them for emergency repairs and maintenance[1] (affecting the most recent and most powerful ones too), nuclear plant do not seems like a sound sustainable choice at least when France is involved. [1]: https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/entreprises/nucleaire-les-quatre-plus-gros-reacteurs-francais-a-l-arret-09dde3be-5e7f-11ec-b2cb-afc8b04d8652 https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/entreprises/nucleaire-l...
- runeks 5y ago> it took 18 years instead of 6 and total cost is difficult to know exactly but is over 12 Bns instead of 3. The cynic in me would like to point out that it's not really running yet: > Olkiluoto 3 started test production at just over 0.1 gigawatt, a small fraction of its capacity, with a ramp-up to full, regular electricity output planned by the end of July.
- natmaka 5y agoA reactor cannot run 100% of the time, as it has to be periodically inspected, refueled...
- usefulcat 5y ago> 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7. A /very small/ entire country of 5.5M.
- eclat 5y agoAnd on top of that it’ll heavily contribute to a huge reduction in electricity prices from €70/MWh to €45/MWh.