9 ms·

Now if only we could get more reactors built. According to the New York Times, Diablo Canyon provides 9% of California's electricity[1]. It astounds me that a s

by S201 4y ago

Now if only we could get more reactors built. According to the New York Times, Diablo Canyon provides 9% of California's electricity[1]. It astounds me that a single generating station like that can provide a whopping 9% of California's electricity. Assuming the same capacity, four more stations would take it to 45%. That's nearly half of your electricity for a state as large as California from a stable, reliable, and clean(-er than fossil fuels) source that drops into the existing grid. I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/climate/california-lawmakers-climate-legislation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/climate/california-lawmak...

panick21_ 4y ago
Diablo Canyon was supposed to be far larger then it ended up being. Would have been amazing. > I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors. I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar. Do you just want your power supply to be less reliable and have a massive dependency of storage? If you have nuclear, why would you ever go of it? There is no reason what so ever to do so. Even fusion will not replace fission. Nuclear fission is the cheapest possible energy by in a first principles analysis (except maybe some Aneutronic fusion maybe but we can't really even analyise what that would be).
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  Doesn’t that depend on how cheap fusion may eventually get though?
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Well we can only speculated, but if you really think threw it, there is no reason what so ever that fusion should be cheaper. Maybe Aneutronic fusion but we are not even close enough to that do an even estimation. Lets go threw the major costs of a power plant. - Building the primary plant - Operations in form of maintenance and salary. - Fuel cost (including transportation and so on) Now lets start with fuel cost. If we are talking about an advanced breeder fission reactor, thorium or natural uranium is basically free. Thorium is a waste product of Rare Earth mining, we have far more then we could ever use already. This material needs to be devolved into some salt. Fusion on the other hand will need to breed its fuel. That would basically require to mine lithium and then circulate it around an already existing fusion reactor. That possible but doesn't sound exactly cheap, it would be an incredibly complex process. So on fuel cost, fission wins pretty clearly. In terms of building the plant, if you look at some basic assumptions about a bill of materials, its pretty clear as well. Many advanced fission reactors are not much more then a big bucket of some sort of steel alloy (stainless steal or some sort of nickel alloy). Not more complex then many advanced materials used in airplane or rocket construction. Its more of an issue with qualification then production. Inside of that bucket you are gone have some graphite tubes or some other metal tubes. That bucket is likely filled with some molten salt, not so much different from molten toothpaste. Now compare this to a containment facility that needs to literally contain the heat a small sun. Not only do you need a magnetic containment that consists of large of highly advanced materials but you also need a physical material that can be blasted by a small sun. What's cheaper to build, a bucket full of hot toothpaste or a complex shaped object that contains a small sun? In terms of operations, a modern load following breeder needs very little refueling. Depending on the exact design you might even just continuously refuel and all you would have to do is dump some additional thorium into the salt. In some designs you need a crane to shuffle around fuel tubes every so often. Not sure how commercial operation of a fusion reactor would exactly work and how automated you could do all of that. I don't think we have enough information to really estimate that. However its hart to see how much easier it would be then a fission reactor. So I think in all major cost aspects, fission looks better. The real advantage of fusion is 3 order of magnitude higher density. But fission fuel is essentially free and dense enough that transporting it is absolute non issue, so not sure how increase density really helps fusion. So I'm not against fusion research, I think its great. But we need to do research, not obsess about trying to build commercial fusion power.
- S201 4y ago
  > I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar. A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background), there are only ~230 years of uranium available.[1] And that's at today's consumption rates; build the amount of reactors we need and it's even less. Maybe we'd find more or maybe there's some other fissile material to use (thorium?). I'm not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to be honest, but it is finite on some timeline. Whereas wind and solar will last as long as the sun lasts. Aside from that, there's always the small risk of malfunctions and nuclear proliferation. Even with newer tech that could greatly limit the possibility of accidents to near zero (it's already absurdly low) there's still the constant need of water for cooling and geopolitical issues causing problems like what is happening right now with the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine. That's why I say it's not perfect but that it does serve an incredibly important purpose in the near term to dramatically lower CO2 emissions and buy time to either deploy more wind & solar, extend the life of nuclear, or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg. Exactly how that looks would likely be a question for our children to answer. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Today's nuclear reactors only extract about 2% of the energy in natural uranium, fast reactors could extract many times more by producing Pu239 and other fissile actinides from relatively abundant U238. Since uranium is water soluble there are large amounts in the ocean and if fast reactors were made economical it would be practical to extract from seawater, seawater uranium is a renewable resource because uranium is always eroding from rocks and making its way to the ocean by rivers. Thorium breeders do the same thing as plutonium breeders by converting Th232 to U233 except they can do it with a thermal spectrum. It's not so clear if terrestrial Th or U is really more abundant but Th is not in seawater because, like Pu it is not water soluble.
