6 ms·

>Why are HN readers so quick to think that Greenpeace is all powerful? The nuclear lobby cant exactly blame the exhorbitant cost of nuclear power for their pro

by pydry 2y ago

>Why are HN readers so quick to think that Greenpeace is all powerful? The nuclear lobby cant exactly blame the exhorbitant cost of nuclear power for their problems. They need a more exciting scapegoat that isnt "it's 5x the cost of the competition".

canadianfella 2y ago
[dead]
nomel 2y ago
Imagine if all the governments of the world came up with a mass produced, cookie cutter, plant, rather than starting all fabrication and design from scratch for each plant?
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  Theoretically stuff like EPR is supposed to be a cookie cutter design. Actual implementation of said design has had a lot of issues, hence the escalation of costs. And it’s not easy to iron out and iterate on something that is billions of dollars a piece when a solar panel is in the thousands and a wind turbine is in the millions.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    It’s just that solar panels can be imported from China without needing a skilled specialist workforce. Yey free market But nuclear has to be built here, and we in the west suck (especially UK/US, France still holding out) at building any big infrastructure without cost overruns. ‘Free market’ doesn’t like the risks of large, hard to finance, one off projects. And our governments have decided that if central planning doesn’t work, then they don’t need to plan anything at all. Combine that with lack of skilled staff workforce as all the people who built previous nuclear powerplants have already retired and the western firms wage war against their own skilled engineers, and you have a toxic cocktail. TL SR: the only reason Small Module Reactors are interesting is because they could be made in China and imported by our lazy system
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      no, SMRs are interesting because they represent smaller units of power. Nuclear reactors are huge things generating power in one specific location, so they're a large point of failure. In addition they have the opposite coin problem of solar and wind; whereas solar and wind don't generate enough power sometimes, nuclear often generates too much power for the grid, and can't easily be turned up or down. A lot of the pumped hydro we have was not developed for solar and wind storage, but for excess nuclear storage. Most hydro in Japan is pumped hydro for nuclear plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Japan If you are going to wind up with the same energy storage problems with nuclear or newer renewables then you may as well go with the cheaper option.
      - realusername 2y ago
        Renewables have the problem on both sides though, they overproduce and underproduce. And the variability of this overproduction and underproduction is much greater than any nuclear plant.
        natmaka 2y ago
        This was a major ordeal as long as we could not conveniently store massive amounts of electricity nor transport it far away, or quickly and frequently balance the grid (hence the need for 'baseload' generation). Those challenges vanished ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current , https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr... ...)
        realusername 2y ago
        None of those are good enough to store even just a few days of a country's production, let alone weeks or months.
- oezi 2y ago
  You mean the solar panel? + it is decentralized, cheap, low tech, low waste, easy to scale.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    > low waste Did I miss some big news about easy recycling solar panels?
    - oezi 2y ago
      Solar waste is similar to Nuclear per energy created: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S095965262202131X-gr12_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S09596526220213... Much lower than fossils. Magnitudes lower than municipal waste or other e-waste. From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - fsflover 2y ago
