A Double First in China for Advanced Nuclear Reactors | Hacker News Reader

A Double First in China for Advanced Nuclear Reactors

spectrum.ieee.org

126 pointsax00x132 comments

Here are three videos that describe the passive cooling mechanisms in the AP1000 during a blackout (total loss of onsite and offsite power); passive core cooling[1], passive containment cooling[2] and passively cooling spend fuel[3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCorzfw5liQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghy9aba3kHU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzBe_kwIs28

Basically the reactor will cool itself without operator intervention and without power for 72 hours. After 72 hours the operator must use various on site equipment and coolant supply to maintain cooling and/or provide coolant from some off site source.

72 hours... is certainly a lot more than the 12 or so they had at Fukushima. But it's really not that much considering just how many things can go wrong at once.

I wonder what prevents them from capturing the steam from the spent fuel storage and running it through a condenser that is connected to a ground heat exchanger (basically tubes run into the earth)

Everything is natural convection or gravity-fed in a blackout station scenario, so there's no way to pump the steam back down into the ground. Also, the ground wouldn't dissipate the heat from the steam fast enough, and would quickly reach a hot equilibrium temperature. It's basically a low capacity heat sink quickly saturated.

Guess: tremendous amounts of heat needing to dissipate would overwhelm all but an enormous ground heat exchanger?

True, but space is generally not a problem at nuclear plants because there is a huge area around them to protect against the accidental release of radiation. Fourier's law for heat conduction would suggest that if you had enough surface area in just steel pipes you could dump a megawatt or more of excess heat into the surrounding atmosphere. In an unconstrained atmosphere (like your heat exchanger structure is outside) that would induce an air current that would further enhance the ability to dump heat into the air passively.

If you had a larger water reserve you could also build the equivalent of a Watt steam pump that could use the heat in the steam to pump water from the reserve into the cask pond. Time to run some simulations to see whether that is doable at all.

Exactly what I was thinking as I read the article, why not just slap the equivalent of a giant passive CPU cooler on it. At that scale you should be able to generate real airflow from the convection currents, making the whole thing more efficient. And you've got a basically unlimited atmosphere to dump the heat into.

Build it on the coast and put the heat sink in a shallow tidal pool fed from the ocean and you could have a massive evaporative cooler. But then you have the very real possibility of a tsunami damaging/disabling the system somehow (e.g. covering it with debris that make it less efficient, washing part of it away.)

If you had a very large, very deep lake though, that should be incredibly efficient. Or a river with a good flow rate.

I'm not sure how much heat a typical commercial nuclear reactor designed for power generation produces, but the reactors at Hanford and Savannah River (used for plutonium production, not power[1]) generated heat measured in gigawatts[2]. That's why they were built next to large rivers - because of the massive cooling requirements.

Maybe you were taking that into account, or maybe heat production drops by a factor of 1000 during an unexpected shutdown, but I read your comment as being that the design you have in mind is limited to a few megawatts.

[1] Except for the N reactor, which was dual-use. [2] https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/pu50yc.html

I was specifically commenting on the spent fuel pool which generates much less heat (at most about megawatt as far as I can find in the literature). However those pools have been a source of issues at Fukishima as there were some indications that the pool could reach criticality under the loss of cooling. (which rapidly escalates the heat production!) The referenced video talks about cooling the spent fuel passively for 72 hrs and then having to turn on a pump to add more water. (it doesn't say where the steam is going, presumably its being vented) So that got me thinking about letting the steam go through pipes forming a heat exchanger (either in the ground or in the air, and after this discussion the air would be better) so that as it condensed it could be returned to the spent fuel pond rather than lost.

Meanwhile, solar appears to be leaping forward in China. From the end of the article:

"All the while, nuclear is falling further behind renewable solar and wind power. As Schneider notes, the 3.3 GW of new nuclear capacity connected to the grid worldwide in 2017 (including three in China and a fourth in Pakistan built by Chinese firms) pales in comparison to the 53 GW of solar power installed in China alone. "

Why is the nuclear industry plagued with cost and schedule overruns? And shouldn’t they have thought by now, “hey our estimates are always off so let’s double them”?

