5 ms·

I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables. Renewables are great. We

by nickpp 3y ago

I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables. Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.

hef19898 3y ago
There we agree. There is only one problem: nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors in the West, they are not competetive with renewables anymore. So every dollar invested in new nuclear reactors is a wasted dollar. The fossil fuel lobby benegits largely from that, because every dollar going into nuclear projects, which will be completed at least a decade later if not more, is a dollar not going into renewables going online in the next year. And it is the latter that posses a problem for fossil fuel plants, not the former. Anyway, as with EVs, capitalism has decided: wind and solar it is, that's where the money goes and not nuclear. For mostly the same reasons come 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. Profits and money.
- nickpp 3y ago
  Yes, free markets have fuelled a technological boom that delivered us renewables - an incredible, completely unexpected feat. But it may be a case of too little too late. The problem is we spent last 100 years spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instead of switching to nuclear due to the nuclear fear-mongering from environmentalists. Now we are facing Climate Change, a civilization-ending danger. And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem. The rational strategy would thus be a (slow, controlled, careful) cost-reducing deregulation and nuclear buildup in parallel with renewables and closing down of legacy plants. But we are facing the same resistance and fear mongering from the exact same politicians and ideologues that got us into this predicament in the first place. I am pretty sure no solution can come from the same people and way of thinking that created the problem.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem. It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs. Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).
    - hef19898 3y ago
      The demand side became pretty proficient regarding load shedding as well, making literally millions off of it.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        Meh, a lot of heavy industry is still running on machines from the 60s. Incentivising them to upgrade their old crap to modern times would cost them billions (which is why they've been dragging their arses so long), but it would bring a lot of consumption savings and flexibility to the grid.
        hef19898 3y ago
        I personally knownof three energy hungry places, two former employers and and one nearby, that runs those really old machines (chemical plants from before the war, WW1 in one case, graphite production of the same age and paper machines at pretty old sites) that are perfectly able for almost a decade now to adapt their production, within certain limits of course, to provide load balancing. They even go as far as adapting production to electricity prices in the spot market and speculate with their long term contract volumes. Litterally making millions, to the point production for zhe waste bin is almost profitable (which renders the whole sustainability angle moot, but I digress). Morw of that, some storage, bio gas and hydrogen peaker plants, geo thermal and renewables and we are good to go.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  > 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. I'm not convinced. I'm expecting the automotive industry will just start producing vehicles that aren't effected by that requirement and those will be marketed in much the same way as SUVs have become pretty much the only vehicle type available because they're permitted to emmit more CO2.
mschuster91 3y ago
> I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables. We have a ton of these people in Germany. "Technologieoffen" they call themselves - the reality is that they want to keep the old structure of big utilities and massive profits for shareholders alive. > Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement. That's what a grid is for. Build a national grid with serious transfer capacities (China can do it over 1000s of km's, so the US can just as well if it wanted), and suddenly you can use East Coast solar to power the West Coast. Or here in Europe, with French and Portuguese offshore wind and solar from Northern Africa. On top of that, incentivise large consumers (data centers, heavy industry) to upgrade their processes to be able to handle dynamic load shedding, and invest into powerful gas and hydrogen fuel cell based peaker plants to cover for the very small amount in a year where neither solar, wind nor dammed hydro is enough to supply the entire country. The serious issue with nuclear is that they cost billions of dollars to build. At the moment, in Germany 44% of the total power is generated using renewables [1], in peak times (i.e. summer) renewables account for up to 70% of the month's load [2]. The investment for NPPs can't ever be recouped at that point, which is why even small scale projects such as NuScale got the boot [3]. No matter what the pro-nuclear crowd hopes, the free market has decided against it. [1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimaschutz/faq-energiewende-2067498 https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimasch... [2] https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-feierte-deutschland-im-juli-einen-ueberraschenden-stromrekord_id_200918408.html https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-f... [3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-agree-terminate-nuclear-project-2023-11-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...
- nickpp 3y ago
  Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. Hence no free market when it comes to building nuclear power plants, unfortunately. Otherwise we’d have a glut of safe electricity at amazingly low prices. Of course safety was the pretext for that overregulation but when such a complex technology has the lowest deaths per megawatt (except solar) [0] - maybe we can relax the rules a little. I know about your suggestions and while they are all good ideas I just don’t see them widely implemented in reality for some reason. Maybe because they all require government intervention which is slow, expensive and prone to corruption from the fossil fuel lobby. Meanwhile the non-renewable part of energy generation is made burning coal, gas and oil and spewing pollution and even radioactive particles in the air, pollution that kills millions every year. Also spewing CO2 causing climate change, e civilization-ending danger getting closer and harder to avoid. Maybe nuclear deserves a second chance? [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

by nickpp 3y ago

hef19898 3y ago

There we agree. There is only one problem: nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors in the West, they are not competetive with renewables anymore. So every dollar invested in new nuclear reactors is a wasted dollar. The fossil fuel lobby benegits largely from that, because every dollar going into nuclear projects, which will be completed at least a decade later if not more, is a dollar not going into renewables going online in the next year. And it is the latter that posses a problem for fossil fuel plants, not the former. Anyway, as with EVs, capitalism has decided: wind and solar it is, that's where the money goes and not nuclear. For mostly the same reasons come 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. Profits and money.

