4 ms·

I don't understand why we couldn't do both?

pbmonster 3y ago
Renewable and nuclear are not very compatible when they share a grid. For two reasons: * Nuclear requires an extremely expensive initial investment that needs to be recouped. For that to happen, the finished plant needs to make as much electricity as possible. This means ramping down a nuclear plant because the sun is high and there's a steady wind spinning all the turbines at max capacity for the next couple of days makes zero economic sense. This is the reason why nuclear powerplants in the US don't even really have the technical means to reduce their output. They are designed from the get-go to be run at 100% capacity, always. And while this argument holds for all powerplants, the economics of nuclear are cut so close, they risk becoming a net loss at current electricity prices if they are ever forced to throttle down. Even if you run them 60, 70 or 80 years. * Even if you build your reactors in a way that allows them to be run at reduced output (the French did that, you obviously need this capability if your entire grid runs on nuclear), doing so is complicated and requires many reactors to work in concert. The reason for this is technical: if you significantly reduce the output of a nuclear reactor, it poisons its own fuel rods with radio-isotopes that make any significant increase in output impossible for tens of days, sometimes for over a month. So if your nuclear reactors do grid-following, you need 30+ of them to take turns, reducing output one night and recovering for a month afterwards while the other reactors take turns doing the same. The exception to that is of course hydro. Nuclear loves hydro, they complement each other perfectly.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  Interesting! I was unaware of the limitations of scaling down nuclear reactors. I had never considered that a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something? I wonder if the new modular reactors allow to better micro-manage the amount of capacity you are adding to any grid.
  - pbmonster 3y ago
    > a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something It's more complicated than that. Let's say you have just one reactor powering one city, nothing else. What happens as everyone goes to bed and turns of their appliances? The number of consumers goes down and the amount of electrical power consumed drops. What does that mean in terms of the electrical circuit between the city and the steam turbine? The electrical current drawn by the city decreases. Less current flowing out of the generator connected to the turbine means there is less back-action pushing against the turbine shaft. But the reactor is still producing the same amount of heat/steam - which means the turbine immediately speeds up. Because the turbine is spinning faster, the generator is now spinning faster, so the AC power is not 60Hz anymore but also increasing. With higher RPM on the generator, the voltage also increases. So the city now gets higher frequency at higher voltage. Both are very bad. Long before the frequency reaches 60.1 Hz, grid operators would normally switch on storage facilities or drop powerplants that can easily just shut down (all renewables and fast cycling natural gas turbines can throttle down or just go offline in seconds, but the other fossil fuel plants and nukes take hours). If you can't do that, you need to dump large amounts of power in other ways. And that's not easy. There are load resistors, that just turn electricity into heat. But you can easily burn those with a gigawatt plant, its not easy to get rid of a couple of unwanted megawatt. In theory you could also vent steam before the turbine to prevent it from accelerating. Just turn more of the nuclear energy into waste heat instead of electricity. But that's a really bad idea in a nuclear reactor, because you need to keep the reactor cool at all costs and messing with where the heat flows seriously threatens not enough heat flowing away from the primary cooling cycle - after all, this entire thing is designed for around 30% of the energy flowing to the generator. So doing something like that would mean engaging the emergency systems of the reactor.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
That's because nuclear is really expensive and you'd have to sell an arm and a leg to get enough of it to matter. Which is a hard sell to people. Renewables on the other hand are so profitable that investments in that are overtaking oil. They are so cheap that people are spending their own money to put it on their roofs in order to lower their energy bills. Even in places that don't get a whole lot of sun throughout the year. So, there's a widening gap between nuclear and renewables that is investment and cost driven. To fix that, cost for nuclear has to come down by quite a large factor. Most current nuclear projects don't have the right level of ambition on this front. Which is why there just isn't a whole lot happening there. People keep trying to phrase this in ideological terms when it's a simple economical issue. Nuclear cost needs to come down by an order of magnitude or so for it to start competing. More actually as that would be just about catching up with the current state of the art in renewables. Assuming that won't drop further would be a very bad assumption.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  While I understand there are real economic considerations, I think if we tie the success of renewables to pure profitability we are doomed. Why does it need to be profitable? I don't see why a reactor could not be state run, and the "cost" of the electricity is used to payoff some portion of the reactor. Another portion of a defense budget could be used to offset the rest, as making your country energy independent really is a security benefit. The cost will never go down if we don't start increasing investments in the industry itself. If economics weren't an issue would you find nuclear a better solution than other renewables?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    If economics isn't an issue renewables solve the problem. Why the atom splitting fetish?
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    The economics are tied to risk and reward. They capture the realities of nuclear just not being that great as it's advertised to be. So, no. The economics are poor because it really is that bad. My view is that some portion of should be invested on the off chance that the economics might improve if we do. But we should not bet our entire future on that happening any time soon. Balance risk and reward basically. I would say that's more than fairly covered by current budgets and I see no need to burn much more than that. And what we do there could probably be allocated more wisely. For example building more really expensive reactors seems like a waste of both time and money here. You get more energy for less $ with renewables. Given 5 GW of nuclear or 30 or so of renewables, I'll have some renewables. Easy choice. Also for the people that invest in these sort of things apparently. Nuclear is a hard sell to institutional investors. Basically it can't be done without tax payer money right now. Renewables are very easy to finance; even without subsidies.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
You can do whatever you want. But if one source of power is 10x more expensive than the other, you don't have a business model.