    - S201 4y ago
      Thanks for the info. I figured there was more to it than that and there were ways to extract more fuel.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Wind and solar have their benefits. I think it's always good to have a diverse supply. It's a common misconception that you have to run nuclear power plants at 100% output all the time. That was true in 1970 but newer plants can adjust their output to meet demand, some even do so on a continuous basis to stabilize the frequency of the electric grid. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12... The resulting changes in temperature put some stress on the parts of the reactor because of thermal expansion but it is something the reactor can be built to tolerate.
- tomatotomato37 4y ago
  I don't know where the idea of nuclear being cheap comes from. Yes, the fuel is miniscule and relatively cheap, but all it does is get far hotter than any type of coal or gas boiler would. You still need a heat engine on the higher tech end of material science to turn that heat into usable energy. And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling system to cover the difference between the dynamic grid load and a reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days. That doesn't mean nuclear is a bad thing, especially when you consider the externalities and production costs of other systems. It's just not a miracle electricity device. Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    If you do a first principles analysis of the amount of material required and the complexity of the plant, nuclear looks really good. The turbine you use to turn heat into power can be the same as the one uses for commercial gas. Nuclear is not actually hotter. Current PWR are actually cooler then Gas/Coal plant (and that's part of why they are so expensive). Most high temperature nuclear reactors will run at comparable temperatures to gas plants, around 600C. I don't know much about gas plants so correct me if they run at lower temps. > higher tech end of material science High temperature doesn't necessary use high tech. Depending on the design, the main containment vessel can be pretty ordinary stainless steal. And the same can be said for airplanes, cars or rockets. They use high tech, but if you do it correctly and you build more then 1, it can still be cheap for the end user. > And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling system High temperature reactors don't need huge cooling systems. The huge size of PWR is mostly related to its absurdly large steam cooling systems, but all of that wouldn't exist in a modern reactor. > reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days. Again, you are drawing conclusions from current reactor designs that were fundamentally designed in the 1960s to power submarines. Modern reactor designs can have very good load following capability. Specially if you make that a goal of the reactor design. A good reactor design is fundamentally load following, if you pull more energy it will produce more. > It's just not a miracle electricity device. I would sort-of disagree. I would suggest that most miracles (walking on water) are not as amazing as the discovery of a material that has many orders of magnitude higher energy density and the a device that has the ability to harness that. Of course its not a divine miracle but given a world that is powered by coal, finding uranium/thorium is basically a miracle. A nuclear reactor like we could build it if we do 5-10 more design iteration would be one of the closes things to a miracle device that we use. > Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination Yes, very much so. If you look at the live of Alvin Weinberg one of pioneers of the nuclear age and the inventor of both the PWR and the Molten Salt reactor. His vision was far beyond just power generation. He had a whole vision of society driven by nuclear plants, nuclear desalination was on of them. I not sure if he talked about synthetic fuel or not. You could even imagine having a nuclear reactor per city super-block and then using solar salt to circulate the heating rather then using electrical heaters. But to get to these applications we need to build on the currently existing market.
- abc_lisper 4y ago
  Nuclear is way more expensive than other renewables and even gas. It takes a long time to build too. What no one seems to be exploring is creating a world wide array of solar panels so that everyone has power when they need it. Atleast US, Africa, India and Europe could do it together. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK... Edit: Hell, US alone could do and get over peak demand in the evenings by having panel array spread all over the country.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    That is drawing short side conclusions from limited data drawn from a world that has per-selected against nuclear. If you look at the energy need of the whole world, and from first principle try to figure out what is the best way to generate enough power for the whole world to live a first world live-style, nuclear is by far the winner. And the result will be system far more reliable and robust compared to one built with solar/wind/storage and long distance transportation.
  - toast0 4y ago
    Where is there significant sunlight to harness when California panels are going into evening?
    - abc_lisper 4y ago
      Yeah.. they have to be in Hawaii..
    - ac29 4y ago
      Japan? New Zealand? The intercontinental cables would be expensive but have less loss than I would have thought.
      - remarkEon 4y ago
        It seems to me to be peak shortsightedness to argue in favor of connecting energy grids in that manner, when we're seeing the failure modes of doing so right now in Europe as a result of the Ukraine war.

