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Electrification goes beyond cars. Think of how much fuel they need for heat in Finland. Electrification means replacing that fuel with electricity. And many re

Electrification 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...

thriftwy 5y ago
Nuclear plant can provide heating for free. It has to be located in Helsinki, though.
pfdietz 5y ago
Nuclear reactors could modulate their output, but they would take a grievous economic hit if they do so, because most of their costs are fixed, independent of the power setting.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Certainly this is cheaper than paying people to buy your electricity (as sometimes happens in California because of solar plants).
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.) In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that discrepancy worse.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Sounds like we could solve this problem for for nuclear the same way we look to solve problems for renewables: storage.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Except if I have batteries, why should I charge them with expensive nuclear energy when I can charge them with cheap renewables? The nuclear plant will be forced to compete with those renewables for this market, which will limit what it can earn with the otherwise curtailed output. This is not as bad as losing it entirely, or even paying for someone to take it, but it's still going to be a net negative for the plant's economics vs. running all out selling at the calculated cost.
        seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        Nuclear has very high capital costs but fuel and operating costs (sans financing and insurance) are relatively cheap. Nuclear energy isn’t expensive if the plant is already built, so if you had to choose and the costs were already sunk, it wouldn’t matter. I guess your point is whether to build the plants in the first place rather than going with other renewables. Since hydro is pretty much tapped out, I guess that would be wind or biofuels?
        ncmncm 5y ago
        Operating cost of nukes is low only compared to coal and oil, and not even to gas. Compared to renewable + storage, nuke operating cost is very, very high.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        My point was that when you calculate the cost/kWh from a nuclear plant, if you then are going to operate than plant only 50% (say) of the time you could otherwise do so, the cost/kWh from that plant goes way up, because those high fixed costs are now amortized over only half the output. Note that even some of the OPERATING costs of a nuclear plant are fixed. You still need about as many staff to run the plant even if you cycle it up and down. The renewables will be wind and PV. Biomass uses too much land area, and would likely be reserved for specialty markets like chemical feedstocks and perhaps aviation fuel.
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      Granted, the cost for solar and wind fail to account for the cost of storage to accommodate their intermittency. If your country has hydroelectric dams, then that works. But for the rest that don't have the right geography for hydro, they burn fossil fuels. Nuclear provides a path for decarbonization. Solar and wind do not, until a massive breakthrough in energy storage is invented. And nobody knows when that will happen, or if it will happen.
      - rndgermandude 5y ago
        We don't need massive breakthroughs in energy storage. And the goal is overall carbon-neutral, not carbon-zero. And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal. The latter might become a very important part of the mix, as it would be relatively easy to securely and relatively cheaply deploy a lot of small scale heat pump power plants, requiring fewer massive power line installations, with the added benefit that geo-thermal basically works independent from the time of the day and weather conditions. As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants). Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%. It's also OK to have some carbon emissions if you can manage to have other measures neutralizing that. We can e.g. use renewable biofuels (e.g. wood, biomass from algae or crops) which "use" a lot of carbon while growing to remove a lot of the emissions the power plants produce, and can with filter technology remove the rest to a degree where we'd still be neutral overall. As I see it, we already got all the basic building blocks, and now it's a matter of optimizing them further and further, and more importantly figuring out the development and deployment (including financing, investment incentives, etc) and logistics (building the additional power lines required is a massive, politically-charged, often NIMBY-kind challenge here in Germany, and from what I hear in a lot of other places including the US too). The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
        lazide 5y ago
- russnes 5y ago
  they could mine bitcoin during low demand
- 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
  Shipping from thevoutside of the European Union isn't really relevant after our eastern neighbor decided to invade Ukraine. We were originally planning to ditch domestic peat as fuel, in favor of Russian biofuel, but that's off the table now, and peat will probably be used extensively for a few years until alternatives are in place. Energy independence is what we aim for at the moment. Carbon neutral is still something we aim for in the long run, but not being relianton Russian energy is the primary goal for the next few years.
Sharlin 5y ago
We (Finland) are probably not going to move towards electric heating to any significant degree. Currently direct (resistive) electric is already the most common means of heating in single-family homes and other low-density residential buildings. Heat pumps are fortunately becoming popular especially in new development, and with them a significant reduction of electricity use compared to direct electric. For condos and apartment buildings by far the most common method of heating is district heating (teleheating) [1], and historically this has been very carbon intensive, even though cogeneration of both heat and electricity in one plant is quite efficient (efficiency > 80%; most Finnish thermal power plants are cogen). Fossil fuels and peat are being replaced with more sustainable (mostly wood-based) fuels, but attaining the emission goals requires burning less fuel, period, which means technologies like geothermal boreholes and large-scale heatpump facilities. SMR nuclear reactors, if they ever become mainstream, would be an excellent source of clean heat and electricity for cities. Current nuclear power plants are located (by design) too far from cities for it to be economical to pipe their waste heat to where it's needed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Geothermal boreholes are suddenly much more practical than anybody had guessed, with laser drilling. Its operating cost will necessarily be quite a bit more than solar, but it works in the Arctic winter, 24x7, and provides cogen heat.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Knowing that we have test plant with geothermal and the depth required is 6,4km even with laser drilling the effectiveness might not be so great.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      We will need to wait and see. It might end up cheaper to ship in ammonia synthesized from solar in the tropics. Most likely it will be a combination of several: normally, delivery by transmission line because cheapest, but with geothermal held ready for strategic backup, and stockpiled ammonia for load peaks. Shipping will get cheaper as fuel does, but is already astonishingly cheap.

