8 ms·

How to scale nuclear power

40 points by jseliger 3y ago

tuatoru 3y ago
Nuclear power only ever existed because of the military applications of the technology. In 1950, if you were a Great Power and wanted to remain one, you had to have nuclear technology tout de suite. Electricity generation was a sop to pacify the masses. There were all sorts of overt and covert subsidies. Nuclear power only continues to exist for those military applications. Back in 2008 or so China had an ambitious policy to grow its nuclear fleet about twentyfold in the next two five-year plans. Last I looked, they had only nearly doubled their fleet and the rate of growth is utterly anemic compared to growth of PV and wind. If China can't do it, with its ability to ride roughshod over everybody and anybody, why would things be better here?
RandomLensman 3y ago
Having a more efficient process to access highly-enriched Uranium? Is it really desirable to have much more at least weapons-capable material out in the wild? Also, interesting to see them go all in on a big future with retro-tech.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Weapons and safety concerns are pretty minimal concerned to basic viability of the tech, I think. Steam generation for electricity is mostly a dead end, IMHO. Being attached to it is like saying that typewriters have been the backbone of business communication for a century, so we had better invest big in them for the future.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    So far very little civil use of HEU outside of research reactors and quite a bit of control around it around the world from the non-proliferation treaty.
- ortusdux 3y ago
  Uranium extraction from seawater looks quite promising. I spoke with some researchers a few years back that were able to demonstrate the ability to produce yellowcake at $200/lb. The current market price is $70/lb, but the actual cost of the uranium is such a small piece of the pie that paying 3x for a domestic, non-mining source makes sense. The initial research was done in rather cold seawater, but they did demonstrate that the process was faster with warm water. Last I heard, they were working on testing the viability of post-filtering hot brine from desalination plants, which should be much more efficent.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Still need to enrich then. Right now there is surplus of HEU from nuclear disarmament but it wasn't cheap to create it.
epistasis 3y ago
Pretty disappointing! It eventually does get around to finding the right critique: > the success of nuclear power is much more about project management, financing, and policy than it is cutting-edge engineering or safety. But suppose you optimize the hell out of that, then what do you get? Maybe, just maybe back to 1960s costs, at the very best. That's not good enough. We need more advanced tech that delivers energy more cheaply. Defining "efficiency" as MWh/acre is just plain silly, and greatly reduces the credibility of the article. What a useless metric, unrelated to economics, that shows a gaping hole in the analysis. Its just boosterism because except for the useless metric, there's nothing appealing about nuclear as a power generation tech, in its current forms. Given a bet between Web3 and nuclear as foundational future techs, would pick Web3 in a heart beat, and let me tell you just how little I believed that silly pitch when a16z was making it... much less now!
littlestymaar 3y ago
> We’ve also gotten very good at operating reactors without incident, increasing our capacity factor, or uptime, to more than 90% (France is only around 75%). Mandatory nick-picking from a chauvinist French: France is “only” around 70+% because we do use nuclear for much more than just base production, and modulate the production to fit the demand variation, not because Americans operators are somehow better ;). Also, unsurprisingly from A16Z they put most of the blame on regulation, but the main reason why nuclear is costly today is because there's barely an industry around it and there's no mass production. And unsurprisingly, custom built one-shot stuff cost much more than serial production.
- johnzim 3y ago
  It's pretty hard to have an industry with the weight of current regulation - not just in terms of how much scrutiny fission receives compared to technologies we _know kill people at an alarming rate_, such as fossil fuel combustion, but also in regulating something that was still relatively new technology the same way that we regulated other energy generation. At least with smaller reactors it's more feasible to get operating data and be on a path to economies of scale. The US now has a second chance to get it right, and the US can always be counted on to do the right thing, after exhausting every other alternative.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    The railway and aeronautics industry have regulation constraints that aren't that far to what nuclear has[1], without preventing the industry to thrive. The worst thing that can ever happen to the nuclear industry would be another catastrophic incident (even one with almost no casualty like Fukushima) so I think taking safety extremely seriously is the only thing that nuclear energy can afford. [1]: My wife work in nuclear engineering, and I did work for the rail industry for some time. It's not exactly the same, but it's also not that different compared to other regulated industries, like healthcare for instance, where it's full YOLO compare to both of the above.
- vitorbaptistaa 3y ago
  > they put most of the blame on regulation, but the main reason why nuclear is costly today is because there's barely an industry around it and there's no mass production. Isn't that because of regulation (which was put in place in part because the population demanded it)?
joak 3y ago
The first sentence «Nearly all of our electricity is generated from heat powering a steam turbine» just explains why nuclear cannot scale: thermal power (including nuclear fission) needs huge amounts of water to cool down the turbine. The thermodynamic cycle needs a hot source and cold source. This is already a limitation, and France has to stop reactors in summer due to this problem.