        Thanks, TIL.
  - realusername 2y ago
    > decentralized If you basically ignore that they are all built in China. I'd say that's the most centralized mainstream technology to generate electricity by far, it's all down to a single country. We could even say it's down to a single person even, the power being so vertical in China. > easy to scale. Well if you don't care about how you are going to pass the winter maybe.
- Retric 2y ago
  Construction costs really aren’t the issue, they are just harder to hide. If you could get someone to build you an absolutely free nuclear power plant it still wouldn’t be cheap power. Just fuel itself which is generally assumed to be ‘free’ runs nearly half the cost of solar power per kWh by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal. Then with that leftover margin, you need to cover everything from land costs to new equipment as thing break over 50+ years. Manned 24/7 operations take ~500 people per GW over the plants full lifetime, as are less obvious expenses like insurance and mandatory downtime for weeks at a time requires something to pick up the slack, etc. Nuclear just ends up expensive even without any safety concerns.
  - blacksmith_tb 2y ago
    Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? These small designs are supposed to be (more) automated, so they wouldn't need huge teams of people 24/7. My main response to the idea of sticking one so far underground is that you might as well just make a geothermal plant.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Hard to say, but this could need a larger staff. The physical bit of reactor where the fission happens is left alone in operation. All the pipes, steam turbines, pumps, plumbing, cooling towers, etc etc do and this wants all of that on the surface.
  - Qem 2y ago
    > by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal. It's actually possible to run a reactor on natural unenriched uranium. IIRC the first man-made reactor ever, the Chicago pile, used natural uranium. Why did we stop using natural uranium in reactors?
    - Retric 2y ago
      Read up on CANDU, it ends up being slightly more expensive and produces more high level nuclear waste. Currently they’re enriching uranium even if the design doesn’t need to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor There’s a lot of different trade offs you can make with nuclear designs, but so far non of them have been demonstrated to actually be meaningfully cheaper.
- slightwinder 2y ago
  France did that, didn't work out that well. Sure, it was cheaper, but still f**ing expensive.
  - chickenbig 2y ago
    Per https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/xtv31i/cost_of_the_messmer_plan_under_100_billion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/xtv31i/cost_of_the... the number is more like 100B EUR. Compare that with renewables, the subsidy of which is reported to be up to 6B EUR for 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-24/french-subsidy-bill-for-renewables-to-rise-to-6-billion-in-2025 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-24/french-su.... It is unclear how this relates to the 30B EUR subsidy program approved by the EU Commission in 2021 https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/29/european-commission-approves-frances-e30bn-renewables-incentive-program/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/29/european-commission-a...
  - realusername 2y ago
    France spent around half of the cost of the nuclear grid on renewables and the result isn't even close. Renewables underdelivered by a huge margin in the past 10 years compared to what the country thought they would. That's a actually one of the reasons of the nuclear rebirth in France, along with the Russian war.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    France also invested heavily in nuclear because they develop their own nuclear weapons. So a knowledgeable industry is key, even though the materials aren't exactly the same.