Renewable and nuclear are not very compatible when they share a grid. For two reasons: * Nuclear requires an extremely expensive initial investment that needs to be recouped. For that to happen, the finished plant needs to make as much electricity as possible. This means ramping down a nuclear plant because the sun is high and there's a steady wind spinning all the turbines at max capacity for the next couple of days makes zero economic sense. This is the reason why nuclear powerplants in the US don't even really have the technical means to reduce their output. They are designed from the get-go to be run at 100% capacity, always. And while this argument holds for all powerplants, the economics of nuclear are cut so close, they risk becoming a net loss at current electricity prices if they are ever forced to throttle down. Even if you run them 60, 70 or 80 years. * Even if you build your reactors in a way that allows them to be run at reduced output (the French did that, you obviously need this capability if your entire grid runs on nuclear), doing so is complicated and requires many reactors to work in concert. The reason for this is technical: if you significantly reduce the output of a nuclear reactor, it poisons its own fuel rods with radio-isotopes that make any significant increase in output impossible for tens of days, sometimes for over a month. So if your nuclear reactors do grid-following, you need 30+ of them to take turns, reducing output one night and recovering for a month afterwards while the other reactors take turns doing the same. The exception to that is of course hydro. Nuclear loves hydro, they complement each other perfectly.

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
Interesting! I was unaware of the limitations of scaling down nuclear reactors. I had never considered that a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something? I wonder if the new modular reactors allow to better micro-manage the amount of capacity you are adding to any grid.
- pbmonster 3y ago
  > a surplus of energy is actually a "bad thing" but I suppose without the means to store it its just useless work, or am I missing something It's more complicated than that. Let's say you have just one reactor powering one city, nothing else. What happens as everyone goes to bed and turns of their appliances? The number of consumers goes down and the amount of electrical power consumed drops. What does that mean in terms of the electrical circuit between the city and the steam turbine? The electrical current drawn by the city decreases. Less current flowing out of the generator connected to the turbine means there is less back-action pushing against the turbine shaft. But the reactor is still producing the same amount of heat/steam - which means the turbine immediately speeds up. Because the turbine is spinning faster, the generator is now spinning faster, so the AC power is not 60Hz anymore but also increasing. With higher RPM on the generator, the voltage also increases. So the city now gets higher frequency at higher voltage. Both are very bad. Long before the frequency reaches 60.1 Hz, grid operators would normally switch on storage facilities or drop powerplants that can easily just shut down (all renewables and fast cycling natural gas turbines can throttle down or just go offline in seconds, but the other fossil fuel plants and nukes take hours). If you can't do that, you need to dump large amounts of power in other ways. And that's not easy. There are load resistors, that just turn electricity into heat. But you can easily burn those with a gigawatt plant, its not easy to get rid of a couple of unwanted megawatt. In theory you could also vent steam before the turbine to prevent it from accelerating. Just turn more of the nuclear energy into waste heat instead of electricity. But that's a really bad idea in a nuclear reactor, because you need to keep the reactor cool at all costs and messing with where the heat flows seriously threatens not enough heat flowing away from the primary cooling cycle - after all, this entire thing is designed for around 30% of the energy flowing to the generator. So doing something like that would mean engaging the emergency systems of the reactor.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

That's because nuclear is really expensive and you'd have to sell an arm and a leg to get enough of it to matter. Which is a hard sell to people. Renewables on the other hand are so profitable that investments in that are overtaking oil. They are so cheap that people are spending their own money to put it on their roofs in order to lower their energy bills. Even in places that don't get a whole lot of sun throughout the year. So, there's a widening gap between nuclear and renewables that is investment and cost driven. To fix that, cost for nuclear has to come down by quite a large factor. Most current nuclear projects don't have the right level of ambition on this front. Which is why there just isn't a whole lot happening there. People keep trying to phrase this in ideological terms when it's a simple economical issue. Nuclear cost needs to come down by an order of magnitude or so for it to start competing. More actually as that would be just about catching up with the current state of the art in renewables. Assuming that won't drop further would be a very bad assumption.

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
While I understand there are real economic considerations, I think if we tie the success of renewables to pure profitability we are doomed. Why does it need to be profitable? I don't see why a reactor could not be state run, and the "cost" of the electricity is used to payoff some portion of the reactor. Another portion of a defense budget could be used to offset the rest, as making your country energy independent really is a security benefit. The cost will never go down if we don't start increasing investments in the industry itself. If economics weren't an issue would you find nuclear a better solution than other renewables?
- pfdietz 3y ago
  If economics isn't an issue renewables solve the problem. Why the atom splitting fetish?
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  The economics are tied to risk and reward. They capture the realities of nuclear just not being that great as it's advertised to be. So, no. The economics are poor because it really is that bad. My view is that some portion of should be invested on the off chance that the economics might improve if we do. But we should not bet our entire future on that happening any time soon. Balance risk and reward basically. I would say that's more than fairly covered by current budgets and I see no need to burn much more than that. And what we do there could probably be allocated more wisely. For example building more really expensive reactors seems like a waste of both time and money here. You get more energy for less $ with renewables. Given 5 GW of nuclear or 30 or so of renewables, I'll have some renewables. Easy choice. Also for the people that invest in these sort of things apparently. Nuclear is a hard sell to institutional investors. Basically it can't be done without tax payer money right now. Renewables are very easy to finance; even without subsidies.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

You can do whatever you want. But if one source of power is 10x more expensive than the other, you don't have a business model.