- kittiepryde 3y ago
  Should we shut down all efforts to generate power that uses heat, steam, and turbines?
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Yes. Even the steam turbine bit alone will make it unable to compete on price with renewables. This is why fusion projects are looking for ways to directly generate electricity. If they run steam turbines they've lost before they even start.
- puppetmaster 3y ago
  Yes, thermal power plants need a cold and hot end to operate, and they are designed to operate within the thermal "range" that its location can provide + some error. Now, this is not really a limitation, rather an engineering constraint. Thermal cycles can be stretched with multiple devices such a HRSG, in the case of combined cycles. About powerplants in France shutting down because of cooling during the summer... I find it hard to believe this is a widespread issue, if an issue at all. Many of the existing nuclear reactors are reaching an age where massive maintenance schedules need to be executed. If the problem is extending the thermal range, that's relatively easy to fix. Source: I used to build powerplants.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    I think the issue is more not killing everything in the river the warmer water is released back into, so the temperature differential becomes unworkable at certain intake temperatures.
hrldcpr 3y ago
In case anyone else was wondering, the "MWh/acre" stats near the beginning are per year. Here they are converted to units that I find more meaningful: "...a nuclear power plant can generate over 6,507 kW/acre compared to solar at 23 kW/acre, or a natural gas plant at 114 kW/acre."
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  What an absolutely meaningless metric for power generation in one of the largest countries on earth by land area.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    Indeed: agrivoltaics is under active R&D. Initial results seem to indicate that in dry areas PV can actually increase crop yields while reducing irrigation demand. So in effect it has a negative land requirement in those places.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    It's the one stat which makes nuclear look good, so of course it's mentioned as if it has any relevance whatsoever.
bananapub 3y ago
does it somehow involve having to pay middlemen that can create a permanent position? or does it involve people investing in currently non-existent "modular" reactors?
blauditore 3y ago
> Nearly all of our electricity is generated from heat powering a steam turbine. [citation needed] I know it's almost a meme now, but not really true. Basically anything renewable doesn't work like that, including hydropower, which makes up a large portion in certain regions.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  You can argue about what percentage "Nearly all" is, but 80% of the power in the US is a steam turbine. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... Hydropower is basically the same thing, the steam has just condensed already.
  - blauditore 3y ago
    So "our" in this case means "USA's". The blog post clearly claims to address global energy questions, but indeed doesn't. > Hydropower is basically the same thing, the steam has just condensed already. I hope you're kidding.
- weaksauce 3y ago
  https://www.epa.gov/energy/about-us-electricity-system-and-its-impact-environment https://www.epa.gov/energy/about-us-electricity-system-and-i... 86% is nearly all to be fair(edit as of 2017)... not 99% nearly all but it's well more than half.
  - blauditore 3y ago
    That's just the US; the post makes it sound like it's globally true.
- jccooper 3y ago
  US energy mix is 60% fossil, 18% nuclear, and 1% biomass, which are all basically steam turbine. The remaining 20% is "renewables", about half wind. World mix is similar. Is 80% "nearly all"? Dunno, that's semantic. But it's a pretty high percentage.
23B1 3y ago
I'd love to read a better article on this topic from someone more trustworthy than a16z.
taylodl 3y ago
Alright. Since I work for one of America's largest utilities I'm going to point out something that apparently isn't all that popular to say: We have plenty of energy already The entirety of our generation capacity is aimed at delivering energy during peak use, which is 8 hours per day. That is 1/3 of the day. The other 1/3 of the day is much less energy intensive, and the final 1/3 hardly registers in comparison. Coal plants can't be powered down so if they're generating too much then the excess is sent to ground. Literally, we spend 1/3 of the day pumping energy into the ground. Ditto for today's nuclear power plants. Yet people keep saying we don't have enough energy. What we don't have is two things: 1. A distribution system capable of handling 24/7 load. The lines feeding your neighborhood were never meant to be run 24/7 and the equipment is undersized to cool down properly. You need to upgrade so they don't overheat and cause problems. Remember, they're only meant to be run hard for 8 hours per day and they're used to not being used much at night so they can cool down in the cool night air. More nuclear generation isn't goin to do squat about that problem. 2. Smart load management. Yes, industry can't shift load as much - but residences can. Don't charge your EV while you're using your oven. Things like that. Collectively there's plenty of power to power everything you need - we just need to be a little smarter in scheduling that power. You need to manage your peak rate. We need smart plugs that shut of when you've reached your peak usage rate. Shut off the EV, shut off the electric water heater - you should be able to program what you want done and get alerts that you're going over your peak load. Load management needs to be part of our lexicon. Continuing to do what we've been doing is not the path forward.
- puppetmaster 3y ago
  Exactly this. And as additional food for thought... How many outages can anyone remember that were caused because of lack of generation capacity?
  - piperswe 3y ago
    I (and other Texans) can remember plenty!
    - taylodl 3y ago
joak 3y ago