by pydry 2y ago

canadianfella 2y ago

[dead]

nomel 2y ago

Imagine if all the governments of the world came up with a mass produced, cookie cutter, plant, rather than starting all fabrication and design from scratch for each plant?

bobthepanda 2y ago
Theoretically stuff like EPR is supposed to be a cookie cutter design. Actual implementation of said design has had a lot of issues, hence the escalation of costs. And it’s not easy to iron out and iterate on something that is billions of dollars a piece when a solar panel is in the thousands and a wind turbine is in the millions.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  It’s just that solar panels can be imported from China without needing a skilled specialist workforce. Yey free market But nuclear has to be built here, and we in the west suck (especially UK/US, France still holding out) at building any big infrastructure without cost overruns. ‘Free market’ doesn’t like the risks of large, hard to finance, one off projects. And our governments have decided that if central planning doesn’t work, then they don’t need to plan anything at all. Combine that with lack of skilled staff workforce as all the people who built previous nuclear powerplants have already retired and the western firms wage war against their own skilled engineers, and you have a toxic cocktail. TL SR: the only reason Small Module Reactors are interesting is because they could be made in China and imported by our lazy system
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    no, SMRs are interesting because they represent smaller units of power. Nuclear reactors are huge things generating power in one specific location, so they're a large point of failure. In addition they have the opposite coin problem of solar and wind; whereas solar and wind don't generate enough power sometimes, nuclear often generates too much power for the grid, and can't easily be turned up or down. A lot of the pumped hydro we have was not developed for solar and wind storage, but for excess nuclear storage. Most hydro in Japan is pumped hydro for nuclear plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Japan If you are going to wind up with the same energy storage problems with nuclear or newer renewables then you may as well go with the cheaper option.
    - realusername 2y ago
      Renewables have the problem on both sides though, they overproduce and underproduce. And the variability of this overproduction and underproduction is much greater than any nuclear plant.
      - natmaka 2y ago
        This was a major ordeal as long as we could not conveniently store massive amounts of electricity nor transport it far away, or quickly and frequently balance the grid (hence the need for 'baseload' generation). Those challenges vanished ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current , https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr... ...)
        realusername 2y ago
        None of those are good enough to store even just a few days of a country's production, let alone weeks or months.
oezi 2y ago
You mean the solar panel? + it is decentralized, cheap, low tech, low waste, easy to scale.
- fsflover 2y ago
  > low waste Did I miss some big news about easy recycling solar panels?
  - oezi 2y ago
    Solar waste is similar to Nuclear per energy created: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S095965262202131X-gr12_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S09596526220213... Much lower than fossils. Magnitudes lower than municipal waste or other e-waste. From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - fsflover 2y ago
      Thanks, TIL.
- realusername 2y ago
  > decentralized If you basically ignore that they are all built in China. I'd say that's the most centralized mainstream technology to generate electricity by far, it's all down to a single country. We could even say it's down to a single person even, the power being so vertical in China. > easy to scale. Well if you don't care about how you are going to pass the winter maybe.
Retric 2y ago
Construction costs really aren’t the issue, they are just harder to hide. If you could get someone to build you an absolutely free nuclear power plant it still wouldn’t be cheap power. Just fuel itself which is generally assumed to be ‘free’ runs nearly half the cost of solar power per kWh by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal. Then with that leftover margin, you need to cover everything from land costs to new equipment as thing break over 50+ years. Manned 24/7 operations take ~500 people per GW over the plants full lifetime, as are less obvious expenses like insurance and mandatory downtime for weeks at a time requires something to pick up the slack, etc. Nuclear just ends up expensive even without any safety concerns.
- blacksmith_tb 2y ago
  Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? These small designs are supposed to be (more) automated, so they wouldn't need huge teams of people 24/7. My main response to the idea of sticking one so far underground is that you might as well just make a geothermal plant.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Hard to say, but this could need a larger staff. The physical bit of reactor where the fission happens is left alone in operation. All the pipes, steam turbines, pumps, plumbing, cooling towers, etc etc do and this wants all of that on the surface.
- Qem 2y ago
  > by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal. It's actually possible to run a reactor on natural unenriched uranium. IIRC the first man-made reactor ever, the Chicago pile, used natural uranium. Why did we stop using natural uranium in reactors?
  - Retric 2y ago
    Read up on CANDU, it ends up being slightly more expensive and produces more high level nuclear waste. Currently they’re enriching uranium even if the design doesn’t need to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor There’s a lot of different trade offs you can make with nuclear designs, but so far non of them have been demonstrated to actually be meaningfully cheaper.
slightwinder 2y ago
France did that, didn't work out that well. Sure, it was cheaper, but still f**ing expensive.
- chickenbig 2y ago
  Per https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/xtv31i/cost_of_the_messmer_plan_under_100_billion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/xtv31i/cost_of_the... the number is more like 100B EUR. Compare that with renewables, the subsidy of which is reported to be up to 6B EUR for 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-24/french-subsidy-bill-for-renewables-to-rise-to-6-billion-in-2025 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-24/french-su.... It is unclear how this relates to the 30B EUR subsidy program approved by the EU Commission in 2021 https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/29/european-commission-approves-frances-e30bn-renewables-incentive-program/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/29/european-commission-a...
- realusername 2y ago
  France spent around half of the cost of the nuclear grid on renewables and the result isn't even close. Renewables underdelivered by a huge margin in the past 10 years compared to what the country thought they would. That's a actually one of the reasons of the nuclear rebirth in France, along with the Russian war.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  France also invested heavily in nuclear because they develop their own nuclear weapons. So a knowledgeable industry is key, even though the materials aren't exactly the same.