thriftwy 5y ago

Nuclear plant can provide heating for free. It has to be located in Helsinki, though.

pfdietz 5y ago

Nuclear reactors could modulate their output, but they would take a grievous economic hit if they do so, because most of their costs are fixed, independent of the power setting.

jdavis703 5y ago
Certainly this is cheaper than paying people to buy your electricity (as sometimes happens in California because of solar plants).
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.) In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that discrepancy worse.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Sounds like we could solve this problem for for nuclear the same way we look to solve problems for renewables: storage.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Except if I have batteries, why should I charge them with expensive nuclear energy when I can charge them with cheap renewables? The nuclear plant will be forced to compete with those renewables for this market, which will limit what it can earn with the otherwise curtailed output. This is not as bad as losing it entirely, or even paying for someone to take it, but it's still going to be a net negative for the plant's economics vs. running all out selling at the calculated cost.
      - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        Nuclear has very high capital costs but fuel and operating costs (sans financing and insurance) are relatively cheap. Nuclear energy isn’t expensive if the plant is already built, so if you had to choose and the costs were already sunk, it wouldn’t matter. I guess your point is whether to build the plants in the first place rather than going with other renewables. Since hydro is pretty much tapped out, I guess that would be wind or biofuels?
        ncmncm 5y ago
        Operating cost of nukes is low only compared to coal and oil, and not even to gas. Compared to renewable + storage, nuke operating cost is very, very high.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        My point was that when you calculate the cost/kWh from a nuclear plant, if you then are going to operate than plant only 50% (say) of the time you could otherwise do so, the cost/kWh from that plant goes way up, because those high fixed costs are now amortized over only half the output. Note that even some of the OPERATING costs of a nuclear plant are fixed. You still need about as many staff to run the plant even if you cycle it up and down. The renewables will be wind and PV. Biomass uses too much land area, and would likely be reserved for specialty markets like chemical feedstocks and perhaps aviation fuel.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    Granted, the cost for solar and wind fail to account for the cost of storage to accommodate their intermittency. If your country has hydroelectric dams, then that works. But for the rest that don't have the right geography for hydro, they burn fossil fuels. Nuclear provides a path for decarbonization. Solar and wind do not, until a massive breakthrough in energy storage is invented. And nobody knows when that will happen, or if it will happen.
    - rndgermandude 5y ago
      We don't need massive breakthroughs in energy storage. And the goal is overall carbon-neutral, not carbon-zero. And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal. The latter might become a very important part of the mix, as it would be relatively easy to securely and relatively cheaply deploy a lot of small scale heat pump power plants, requiring fewer massive power line installations, with the added benefit that geo-thermal basically works independent from the time of the day and weather conditions. As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants). Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%. It's also OK to have some carbon emissions if you can manage to have other measures neutralizing that. We can e.g. use renewable biofuels (e.g. wood, biomass from algae or crops) which "use" a lot of carbon while growing to remove a lot of the emissions the power plants produce, and can with filter technology remove the rest to a degree where we'd still be neutral overall. As I see it, we already got all the basic building blocks, and now it's a matter of optimizing them further and further, and more importantly figuring out the development and deployment (including financing, investment incentives, etc) and logistics (building the additional power lines required is a massive, politically-charged, often NIMBY-kind challenge here in Germany, and from what I hear in a lot of other places including the US too). The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
      - lazide 5y ago
russnes 5y ago
they could mine bitcoin during low demand
2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
Shipping from thevoutside of the European Union isn't really relevant after our eastern neighbor decided to invade Ukraine. We were originally planning to ditch domestic peat as fuel, in favor of Russian biofuel, but that's off the table now, and peat will probably be used extensively for a few years until alternatives are in place. Energy independence is what we aim for at the moment. Carbon neutral is still something we aim for in the long run, but not being relianton Russian energy is the primary goal for the next few years.

Sharlin 5y ago

We (Finland) are probably not going to move towards electric heating to any significant degree. Currently direct (resistive) electric is already the most common means of heating in single-family homes and other low-density residential buildings. Heat pumps are fortunately becoming popular especially in new development, and with them a significant reduction of electricity use compared to direct electric. For condos and apartment buildings by far the most common method of heating is district heating (teleheating) [1], and historically this has been very carbon intensive, even though cogeneration of both heat and electricity in one plant is quite efficient (efficiency > 80%; most Finnish thermal power plants are cogen). Fossil fuels and peat are being replaced with more sustainable (mostly wood-based) fuels, but attaining the emission goals requires burning less fuel, period, which means technologies like geothermal boreholes and large-scale heatpump facilities. SMR nuclear reactors, if they ever become mainstream, would be an excellent source of clean heat and electricity for cities. Current nuclear power plants are located (by design) too far from cities for it to be economical to pipe their waste heat to where it's needed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

ncmncm 5y ago
Geothermal boreholes are suddenly much more practical than anybody had guessed, with laser drilling. Its operating cost will necessarily be quite a bit more than solar, but it works in the Arctic winter, 24x7, and provides cogen heat.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Knowing that we have test plant with geothermal and the depth required is 6,4km even with laser drilling the effectiveness might not be so great.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    We will need to wait and see. It might end up cheaper to ship in ammonia synthesized from solar in the tropics. Most likely it will be a combination of several: normally, delivery by transmission line because cheapest, but with geothermal held ready for strategic backup, and stockpiled ammonia for load peaks. Shipping will get cheaper as fuel does, but is already astonishingly cheap.