«The tides are turning in favor of nuclear energy» in their dreams... PV costs are falling exponentially (-10% per year) while nuclear costs remain at best constant. If you decide today to build a reactor it will be ready in 10-20 years (don't be in the hurry). By the time it start producing it will be competing with plenty of cheaper renewables. During its lifetime (50 years) it will have plenty of time to become obsolete and so expensive. It's like buying a Cray I in the 1980s and get delivered in 2000 just to find that a gaming console has more power than your mammoth computer but at a fraction of the cost. Nuclear is completely doomed.
- abfan1127 3y ago
  are you comparing PV, or PV + Battery storage?
  - crote 3y ago
    PV+storage is already cheaper than nuclear.
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      I would love to see the numbers for this for an existing commercial installation of grid scale. Everywhere I've looked, sufficiently inexpensive storage is either theoretical or using some tech nobody has really built out en masse before. I know there's a few desert installs that do well, but the best places for solar tend to also be the least populated.
  - joak 3y ago
    Batteries costs and PV costs are both dropping exponentially. So it doesn't matter much. Once batteries are everywhere who cares when the electricity is produced. Hey btw Vermont Utility plans to installs battery storage at customers' homes because it cheaper than updating the grid https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-home-batteries.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environme...
- ETHisso2017 3y ago
worik 3y ago
No amount of hand waving can get past the fact that all forms of nuclear energy in use these days generates long term waste that must be stored for a very long time. The time-scale is so long that there are no geological formations that last that long For the entire period the waste must be monitored to ensure that it does not come into contact with humans, whom it will make very sick. The waste does not look, taste or smell poisonous so some sort of warning sign has to be placed on it. That sign must be readable over a time scale many times longer than we have had writing. What selfishness. Making the next thousand generations pay for our current consumption. The most expensive energy possible to imagine. But because it is not our generation, but the next thousand generations (plus) that pay the bill.... Golly.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  We could hand wave around fuel cycles that would reduce the amount of concentrated, long halflife material. We aren't really on a path to develop the technology, but not having the technology is probably the primary roadblock.
- cossatot 3y ago
  The time-scale is so long that there are no geological formations that last that long Geologist here, highly skeptical of this statement. Most of the land area of each continent has had essentially no seismic/tectonic activity for tens to hundreds of millions of years. With sufficient burial depth (which doesn't have to be super deep, less than a kilometer certainly) there is little reason to suspect that in most areas that haven't been disturbed in 200 million years, they will be disturbed in another 200 million years. The surface of the earth has had cycles of erosion and deposition associated with climate variations (i.e. ice ages) but the effects of these aren't always that deep. This isn't to say that the other issues aren't important--communication of dangers to future humans (or other intelligent creatures) that may not share our language, especially. However it's a social/political problem, not a geological one.
- dontreact 3y ago
  But the waste is just SO small and just needs to stay inside of concrete to be considered contained. I would rather burden future generations with this rather than continuing to produce CO2 at the scale we are doing now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... It feels more solvable than trying to figure out how to reduce CO2 without nuclear (to me)
cranky908canuck 3y ago
I see nuclear having a lot of trouble competing with solar/wind for two reasons: 1: incremental construction costs: (NB, numbers speculative, think order of magnitude). Roughly speaking, 100e6 dollars gets you a decent solar/wind utility scale installation (heck, you can do it retail for a few 10e3's on SFH rooftops), but only (maybe) a feasibility study for nuclear. Definitely not an operating plant. Spending 100e6 dollars a year gets operating solar/wind generating capacity on an ongoing basis, same on nuclear gets you a working plant in how many years? 2: backend costs: I don't think nuclear has a business plan about the cost of decommissioning a plant. Or maybe it ends up like orphan wells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canad.... Reason 1: means that the business risk associated with solar/wind is far less than that of nuclear. Given that nuclear and solar/wind are very similar as being base load [1] and not well suited to tracking fluctuating demand (so, both need the same sort of backup / storage tricks, albeit for different production profiles), solar/wind win the "cheap 'n' cheerful" race hands down. Also, manageable by private entities, so no WPPSS scandals ("whoops!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5). Reason 2: decommissioning/recycling costs are far lower. This reduces taxpayer risk (ie., externalizing costs). There's nothing exotic: aluminum frames can join the "beer can to beer can in six weeks" loop and the other materials (can't be bothered to find the references just now) aren't as hard to reprocess as detractors claim. Also, again, it's smaller increments, so no massive 6 reactor plant that will take twenty years to dismantle. It's far easier to develop a 'panels to panels' industry with a steady stream of little projects than with a "my career was about remediating Splitters Bay" model. [1] nuclear has to 'throw it away' by paying someone to take the power, they can't ramp down. Solar/wind has to 'throw it away' by not taking what's on offer. No way to make back six hours of curtailed sunshine.