by S201 4y ago

panick21_ 4y ago

Diablo Canyon was supposed to be far larger then it ended up being. Would have been amazing. > I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors. I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar. Do you just want your power supply to be less reliable and have a massive dependency of storage? If you have nuclear, why would you ever go of it? There is no reason what so ever to do so. Even fusion will not replace fission. Nuclear fission is the cheapest possible energy by in a first principles analysis (except maybe some Aneutronic fusion maybe but we can't really even analyise what that would be).

throwaway5959 4y ago
Doesn’t that depend on how cheap fusion may eventually get though?
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Well we can only speculated, but if you really think threw it, there is no reason what so ever that fusion should be cheaper. Maybe Aneutronic fusion but we are not even close enough to that do an even estimation. Lets go threw the major costs of a power plant. - Building the primary plant - Operations in form of maintenance and salary. - Fuel cost (including transportation and so on) Now lets start with fuel cost. If we are talking about an advanced breeder fission reactor, thorium or natural uranium is basically free. Thorium is a waste product of Rare Earth mining, we have far more then we could ever use already. This material needs to be devolved into some salt. Fusion on the other hand will need to breed its fuel. That would basically require to mine lithium and then circulate it around an already existing fusion reactor. That possible but doesn't sound exactly cheap, it would be an incredibly complex process. So on fuel cost, fission wins pretty clearly. In terms of building the plant, if you look at some basic assumptions about a bill of materials, its pretty clear as well. Many advanced fission reactors are not much more then a big bucket of some sort of steel alloy (stainless steal or some sort of nickel alloy). Not more complex then many advanced materials used in airplane or rocket construction. Its more of an issue with qualification then production. Inside of that bucket you are gone have some graphite tubes or some other metal tubes. That bucket is likely filled with some molten salt, not so much different from molten toothpaste. Now compare this to a containment facility that needs to literally contain the heat a small sun. Not only do you need a magnetic containment that consists of large of highly advanced materials but you also need a physical material that can be blasted by a small sun. What's cheaper to build, a bucket full of hot toothpaste or a complex shaped object that contains a small sun? In terms of operations, a modern load following breeder needs very little refueling. Depending on the exact design you might even just continuously refuel and all you would have to do is dump some additional thorium into the salt. In some designs you need a crane to shuffle around fuel tubes every so often. Not sure how commercial operation of a fusion reactor would exactly work and how automated you could do all of that. I don't think we have enough information to really estimate that. However its hart to see how much easier it would be then a fission reactor. So I think in all major cost aspects, fission looks better. The real advantage of fusion is 3 order of magnitude higher density. But fission fuel is essentially free and dense enough that transporting it is absolute non issue, so not sure how increase density really helps fusion. So I'm not against fusion research, I think its great. But we need to do research, not obsess about trying to build commercial fusion power.
S201 4y ago
> I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar. A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background), there are only ~230 years of uranium available.[1] And that's at today's consumption rates; build the amount of reactors we need and it's even less. Maybe we'd find more or maybe there's some other fissile material to use (thorium?). I'm not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to be honest, but it is finite on some timeline. Whereas wind and solar will last as long as the sun lasts. Aside from that, there's always the small risk of malfunctions and nuclear proliferation. Even with newer tech that could greatly limit the possibility of accidents to near zero (it's already absurdly low) there's still the constant need of water for cooling and geopolitical issues causing problems like what is happening right now with the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine. That's why I say it's not perfect but that it does serve an incredibly important purpose in the near term to dramatically lower CO2 emissions and buy time to either deploy more wind & solar, extend the life of nuclear, or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg. Exactly how that looks would likely be a question for our children to answer. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Today's nuclear reactors only extract about 2% of the energy in natural uranium, fast reactors could extract many times more by producing Pu239 and other fissile actinides from relatively abundant U238. Since uranium is water soluble there are large amounts in the ocean and if fast reactors were made economical it would be practical to extract from seawater, seawater uranium is a renewable resource because uranium is always eroding from rocks and making its way to the ocean by rivers. Thorium breeders do the same thing as plutonium breeders by converting Th232 to U233 except they can do it with a thermal spectrum. It's not so clear if terrestrial Th or U is really more abundant but Th is not in seawater because, like Pu it is not water soluble.
  - S201 4y ago