nickpp 3y ago
Yes, free markets have fuelled a technological boom that delivered us renewables - an incredible, completely unexpected feat. But it may be a case of too little too late. The problem is we spent last 100 years spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instead of switching to nuclear due to the nuclear fear-mongering from environmentalists. Now we are facing Climate Change, a civilization-ending danger. And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem. The rational strategy would thus be a (slow, controlled, careful) cost-reducing deregulation and nuclear buildup in parallel with renewables and closing down of legacy plants. But we are facing the same resistance and fear mongering from the exact same politicians and ideologues that got us into this predicament in the first place. I am pretty sure no solution can come from the same people and way of thinking that created the problem.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem. It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs. Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).
  - hef19898 3y ago
    The demand side became pretty proficient regarding load shedding as well, making literally millions off of it.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Meh, a lot of heavy industry is still running on machines from the 60s. Incentivising them to upgrade their old crap to modern times would cost them billions (which is why they've been dragging their arses so long), but it would bring a lot of consumption savings and flexibility to the grid.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        I personally knownof three energy hungry places, two former employers and and one nearby, that runs those really old machines (chemical plants from before the war, WW1 in one case, graphite production of the same age and paper machines at pretty old sites) that are perfectly able for almost a decade now to adapt their production, within certain limits of course, to provide load balancing. They even go as far as adapting production to electricity prices in the spot market and speculate with their long term contract volumes. Litterally making millions, to the point production for zhe waste bin is almost profitable (which renders the whole sustainability angle moot, but I digress). Morw of that, some storage, bio gas and hydrogen peaker plants, geo thermal and renewables and we are good to go.
TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
> 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. I'm not convinced. I'm expecting the automotive industry will just start producing vehicles that aren't effected by that requirement and those will be marketed in much the same way as SUVs have become pretty much the only vehicle type available because they're permitted to emmit more CO2.

mschuster91 3y ago

> I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables. We have a ton of these people in Germany. "Technologieoffen" they call themselves - the reality is that they want to keep the old structure of big utilities and massive profits for shareholders alive. > Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement. That's what a grid is for. Build a national grid with serious transfer capacities (China can do it over 1000s of km's, so the US can just as well if it wanted), and suddenly you can use East Coast solar to power the West Coast. Or here in Europe, with French and Portuguese offshore wind and solar from Northern Africa. On top of that, incentivise large consumers (data centers, heavy industry) to upgrade their processes to be able to handle dynamic load shedding, and invest into powerful gas and hydrogen fuel cell based peaker plants to cover for the very small amount in a year where neither solar, wind nor dammed hydro is enough to supply the entire country. The serious issue with nuclear is that they cost billions of dollars to build. At the moment, in Germany 44% of the total power is generated using renewables [1], in peak times (i.e. summer) renewables account for up to 70% of the month's load [2]. The investment for NPPs can't ever be recouped at that point, which is why even small scale projects such as NuScale got the boot [3]. No matter what the pro-nuclear crowd hopes, the free market has decided against it. [1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimaschutz/faq-energiewende-2067498 https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimasch... [2] https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-feierte-deutschland-im-juli-einen-ueberraschenden-stromrekord_id_200918408.html https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-f... [3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-agree-terminate-nuclear-project-2023-11-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...

nickpp 3y ago
Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. Hence no free market when it comes to building nuclear power plants, unfortunately. Otherwise we’d have a glut of safe electricity at amazingly low prices. Of course safety was the pretext for that overregulation but when such a complex technology has the lowest deaths per megawatt (except solar) [0] - maybe we can relax the rules a little. I know about your suggestions and while they are all good ideas I just don’t see them widely implemented in reality for some reason. Maybe because they all require government intervention which is slow, expensive and prone to corruption from the fossil fuel lobby. Meanwhile the non-renewable part of energy generation is made burning coal, gas and oil and spewing pollution and even radioactive particles in the air, pollution that kills millions every year. Also spewing CO2 causing climate change, e civilization-ending danger getting closer and harder to avoid. Maybe nuclear deserves a second chance? [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...