40 points by jseliger 3y ago

Nuclear power only ever existed because of the military applications of the technology. In 1950, if you were a Great Power and wanted to remain one, you had to have nuclear technology tout de suite. Electricity generation was a sop to pacify the masses. There were all sorts of overt and covert subsidies. Nuclear power only continues to exist for those military applications. Back in 2008 or so China had an ambitious policy to grow its nuclear fleet about twentyfold in the next two five-year plans. Last I looked, they had only nearly doubled their fleet and the rate of growth is utterly anemic compared to growth of PV and wind. If China can't do it, with its ability to ride roughshod over everybody and anybody, why would things be better here?

RandomLensman 3y ago

Having a more efficient process to access highly-enriched Uranium? Is it really desirable to have much more at least weapons-capable material out in the wild? Also, interesting to see them go all in on a big future with retro-tech.

epistasis 3y ago
Weapons and safety concerns are pretty minimal concerned to basic viability of the tech, I think. Steam generation for electricity is mostly a dead end, IMHO. Being attached to it is like saying that typewriters have been the backbone of business communication for a century, so we had better invest big in them for the future.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  So far very little civil use of HEU outside of research reactors and quite a bit of control around it around the world from the non-proliferation treaty.
ortusdux 3y ago
Uranium extraction from seawater looks quite promising. I spoke with some researchers a few years back that were able to demonstrate the ability to produce yellowcake at $200/lb. The current market price is $70/lb, but the actual cost of the uranium is such a small piece of the pie that paying 3x for a domestic, non-mining source makes sense. The initial research was done in rather cold seawater, but they did demonstrate that the process was faster with warm water. Last I heard, they were working on testing the viability of post-filtering hot brine from desalination plants, which should be much more efficent.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Still need to enrich then. Right now there is surplus of HEU from nuclear disarmament but it wasn't cheap to create it.