As the article states, they lost their competency. Here in France, the reason is poor planning, focus on cost-cutting and lack of long term vision by top management and government. EDF, the historical state power company turned into a private company in 2004, laid off most of the technicians that built the power plants over the years and subcontracted all the maintenance work to hundreds of subcontractors that fight for the lowest bid and employ only underqualified people, who often work in illegal conditions. The latest EPR reactor in construction in France is riddled with defects, the pressure vessel, built by Framatome, also absorbed by EDF, has uneven carbon content which means it could crack. The concrete enclosure has many large holes due to poor work. The bridge on top of the reactor was made of low-quality steel bought in Russia and had to be replaced. Basically everything is badly done, because they constantly try too make it in the cheapest way possible. But it's not working out for them because fortunately the nuclear safety authority is there to force them to redo things correctly. In its current state, the nuclear industry is basically dead in France. As another example, they can't decomission the plants arriving in end of life, and EDF officially postponed it until 2100.

>As the article states, they lost their competency.

I think people undereatimate how bleak the short term future (50-100 years) is looking right now. We've forgotten how to properly build many of the things we once touted as the pinnacles of modern civilization and the current societal status quo is too fractured and stressed to ever pursue the kind of learning process needed to reaquire that knowledge. This is but one example among many.

We have plenty of competence in wind and solar energy. What we need to pay attention to is that many of the nuclear plants built in the past are flawed, and so we always had less competence at building them than we thought.

Not at all. We had plenty of competence. We just chose to save a buck instead of using it.

And the risk ? "You cannot blame me for that !"

(especially since this is taxpayer funds, ie. everyone, decided by democratic vote, at least in France and the US. The democratic contract ought to mean that since we collectively decided to do this, we are also collectively responsible for the results, and yes, even if you voted for the other guy)

You appear to be certain that you know a lot about whom to blame, but the reality is that it's unclear that we ever had the ability to build a large number of reliable nuclear power plants.

>…it's unclear that we ever had the ability to build a large number of reliable nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power plants have been safer and more reliable than other forms of power.

In terms of reliability, nuclear has had the highest capacity factor of any source of power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

In terms of accidents, nuclear has had a much better safety record than any other form of power up this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

(They don’t cover ground based solar which I would think would actually be the safest. Why do people keep wanting to subsidize roof top solar?)

Some other links on deaths due to energy production: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. What if the Alison Canyon was a nuclear storage site (instead of a natural gas storage site) and 11,000 people had to be evacuated - how much would the media have covered that? Another recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 (YES 200 thousand!) people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. I can't blame some for being afraid of nuclear power, but there are many who should know better.

”Why do people keep wanting to subsidize roof top solar?”

Ground-based solar has a cost in terms of the land being unavailable for other purposes, such as agriculture or housing or even just maintaining ecosystems in their natural state.

But roof-top solar is making use of a resource that is otherwise unproductive space anyway. There are also benefits to having energy production right at the point of use, since you avoid grid losses and are offsetting the retail cost of energy rather than selling into the grid at wholesale prices.

>...Ground-based solar has a cost in terms of the land being unavailable for other purposes, such as agriculture or housing or even just maintaining ecosystems in their natural state.

True, but I was mostly comparing the safety record. The death rate for rooftop solar is probably at least an order of magnitude worse than ground based solar. Even with subsidies it is also much more expensive.

>...There are also benefits to having energy production right at the point of use, since you avoid grid losses and are offsetting the retail cost of energy rather than selling into the grid at wholesale prices.

Very little of rooftop solar is used on site - it is just added to the grid.

We know we are incapable, because deaths per GWh for nuclear power are lower than solar or wind. Oh wait. No. That's opposite.

