6 ms·

> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and

• graemep 5mo ago
  Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable. I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?
  • Pay08 5mo ago
    I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.
    • tokai 5mo ago
      No not at all. You can vary reactor output, its generally as simple as pulling rods in or out. But they cannot just turn on and off. That takes a ton of time and effort.
      • Pay08 5mo ago
        Huh, I don't know where I read that their output can only be at 100% then.
        • zozbot234 5mo ago
          It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.
        • mpweiher 5mo ago
          There is a lot of disinformation about nuclear power that has been so widely and consistently disseminated that it has basically diffused into the background.
        • Moldoteck 5mo ago
          no, you can do wild variations as long as it's not full shutdown
        • peterfirefly 5mo ago
          Some reactor types are better at going up and down in power fast than others. It is definitely a solved problem, though, and has been for decades. I remember, decades ago, that anti-nuclear activists (some of them were even university professors who ought to know better) argued that it was impossible while France had already been doing exactly that for decades (at the time).
    • leonidasrup 5mo ago
      "PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)." On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
    • graemep 5mo ago
      A small amount of coal has a huge environmental impact.
    • phil21 5mo ago
      Good news: nuclear costs the same to run at max output as it does idle! No change in fuel costs. Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions. Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel. Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed. That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.
    • Moldoteck 5mo ago
      look at open RTE data. You can modulate nuclear a lot.
  • pjc50 5mo ago
    One small problem, nuclear is also dependent on water: https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-force-french-nuclear-plants-to-cut-output-despite-rising-demand/ https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-forc...
    • Moldoteck 5mo ago
      France was net exporting 14GW at that time. There's no reason for EDF to build cooling towers there - where would you sell the power?
    • peterfirefly 5mo ago
      Dry cooling towers exist.
    • orthecreedence 5mo ago
      Such a difficult resource to find.
  • namibj 5mo ago
    Solar is REALLY CHEAP. And provided you keep existing central European gas heating infrastructure around for a while, you can basically just wait out the really good energy storage by using existing caverns you pre-fill with methane to keep your people from freezing. If you're not curtailing a substantial fraction of PV yield (yearly) in central Europe that's a sign there way not enough capacity yet. Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate. We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.
• derektank 5mo ago
  Renewables are cheap. Renewables plus battery storage still are not and nuclear is a reasonable alternative for base load power.
  • panick21_ 5mo ago
    More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions. With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance). But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable. One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.
    • crote 5mo ago
      The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.
      • panick21_ 5mo ago
        You can look at the projections by all the grid providers if you don't believe me.
  • triceratops 5mo ago
    Renewables + battery are already the cheapest solution in some places. By the time a new nuclear power plant is built they will be cheaper everywhere.
    • Jensson 5mo ago
      People said that 40 years ago and see where we are today, if people hadn't said that we would have a much cleaner world today. We might have that good and cheap batteries in 20 years, but also possible we wont have that. Would you really wanna bet our planets climate on your gut feeling that batteries will get that good?
• SecretDreams 5mo ago
  > nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online. Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather. I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
  • _aavaa_ 5mo ago
    > I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix. It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
    • SecretDreams 5mo ago
      > The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth. Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place. The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
      • 5mo ago
• nandomrumber 5mo ago
  The West built the existing rector fleet cheap and fast in the past, and those reactors have proven to be safe and reliable and maintainable. It’s a proven technology with decades decades in service. We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale. What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?
  • triceratops 5mo ago
    > What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other? No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.
    • peterfirefly 5mo ago
      Germany did indeed make that choice.
      • triceratops 5mo ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292341 can we call it Triceratops' law now?
  • tialaramex 5mo ago
    > We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale. The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous. That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal. Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.
• ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
  Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point. New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span. It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
  • Moldoteck 5mo ago
    in belgium case the choice is rather nuclear or new gas plants from engie. Why do you think engie wants them shut?
  • peterfirefly 5mo ago
    And importing gas famously has zero known serious externalities, as vividly demonstrated in Europe and the Gulf at the moment.