epistasis 3y ago

Pretty disappointing! It eventually does get around to finding the right critique: > the success of nuclear power is much more about project management, financing, and policy than it is cutting-edge engineering or safety. But suppose you optimize the hell out of that, then what do you get? Maybe, just maybe back to 1960s costs, at the very best. That's not good enough. We need more advanced tech that delivers energy more cheaply. Defining "efficiency" as MWh/acre is just plain silly, and greatly reduces the credibility of the article. What a useless metric, unrelated to economics, that shows a gaping hole in the analysis. Its just boosterism because except for the useless metric, there's nothing appealing about nuclear as a power generation tech, in its current forms. Given a bet between Web3 and nuclear as foundational future techs, would pick Web3 in a heart beat, and let me tell you just how little I believed that silly pitch when a16z was making it... much less now!

littlestymaar 3y ago

> We’ve also gotten very good at operating reactors without incident, increasing our capacity factor, or uptime, to more than 90% (France is only around 75%). Mandatory nick-picking from a chauvinist French: France is “only” around 70+% because we do use nuclear for much more than just base production, and modulate the production to fit the demand variation, not because Americans operators are somehow better ;). Also, unsurprisingly from A16Z they put most of the blame on regulation, but the main reason why nuclear is costly today is because there's barely an industry around it and there's no mass production. And unsurprisingly, custom built one-shot stuff cost much more than serial production.

johnzim 3y ago
It's pretty hard to have an industry with the weight of current regulation - not just in terms of how much scrutiny fission receives compared to technologies we _know kill people at an alarming rate_, such as fossil fuel combustion, but also in regulating something that was still relatively new technology the same way that we regulated other energy generation. At least with smaller reactors it's more feasible to get operating data and be on a path to economies of scale. The US now has a second chance to get it right, and the US can always be counted on to do the right thing, after exhausting every other alternative.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  The railway and aeronautics industry have regulation constraints that aren't that far to what nuclear has[1], without preventing the industry to thrive. The worst thing that can ever happen to the nuclear industry would be another catastrophic incident (even one with almost no casualty like Fukushima) so I think taking safety extremely seriously is the only thing that nuclear energy can afford. [1]: My wife work in nuclear engineering, and I did work for the rail industry for some time. It's not exactly the same, but it's also not that different compared to other regulated industries, like healthcare for instance, where it's full YOLO compare to both of the above.
vitorbaptistaa 3y ago
> they put most of the blame on regulation, but the main reason why nuclear is costly today is because there's barely an industry around it and there's no mass production. Isn't that because of regulation (which was put in place in part because the population demanded it)?

joak 3y ago

The first sentence «Nearly all of our electricity is generated from heat powering a steam turbine» just explains why nuclear cannot scale: thermal power (including nuclear fission) needs huge amounts of water to cool down the turbine. The thermodynamic cycle needs a hot source and cold source. This is already a limitation, and France has to stop reactors in summer due to this problem.

kittiepryde 3y ago
Should we shut down all efforts to generate power that uses heat, steam, and turbines?
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Yes. Even the steam turbine bit alone will make it unable to compete on price with renewables. This is why fusion projects are looking for ways to directly generate electricity. If they run steam turbines they've lost before they even start.
puppetmaster 3y ago
Yes, thermal power plants need a cold and hot end to operate, and they are designed to operate within the thermal "range" that its location can provide + some error. Now, this is not really a limitation, rather an engineering constraint. Thermal cycles can be stretched with multiple devices such a HRSG, in the case of combined cycles. About powerplants in France shutting down because of cooling during the summer... I find it hard to believe this is a widespread issue, if an issue at all. Many of the existing nuclear reactors are reaching an age where massive maintenance schedules need to be executed. If the problem is extending the thermal range, that's relatively easy to fix. Source: I used to build powerplants.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  I think the issue is more not killing everything in the river the warmer water is released back into, so the temperature differential becomes unworkable at certain intake temperatures.

hrldcpr 3y ago

In case anyone else was wondering, the "MWh/acre" stats near the beginning are per year. Here they are converted to units that I find more meaningful: "...a nuclear power plant can generate over 6,507 kW/acre compared to solar at 23 kW/acre, or a natural gas plant at 114 kW/acre."