When you elect representatives, you delegate a lot of authority to those representatives. No one picks who to vote solely on nuclear policy, and you could argue that if it you actually polled voters it probably wouldn't rank very high in terms of priorities, especially not nuclear at any cost.

I feel like this outlook discredits a lot of wonderful young people out there.

And yet, the UK government awarded EDF the contract to build the new Hinkley Point C plant, to the same EPR design.

Decommissioning nuclear plants is hugely expensive and a problem all over the world. It’s one of the main reasons why nuclear is now so expensive.

One hope is that it may be cheaper in future with advances in robotics, etc, which can operate safely in contaminated environments.

This perfectly illustrates why I'm absolutely against nuclear energy. You know, all those pro nuclear advocates apparently assume that powerplants will be run by selfless companies that only care about safety and human well being and are content as soon as they can cover their expenses. I can't fathom how you can be this disconnected from reality.

Reality is that you cut costs, and keep cutting costs more and more as long as that thing doesn't blow up, and if you have problems or minor leakage that you would have to report but can cover up, you do so.

And we didn't even get started with nuclear waste. What could and should be done and what is currently being done is again miles apart in many instances.

>>> hundreds of subcontractors that fight for the lowest bid and employ only underqualified people

ahhhh the marvels of competition...

But there is no competition. The company that is using subcontractors has a law-sustained monopoly and political connections. Of course they just need to look for the cheapest guys.

There are lots of large construction projects that overrun their budget, not just for nuclear power plants.

Just check out Berlin's new airport:

Fifteen years planning phase, construction start 2006 with initial estimates of five years construction time. Initial cost estimate ~700 million Euros. Cost estimate at the start of construction 2400 million Euros. Cost estimate five years into the construction 4200 million. Cost estimate nine years into the construction nearly 6000 million Euros... now we're 12 years into construction and still don't have a reliable estimate when it's going to open.

And it's not like we haven't been building new airports for decades like with nuclear power plants.

I work at a nuclear equipment supplier.

The focus on paperwork as opposed to real engineering work is something to be in awe at. Process drains competence, but even under ideal scenarios, these are large, complicated machines, and the base incentives for all layers of management are to underestimate the time and cost to complete a project. For many nuclear projects, cost overruns do not hurt the people who made the initial estimates, and the estimates are impossible to do correctly anyway due to the vast complexity.

EDIT: One thing I will also add is that as time goes on, the corpus of knowledge you need to know in order to effectively engineer the parts we supply only grows, as the nuclear fleet ages, documentation rots, and more code editions are released. This means that young engineers face a steeper learning while the graybeards (70 year old engineers, not 35 years old, aka graybeard in software years) face retirement.

The politics of it all introduces a lot of problems. You don't just have some single guy or few people that decide to build a plant. You gotta go through federal politics to even be allowed to attempt to build a nuclear facility, and lower levels of government will have a lot of push back to not put the actual facility near themselves, especially fuel and waste storage. There is a lot of pockets to lube up with money along the way before you even get to having your plant designs reviewed and approved. There are also international politics to deal with in most cases depending on how you are sourcing your material. And by time you get all that done and are ready to build the plant, there is an entirely new set of politicians to introduce more potential holdbacks, and then any one working in the construction phases are going to be demanding a premium just because of what it is.

And although those costs aren't unknown, if you do state all those extra costs straight out people will just assume its going to cost even more on top of that anyways and deny the project from the start.

They do -- And then they come in at 2x time/cost of the doubled estimate.

The initial estimate for the Vogtle expansion in Georgia was $11.5 billion total with first power coming in 2016 and 2017 for the two reactors. The cost was repeatedly revised upwards with the latest estimate at $27 billion and they aren't expecting power before 2022. The entire project might still be cancelled and rate payers will just lose ten billion+ dollars.

Can you imagine a project that is over 100% over budget in time and money when the scale is billions of dollars and a decade?

