Anthropogenic Climate Change

If only previous accidents with nuclear plants hadn't stoked paranoia of nuclear energy.

I mean, even without paranoia, nuclear materials are what counts as non-renewable right? Meaning eventually we will run out of them. That when things go wrong, they go terribly wrong, certainly does no help but there are reasons to seek other solutions even apart from that.

In the case of nuclear energy, "eventually" will be a long time. And it buys time for other solutions.

There's also the fact that a nuclear plant can be built pretty much anywhere, unlike most forms of renewable energy.

Of course, another issue with nuclear plants is that they have very high upfront capital costs. Building a nuclear plant ain't cheap.

Edited by M84 on Aug 2nd 2019 at 12:45:15 AM

Good points. Also about renewables, my city (as well as chunks of the country) is replete with spas and thermal baths due to geothermic energy but apparently nobody thought of using that to help the powergrid...

And yep, they ain't cheap, though I guess no power plant really is. You also have to factor in dealing with the radioactive waste.

Fast breeders stretch uranium and thorium supplies so far that the sun will expand and eat the earth before we run out. So literally "less limited than solar".

Sure, pretty much all forms of energy except Oil, Coal and Natural Gas are expensive short term. The problem is that Oil, Coal and Gas are even more expensive long term - in more ways than just money - while Solar and Nuclear aren't.

So the argument of "Too expensive therefore will not build" is basically kicking the can down the road by irresponsibility.

As for Anti-Nuclear protesters, my general viewpoint towards them is...uncharitable, to say the least. I'd love to slam their heads against a Depleted Uranium wall until there's no more left of them, but that's bad form these days.

The "expensive" point wasn't about the energy itself but about building and maintaining the power plant. Which is arguably true for every kind of power plant.

Another issue is that the paranoia concerning nuclear plants leads to a severe case of NIMBY. Nobody wants a nuclear plant anywhere near them.

Granted, there's a similar issue with things like wind farms, since wind farms are noisy as hell.

But even by that standard, a nuclear plant is pricey. To build. Actual maintenance and running of a nuclear plant is actually dirt cheap.

TBH, there are quite a few legit cons to nuclear energy. But it's arguable that the pros outweigh said cons. And the loudest arguments from anti-nuclear protesters are usually rooted in pseudo-scientific bullshit.

Edited by M84 on Aug 2nd 2019 at 4:14:30 PM

Nuclear is "renewable" in the sense that we are not going to run out of it anywhere soon. At a minimum, it'd be a matter of many millennia. I use the word "pseudo-renewable" for this.

I think one question that hasn't been answered about many renewable energy sources is land consumption. Wind and sun require wind and sun, and non-negotiable laws of nature like the solar constant and Betz's law impose minimum land use requirements that can't be innovated away. In a world with progressive electrification this might make a 100% renewable grid unacceptably harmful to the environment.

Hence one of the downsides to said renewable sources. You can't build them everywhere. And building them in the places you can might also fuck with the environment.

Cheaper than "renewable" + storage. Basic math: Even extremely optimistic projections about the cost of grid scale storage ends up with "100 euro /kwh".

If you want to get your power from nuclear without gas peaking or overbuilding, you need to be able to store what amounts to 3 hours of output from that plant (So you can store a third of what it produces for nine hours during the night, and dump it into the grid over course of daytime peak demand).

EPR: 1650000 kilowatt output. x 3 x 100 = 495 million euros. That is peppery, put not entirely unreasonable to be able to cancel northstream and tell the fracking boys to go pound dust.

Finland worked out that a renewable grid in Finland needs 9 days of storage. Meaning, 35 billion worth of storage for building a system of "renewables + storage" actually equivalent to an EPR + storage. Just for the storage. It also involved overbuilding the generation side, so those costs you see quoted for wind? Yhea add 25, 50 % to them. There is a reason Finland is keeping on with the reactor construction.

Finland is a bad case, because it is so northerly, but it is not really an outlier, and even the places that are outliers in a good way - that is, low seasonal variation, and not prone to lengthy stretches of "Same weather everywhere" still need multiple days, and huge interconnects.

Edited by Izeinsummer on Aug 2nd 2019 at 1:28:32 AM

See, I think that you can do nuclear peaking by constructing plants that can be shut up or down quickly.

You can load follow with reactors, but the economics of building some storage are better unless your reactor costs are very low.

