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> First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Western nuclear power plants alway

• dale_glass 4y ago
  > Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point. Mass production in general is made cheaper by simplifying and cutting corners. Nuclear isn't terribly friendly towards this, you can't just go "How about we use 30% less concrete?" > Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky. > No, we can't. You're missing the point. Here's what I envision: 1. Renewables continue to eat nuclear's lunch 2. Nuclear keeps not getting built 3. Eventually grid destabilizes 4. People want solutions, right now At point 4, nobody is going to sit there and wait 5-10 years for nuclear to be built. Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days? So that's how I see things going. Once the shit hits the fan, urgent solutions will be needed. And pretty much everything is much faster than nuclear. I'm not envisioning some utopic future, but one where problems will be ignored until something goes quite wrong, that's going to suck for a while, then things get hurriedly rectified in a huge rush and at great expense, but that will still favor non-nuclear solutions.
  • Manuel_D 4y ago
    > The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point. Er, no it is the point. We've always been using the safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to affect costs because those safety features have always been there. > Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky. Quite the contrary, it makes it benefit vastly more from economies of scale. For example, one of the central components in a wind turbine is an alternator or dynamo. We make alternators for all kinds of products, so doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely double the market for alternators because wind turbines are only a small segment of the market for alternators. By comparison, nuclear pressure vessels are only used for nuclear power plants. Thus doubling the production of nuclear pressure vessels doubles the market for pressure vessels. Serialized production of nuclear power at scale would easily expand the market for nuclear power components by an order of magnitude. The same cannot be said of wind turbines and alternators. You're missing the context that renewables are currently being used to supplement a primarily fossil fuel grid. This means we don't actually have to accommodate the intermittent nature of renewable production. Once renewables saturate the energy market during peak production, things become a lot harder for renewables. You're comparing apples to oranges when you compare an intermittent source to a non-intermittent source. People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy storage is invented. Which it hasn't. We have geographically-limited options like hydro which are good for the regions that have access to it. But for everywhere else, it's either continue to use fossil fuels or nuclear power. > Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days? How much does it store? Media reports this as "2,000 megawatt seconds" [1]. In other words, 0.55 megawatt hours. This is less electricity than a small nuclear plant produces every minute. To put this in perspective the US alone consumes about 12 TWh (or 12,000,000 MWh) of electricity every day. We'd need tens of millions of these battery facilities. Again, there's a reason why plans for a primary renewable grid assume hydrogen storage, or some new battery chemistry will be a silver bullet for storage. 1. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-begins-providing-inertia-grid-services-at-scale-in-world-first-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...
• cesarb 4y ago
  > Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes, so no such plans are needed. I've seen this argument repeated a lot lately, and it's annoying, because it focuses entirely on the wrong thing. What went wrong with Fukushima was not the earthquake itself, but the flooding caused by it. A lot more places in the world are vulnerable to flooding than they are to earthquakes (I myself live in one of these: zero noticeable earthquakes, a lot of rain-caused flooding and landslides, and next to a nuclear power complex). And AFAIK, all or nearly all nuclear power plants in the world reviewed their backup power systems after Fukushima, to make sure their generators and power switches are not in an area of the plant which could be flooded.
  • Manuel_D 4y ago
    To be more specific, the tsunami caused by it. And without the massive 9.1 earthquake there would have been no tsunami. Flooding from rain or snowmelt is far more gradual.
    • Gwypaas 4y ago
      There has been more near misses in the nuclear industry than tsunamis. After Fukushima about all plants in the west had to install independent core cooling because the regulators realized the risk was systemic, even though the cause was special in the case of Fukushima. A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
      • Manuel_D 4y ago
        And there are plenty of real disasters that were several times deadlier than Chernobyl, yet I doubt most readers have heard of them since they don't involve the term "nuclear" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure Nuclear is one of the safest form of electricity generation, even though plants built before 1980 account for most electricity production. Safety is not an issue with nuclear, when doing a good-faith comparison with other forms of energy production and the continued damage of climate change.
• Kon5ole 4y ago
  >Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. You can't build a building that contains a steam explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the reactor could be made indestructible in the first place. Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima. Such costs could appear at any time, anywhere in the world that has a nuclear reactor. For example due to negligence, acts of war or terrorism. No earthquake required. >Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you essentially need to be able to create an artificial alpine lake True if you want to create it from scratch, but many countries already have lots of hydro that could be increased by adding pumps to existing dams. Other countries can use other methods, like store heat, for example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants generate power even during the night. Or you can generate Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries. There are a number of options, and they all have the benefit of being safe enough and cheap enough that they can be made by anyone anywhere, even at small scale. I personally think that the ease of deployment will be the killer feature for storage, as it was for solar.
  • Manuel_D 4y ago
    > You can't build a building that contains a steam explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the reactor could be made indestructible in the first place. Wrong: we can, and do, build concrete domes that contain a potential steam explosion. The pressure vessel has to connect to steam generators, control rods, and more whereas the secondary containment does not. Furthermore, once the pressure vessel explodes, the water boils off and is no longer being heated by the core. > Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima. Got a source for these claims? Especially the "billions per year still" for Chernobyl? Even the more extreme estimates claim $200B for Fukushima, and much of that is speculative (nowhere near that much has actually been spent). > Other countries can use other methods, like store heat, for example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants generate power even during the night. Or you can generate Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries. Except for solar thermal (which was never cost competitive, and still suffers from intermittency due to weather), all of these things are experimental. Like I said: in order to make intermit energy sources feasible, we need some new form of energy storage that yields order-of-magnitude improvements over existing storage systems. Maybe some of these will be our silver bullet for storage. Maybe not. Most don't want to gamble the future of civilization on the guess that some silver bullet will be found.