Anyone with the background should try and pencil out a financial forecast to make money off tying up tens of billions of dollars for 15 years before you see a penny of revenue.

Meanwhile in 8 months in India they have built 648 MW solar plant that costs $679 million [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/gM-0lrIxCnE

11 of the 12 most polluted cities on earth are in India. They need to build a lot faster given coal is still 3/4 of their energy generation. The US is a laggard on solar as a percentage of energy generation, and even the US has a larger share of its energy derived from solar than India does.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43972155

India's air pollution problem is only partially due to power plants. Much of it comes from things like cooking fires, agricultural burning, and combustion vehicles. Closing down coal would be a step forward, but wouldn't solve the problem alone.

Pretty much off topic by me but:

Do you know what is the total surface area of currently installed solar panels by SolarCity?

Alternatively the largest total area solar panels operated by a single entity?

(it's for an astronomy idea I have)

Why don't they build sites with many small productised nuclear sub propulsion type reactors, as opposed to a single monstrous and pretty much bespoke reactor? I'm sure there's a good reason but on the surface it seems like commodity reactors would be a far cheaper approach in the end.

> ...commodity reactors would be a far cheaper approach in the end.

I've read claims that in the US, unfortunately there are no commodity reactors, with commensurately commodity costs in licensing, environmental and regulatory approvals. Each reactor is effectively a one-off effort, with a minority of transferable capital equipment, skills, etc. I've also read that France's reactors are far more uniform, and they reap many benefits from it.

I wish more research and engineering could be justified into ultra-small reactors like described in this Quora response [1]. Not really sure what he meant by a magneto-hydrodynamic power conversion because I didn't picture a conductive fluid involved from his description, but I wonder if the reaction can be scaled down even smaller than the proposed 100 GJ burst (I somehow suspect battery chemistries don't take kindly to those scales of bursts).

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-micro-nuclear-reactor-that-...

The whole point of the new generation of both Westinghouse and EDF reactors is that each would be a commodity. And both are stumbling at the start.

Because there are natural economies of scale in building larger nuclear reactors. Submarine propulsion reactors are several times more expensive than commercial reactors on a per-unit-power basis, even after accounting for the overruns.

The large size of nuclear reactors is often one of the factors blamed for their high cost.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which could be manufactured in factories rather than in bespoke, on-site builds, are regarded as a technology that could bring down the cost of nuclear builds in future.

I suspect submarine reactors are expensive because of their unique design constraints, relatively small production runs, and the fact that they are contracted/built on military budgets rather than in competitive commercial environments.

I was being lazy in my post I suppose: work on this idea is well underway. Whether it proves successful or not still seems unclear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

The wikipedia article doesn't do a good job of selling it.

Lets take a statement like this: "Nuclear reactor fuel can be low-enriched uranium, with a concentration of less than 20% of fissile 235 U. This low quantity, non-weapons-grade uranium makes the fuel less desirable for weapons production."

20% enrichment is far higher than what is typically used in commercial power reactors. Because of the exponential behavior of uranium enrichment, 20% is almost all the way up to weapon's-grade material. Its part of why Iran's stockpile of 20-40% material was so concerning - they could have very quickly converted that into bombs.

If you have the technology to crank out 20% U-235 in quantity, then you also have the technology to make weapons in quantity.

Here's another concerning statement, "Many SMRs are fast reactors..." Fast reactors are inherently capable of being used for mass-production of plutonium. Plutonium production from fast breeder reactors is far less expensive than uranium enrichment, and an even higher proliferation risk.

Honestly, I think that the only reason small modular reactors have some traction because they appear to require less capital investment than full-scale reactors, thus drawing VC slush money.

This makes fusion look almost cheap :-)

And look almost quick to market ... in 50 years (as they always say).

They do, the logistics of constructing a nuclear power plant is one of the most complex things humans currently do, and federal funding that was promised at the outset of construction can be (and in this case, was) reneged by a new administration.