mikeyouse 3y ago
What an absolutely meaningless metric for power generation in one of the largest countries on earth by land area.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  Indeed: agrivoltaics is under active R&D. Initial results seem to indicate that in dry areas PV can actually increase crop yields while reducing irrigation demand. So in effect it has a negative land requirement in those places.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  It's the one stat which makes nuclear look good, so of course it's mentioned as if it has any relevance whatsoever.

bananapub 3y ago

does it somehow involve having to pay middlemen that can create a permanent position? or does it involve people investing in currently non-existent "modular" reactors?

blauditore 3y ago

> Nearly all of our electricity is generated from heat powering a steam turbine. [citation needed] I know it's almost a meme now, but not really true. Basically anything renewable doesn't work like that, including hydropower, which makes up a large portion in certain regions.

RandallBrown 3y ago
You can argue about what percentage "Nearly all" is, but 80% of the power in the US is a steam turbine. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... Hydropower is basically the same thing, the steam has just condensed already.
- blauditore 3y ago
  So "our" in this case means "USA's". The blog post clearly claims to address global energy questions, but indeed doesn't. > Hydropower is basically the same thing, the steam has just condensed already. I hope you're kidding.
weaksauce 3y ago
https://www.epa.gov/energy/about-us-electricity-system-and-its-impact-environment https://www.epa.gov/energy/about-us-electricity-system-and-i... 86% is nearly all to be fair(edit as of 2017)... not 99% nearly all but it's well more than half.
- blauditore 3y ago
  That's just the US; the post makes it sound like it's globally true.
jccooper 3y ago
US energy mix is 60% fossil, 18% nuclear, and 1% biomass, which are all basically steam turbine. The remaining 20% is "renewables", about half wind. World mix is similar. Is 80% "nearly all"? Dunno, that's semantic. But it's a pretty high percentage.

23B1 3y ago

I'd love to read a better article on this topic from someone more trustworthy than a16z.

taylodl 3y ago

Alright. Since I work for one of America's largest utilities I'm going to point out something that apparently isn't all that popular to say: We have plenty of energy already The entirety of our generation capacity is aimed at delivering energy during peak use, which is 8 hours per day. That is 1/3 of the day. The other 1/3 of the day is much less energy intensive, and the final 1/3 hardly registers in comparison. Coal plants can't be powered down so if they're generating too much then the excess is sent to ground. Literally, we spend 1/3 of the day pumping energy into the ground. Ditto for today's nuclear power plants. Yet people keep saying we don't have enough energy. What we don't have is two things: 1. A distribution system capable of handling 24/7 load. The lines feeding your neighborhood were never meant to be run 24/7 and the equipment is undersized to cool down properly. You need to upgrade so they don't overheat and cause problems. Remember, they're only meant to be run hard for 8 hours per day and they're used to not being used much at night so they can cool down in the cool night air. More nuclear generation isn't goin to do squat about that problem. 2. Smart load management. Yes, industry can't shift load as much - but residences can. Don't charge your EV while you're using your oven. Things like that. Collectively there's plenty of power to power everything you need - we just need to be a little smarter in scheduling that power. You need to manage your peak rate. We need smart plugs that shut of when you've reached your peak usage rate. Shut off the EV, shut off the electric water heater - you should be able to program what you want done and get alerts that you're going over your peak load. Load management needs to be part of our lexicon. Continuing to do what we've been doing is not the path forward.

puppetmaster 3y ago
Exactly this. And as additional food for thought... How many outages can anyone remember that were caused because of lack of generation capacity?
- piperswe 3y ago
  I (and other Texans) can remember plenty!
  - taylodl 3y ago

joak 3y ago

«The tides are turning in favor of nuclear energy» in their dreams... PV costs are falling exponentially (-10% per year) while nuclear costs remain at best constant. If you decide today to build a reactor it will be ready in 10-20 years (don't be in the hurry). By the time it start producing it will be competing with plenty of cheaper renewables. During its lifetime (50 years) it will have plenty of time to become obsolete and so expensive. It's like buying a Cray I in the 1980s and get delivered in 2000 just to find that a gaming console has more power than your mammoth computer but at a fraction of the cost. Nuclear is completely doomed.