If you just build reactors until you can serve the peak with nuclear directly, the last reactor you build is going to be running a third of the time (Well, in practice all your reactors would run at slightly below capacity two thirds of the time, but economically, same thing) which is a colossal waste of capital. Half a billion worth of storage per plant to be able to run them flat out 100 % of the time is a pretty sweet deal.

Edited by Izeinsummer on Aug 2nd 2019 at 1:47:04 AM

Ah ok thanks, somehow my brain froze and it didn't connect the dots that if the exposed material takes so long to decay then the fuel may be used for a long time too.

How much more expensive are nuclear power plants to build than other types of power plant though? Doubt they are that much more expensive than other types...

Nuclear power plants are prone to cost overruns, especially when they are built by a country which hasn't been building them for a while. The EPR type mentioned above has become notorious for this.

It can cost up to $10 billion or more for a large reactor.

Building a nuclear plant is expensive.

and My point was more, "is it fair to single nuclear plants out as so-darn-expensive when compared to power plants that don't use nuclear power as a power source, or is that based on a misconception?"

Edited by akanesarumara on Aug 2nd 2019 at 12:53:32 PM

While the up-front cost of a nuclear plant is high, projects like this are mainly evaluated by amortizing the cost over the projected lifespan of the plant, then comparing the ratio of power output to cost. Nuclear is competitive with fossil fuels when this calculation is run. It is also much safer, and substantially cleaner even when waste products are taken into account.

Ramping nuclear plants up and down to keep grids stable, however, is slow and difficult. So while you can have nuclear power as the backbone of the grid, you need ways to store energy during off-peak hours and discharge it during peak hours. Solar and wind have similar issues in that you can't really control when the power is generated.

Thus, large-scale battery installations are an essential part of a sustainable grid.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 2nd 2019 at 7:02:11 AM

Based on everything I've read, the relative cost of nuclear vs. renewable isn't well known. Costs for renewable energies have been declining while the cost of nuclear plants is strongly dependent on cost overruns, effects of incidents and lifespan extensions that aren't easily calculable owing to their stochastic nature.

Nuclear plants can be and are run (e.g in Germany) in load following mode. The trick is to predict the physical processes inside a reactor under varying power output to avoid falling into "iodine pits" or power surges. Some plants can alter their steam usage to vary power output.

Still, the sun and wind are endless and free sources of energy, so you want to take advantage of them as much as possible, with nuclear energy as a backstop.

Another solution to storing energy for a few hours every night is to convert the transportation industry to electric vehicles, most of which are hooked to chargers overnight, and then let consumers sell capacity back to the grid during the day. The economics of this work out nicely.

Edited by DeMarquis on Aug 3rd 2019 at 6:13:07 AM

You're correct. It's a neat, organic solution to the problem, but I have difficulty believing that we could deploy the necessary infrastructure cheaply or efficiently. I would wager that most electrical grids can't handle backflow like that, especially without replacing everyone's meters. Software upgrades might be needed as well. It'd be like everyone installed solar panels. We might also need level 2 home chargers for the cars to provide a significant amount of power: I can't see 120 V cords doing the trick. Consumers would want to be paid back for the energy they supply to the grid, so that'll complicate electricity bills.

There are behavioral aspects to be considered, especially as EVs approach mass-market saturation. Many people will simply refuse to let their cars supply power, regardless of whether they can recoup some of their charging costs for it.

We are going to need a nation-wide smart grid to get ourselves off of fossil fuels anyhow, though I dont deny the other challenges you list. The sooner we start investing in the necessary infrastructure the better off we will be.

Edited by DeMarquis on Aug 3rd 2019 at 8:28:47 AM

Now, back to the sciencey aspects: New Models Point to More Global Warming Than We Expected. Specifically, they say that twice as much carbon dioxide can cause a warming of 4-5 degrees instead of 3 as is usually assumed. The problem appears to be that older climate models do not properly account for changes in low clouds over the oceans, which have a strong cooling effect and which in some newer models tend to disappear with warming.

(That's only the temperature, mind you. The effects that extra global warming or the disappearance of low clouds will have on precipitation are something that, AFAIK, nobody has investigated yet)

It's a shame that the anti-nuclear movement couldn't just take the win, they could probably make a solid argument for nuclear tech only being so safe because of their protests and fears. take the victory, claim credit for turning nuclear power from Chernobyl to what it is today and then fall in.