Mike Shellenberger argues the way to build nuclear plants on time and budget is to build the same design over and over cookie cutter style. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/21...

Basically we're building so few of them so seldom, that every time it's a FOAK and we start the learning process from scratch.

They do.

If you want an order of magnitude of how huge the drifts are, have a look at the construction of the EPR of Flamanville in France[1]: started in 2007 with an initial timeline of 5 years and budget of €3.3bn, it is still not completed as of today (they just announced targeting the end of 2018) and the current budget is over €10.5bn.

In the end, the complexity, criticality and sheer scale of these projects make them extremely hard to lead properly and any setback can have gigantic impacts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

The Flamanville EPR is a bit of a special case since it's the first of its kind, so it's not surprising that it's not on budget and schedule, I hope EDF learned some lessons from that.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Relevant: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...

Because the government is heavily involved. The process is both massively bureaucratic and political, which is a surefire way to spend way more time and money than originally estimated.

s/nuclear/software/g

There, fixed that for ya. :P

Your comment is more insightful that u realize ;)

Software projects often suffer from exponential variations in specs, implementation, testing, environment, etc.

Nuclear projects often suffer from inflexible and pre-defined specs and constraints.

That happens in basically every industry. The problem is that if you double your own estimate, but no one else does, then your project doesn't get selected. Also, if you double your estimate and go ahead with the project, it will have a psychological impact which causes wasteful spending and slow work that will result in additional overruns...

I haven't heard much about cost overruns for wind farms and solar panel farms.

Solar thermal, yes, that's a startup industry.

To clarify, it happens in basically any industry with megaprojects.

So, it applies to all of the recent large solar, wind, and battery projects... which appear to hit their budgets and dates? Or are those not megaprojects?

Most megaprojects have mega complexity. In contrast, wind, solar and batteries are scaling by having many units, feeding in to a dumb grid, and don't have the complexity explosion.

Distributed generation and smart loads were invented to add enough complexity (technical, regulatory) to allow them to achieve massive system failure :-)

This is why I think solar can win in the long term (wind already has won) - just scale up linearly. Doing so is geared toward standard assembly line production, standardized installation for the technicians, regardless of scale.

Imagine their surprise when the estimates are still wrong after doubling.

Because NIMBYs have figured out how to drag the process out indefinitely. It's very effective at making nuclear projects un-economical.

What's left of Westinghouse is now owned by some private equity firm.

It's sad that, as evidenced by the AP1000 Youtube videos, the nuclear industry (at least in Westinghouse's case) appears to have become sclerotic and unable to even hire a dynamic visual communication team. You can't disrupt a reactor, which leads to understandable caution, but surely they could have understood that, given nuclear power's ominous reputation, you need to have the best PR and visualizations money can buy.

It's owned by Toshiba, I believe.

I'm all for safer reactors coupled with expansion of nuclear power, but how is China buying yet another a packaged product from the west a "double first"?

Because they are the first exemplars of these packaged products (note: plural, one each from Framatome|Areva/EDF/Siemens in Europe† and Westinghouse in the US‡) to be built anywhere in the world ahead of other construction projects. Thus: "double first".

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

‡ http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/New-Plants/AP1000-PWR

ps: it's a little bit worrying I can't find any single commercial page detailing the EPR

The Chinese had lots of involvement in building these, and neither the AP1000 or the EPR is online anywhere but China yet...

why are they using this unsafe tech (Pu-U) when molten salt reactors are safer? https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html

Wish we had news on the Pebble Bed stuff.

Well, Mammoet, the heavy-lift company, was able to move the jammed German pebble bed reactor to a new location where it can cool down for 60 years or so until somebody figures out how to dismantle it.[1]

[1] https://www.mammoet.com/cases/avrjulich/

The link indicates Mammonet moved a reactor built in 1950. Are you sure it is related to pebble bed design at all?