abfan1127 3y ago
are you comparing PV, or PV + Battery storage?
- crote 3y ago
  PV+storage is already cheaper than nuclear.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    I would love to see the numbers for this for an existing commercial installation of grid scale. Everywhere I've looked, sufficiently inexpensive storage is either theoretical or using some tech nobody has really built out en masse before. I know there's a few desert installs that do well, but the best places for solar tend to also be the least populated.
- joak 3y ago
  Batteries costs and PV costs are both dropping exponentially. So it doesn't matter much. Once batteries are everywhere who cares when the electricity is produced. Hey btw Vermont Utility plans to installs battery storage at customers' homes because it cheaper than updating the grid https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-home-batteries.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environme...
ETHisso2017 3y ago

worik 3y ago

No amount of hand waving can get past the fact that all forms of nuclear energy in use these days generates long term waste that must be stored for a very long time. The time-scale is so long that there are no geological formations that last that long For the entire period the waste must be monitored to ensure that it does not come into contact with humans, whom it will make very sick. The waste does not look, taste or smell poisonous so some sort of warning sign has to be placed on it. That sign must be readable over a time scale many times longer than we have had writing. What selfishness. Making the next thousand generations pay for our current consumption. The most expensive energy possible to imagine. But because it is not our generation, but the next thousand generations (plus) that pay the bill.... Golly.

maxerickson 3y ago
We could hand wave around fuel cycles that would reduce the amount of concentrated, long halflife material. We aren't really on a path to develop the technology, but not having the technology is probably the primary roadblock.
cossatot 3y ago
The time-scale is so long that there are no geological formations that last that long Geologist here, highly skeptical of this statement. Most of the land area of each continent has had essentially no seismic/tectonic activity for tens to hundreds of millions of years. With sufficient burial depth (which doesn't have to be super deep, less than a kilometer certainly) there is little reason to suspect that in most areas that haven't been disturbed in 200 million years, they will be disturbed in another 200 million years. The surface of the earth has had cycles of erosion and deposition associated with climate variations (i.e. ice ages) but the effects of these aren't always that deep. This isn't to say that the other issues aren't important--communication of dangers to future humans (or other intelligent creatures) that may not share our language, especially. However it's a social/political problem, not a geological one.
dontreact 3y ago
But the waste is just SO small and just needs to stay inside of concrete to be considered contained. I would rather burden future generations with this rather than continuing to produce CO2 at the scale we are doing now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... It feels more solvable than trying to figure out how to reduce CO2 without nuclear (to me)

cranky908canuck 3y ago

I see nuclear having a lot of trouble competing with solar/wind for two reasons: 1: incremental construction costs: (NB, numbers speculative, think order of magnitude). Roughly speaking, 100e6 dollars gets you a decent solar/wind utility scale installation (heck, you can do it retail for a few 10e3's on SFH rooftops), but only (maybe) a feasibility study for nuclear. Definitely not an operating plant. Spending 100e6 dollars a year gets operating solar/wind generating capacity on an ongoing basis, same on nuclear gets you a working plant in how many years? 2: backend costs: I don't think nuclear has a business plan about the cost of decommissioning a plant. Or maybe it ends up like orphan wells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canad.... Reason 1: means that the business risk associated with solar/wind is far less than that of nuclear. Given that nuclear and solar/wind are very similar as being base load [1] and not well suited to tracking fluctuating demand (so, both need the same sort of backup / storage tricks, albeit for different production profiles), solar/wind win the "cheap 'n' cheerful" race hands down. Also, manageable by private entities, so no WPPSS scandals ("whoops!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5). Reason 2: decommissioning/recycling costs are far lower. This reduces taxpayer risk (ie., externalizing costs). There's nothing exotic: aluminum frames can join the "beer can to beer can in six weeks" loop and the other materials (can't be bothered to find the references just now) aren't as hard to reprocess as detractors claim. Also, again, it's smaller increments, so no massive 6 reactor plant that will take twenty years to dismantle. It's far easier to develop a 'panels to panels' industry with a steady stream of little projects than with a "my career was about remediating Splitters Bay" model. [1] nuclear has to 'throw it away' by paying someone to take the power, they can't ramp down. Solar/wind has to 'throw it away' by not taking what's on offer. No way to make back six hours of curtailed sunshine.