    Thanks for the info. I figured there was more to it than that and there were ways to extract more fuel.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Wind and solar have their benefits. I think it's always good to have a diverse supply. It's a common misconception that you have to run nuclear power plants at 100% output all the time. That was true in 1970 but newer plants can adjust their output to meet demand, some even do so on a continuous basis to stabilize the frequency of the electric grid. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12... The resulting changes in temperature put some stress on the parts of the reactor because of thermal expansion but it is something the reactor can be built to tolerate.
tomatotomato37 4y ago
I don't know where the idea of nuclear being cheap comes from. Yes, the fuel is miniscule and relatively cheap, but all it does is get far hotter than any type of coal or gas boiler would. You still need a heat engine on the higher tech end of material science to turn that heat into usable energy. And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling system to cover the difference between the dynamic grid load and a reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days. That doesn't mean nuclear is a bad thing, especially when you consider the externalities and production costs of other systems. It's just not a miracle electricity device. Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination
- panick21_ 4y ago
  If you do a first principles analysis of the amount of material required and the complexity of the plant, nuclear looks really good. The turbine you use to turn heat into power can be the same as the one uses for commercial gas. Nuclear is not actually hotter. Current PWR are actually cooler then Gas/Coal plant (and that's part of why they are so expensive). Most high temperature nuclear reactors will run at comparable temperatures to gas plants, around 600C. I don't know much about gas plants so correct me if they run at lower temps. > higher tech end of material science High temperature doesn't necessary use high tech. Depending on the design, the main containment vessel can be pretty ordinary stainless steal. And the same can be said for airplanes, cars or rockets. They use high tech, but if you do it correctly and you build more then 1, it can still be cheap for the end user. > And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling system High temperature reactors don't need huge cooling systems. The huge size of PWR is mostly related to its absurdly large steam cooling systems, but all of that wouldn't exist in a modern reactor. > reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days. Again, you are drawing conclusions from current reactor designs that were fundamentally designed in the 1960s to power submarines. Modern reactor designs can have very good load following capability. Specially if you make that a goal of the reactor design. A good reactor design is fundamentally load following, if you pull more energy it will produce more. > It's just not a miracle electricity device. I would sort-of disagree. I would suggest that most miracles (walking on water) are not as amazing as the discovery of a material that has many orders of magnitude higher energy density and the a device that has the ability to harness that. Of course its not a divine miracle but given a world that is powered by coal, finding uranium/thorium is basically a miracle. A nuclear reactor like we could build it if we do 5-10 more design iteration would be one of the closes things to a miracle device that we use. > Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need heat, like desalination Yes, very much so. If you look at the live of Alvin Weinberg one of pioneers of the nuclear age and the inventor of both the PWR and the Molten Salt reactor. His vision was far beyond just power generation. He had a whole vision of society driven by nuclear plants, nuclear desalination was on of them. I not sure if he talked about synthetic fuel or not. You could even imagine having a nuclear reactor per city super-block and then using solar salt to circulate the heating rather then using electrical heaters. But to get to these applications we need to build on the currently existing market.
abc_lisper 4y ago
Nuclear is way more expensive than other renewables and even gas. It takes a long time to build too. What no one seems to be exploring is creating a world wide array of solar panels so that everyone has power when they need it. Atleast US, Africa, India and Europe could do it together. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK... Edit: Hell, US alone could do and get over peak demand in the evenings by having panel array spread all over the country.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  That is drawing short side conclusions from limited data drawn from a world that has per-selected against nuclear. If you look at the energy need of the whole world, and from first principle try to figure out what is the best way to generate enough power for the whole world to live a first world live-style, nuclear is by far the winner. And the result will be system far more reliable and robust compared to one built with solar/wind/storage and long distance transportation.
- toast0 4y ago
  Where is there significant sunlight to harness when California panels are going into evening?
  - abc_lisper 4y ago
    Yeah.. they have to be in Hawaii..
  - ac29 4y ago
    Japan? New Zealand? The intercontinental cables would be expensive but have less loss than I would have thought.
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      It seems to me to be peak shortsightedness to argue in favor of connecting energy grids in that manner, when we're seeing the failure modes of doing so right now in Europe as a result of the Ukraine war.