I don't know why that article says it was built in the 50's, it was built in the 60's https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_(Jülich)

Yes. its the original design model which subsequently moved to China. I don't doubt the design flaws which were in the 1950s model have been overcome, but man. The Strontium90 burden.. thats one sick sad story.

That's quite some clusterfuck.

Every reactor design which had something mechanically or chemically complex going on inside the radioactive zone has had major problems. Pebble bed reactors jam. Sodium cooled reactors have fires. Helium cooled reactors have leaks. The interior environment is hostile, unmaintainable, and has to work for decades. That's why we're stuck with water-based reactors.

Well, yes and no. Basically LWRs are good enough for the time being. When/if there's a major expansion of nuclear power, we'll need breeders and reprocessing, but right now there's no pressing need.

Right now what nuclear power needs (from the technical POV) is to reduce the time and cost of construction. Which, most likely, won't happen by introducing new and unproven reactors and fuels.

“The White House cited this nuclear nexus in a May memo instructing Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, to force utilities to buy power from unprofitable nuclear and coal plants.”

I hope people noticed the part about subsidizing coal. Natural gas is so cheap that coal is no longer competitive, which is a good thing.

The administration is extending the life of coal plants that aren’t profitable.

No, this is not what this is all about. It's about national security and grid resiliency. When all you have is 2 pipelines with first dibbs on residential heating purposes, it can lead to blackouts. We almost had a major one in 2014 when there wasn't enough gas supply to New England. 80% of the coal that's supposed to retire in 5 years had to be brought online else several states in New England would have had rolling blackouts with millions in damage.

Some would argue coal has to go at all costs, and I understand it is awful for the environment and kills people due to pollution (absolutely horrible). However, getting rid of nuclear and coal completely is premature according to much of the literature put out by independent and neutral parties. It's ok for places like Germany to get rid of Nuclear power when they can get it from France down the road.

> national security

That's a bullshit ticket to do anything they want. Next.

> grid resiliency

As others have mentioned, batteries. Next.

> unprofitable nuclear (from GP)

> However, getting rid of nuclear

Do you recognize the difference between antiquated, unprofitable nuclear power plants and modern ones like those in the article? Your comment seems to lump them all togther, which suggests you don't. The US has many of the former and none of the latter. The latter would be beneficial.

No my friend. It isn't a joke. This is being taken seriously throughout the entire industry. Batteries are nowhere near where they need to be. If we lose a pipeline in New England, batteries will not last long enough to serve load along with solar and wind. That might be viable in 10-15 years, but not now. Look at all the latest reports from ISO-NE. They are the neutral party running the grid in that area. I understand very well that the majority of nuclear plants slated to retire in the US are doing so because of economics. I'm not interested in something that isn't slated to be built over here anytime soon.

Batteries aren't good enough yet and won't be good enough for medium term grid level storage for another 10-20 years.

The only real option we have right now is hydro and more expansive hvdc grids.

Would you mind elaborating on how centralized plants are better from a national security perspective? Wouldn't it be easier for an attacker to disrupt a coal or nuclear plant than it would be to disrupt a more distributed scheme like wind or solar?

Wind and solar if distributed is better if A) it currently exists and B) enough transmission exists to connect it to the higher voltage grid and C) the sun always shines and the wind always blows.

Several regions of our grid don't have near enough of these resources. You might only have 10% of your fuel-mix as renewable, but the percentage is constantly growing.

Having a nuclear plant that can generate a freaking GW 24/7 for years gives you fuel diversity and security. Coal plants typically have months of fuel on-site.

In the future, we can imagine tons and tons of renewable and batteries working together for a distributed and secure grid, but we're just not there yet despite a lot of excitement just like Musk hasn't really setup a Mars colony yet.

Batteries are a thing now. And they are stepping up to the plate to fix things when coal plants are failing.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/thats-a-recor...

>would have had rolling blackouts with millions in damage.

Well. There is more than one solution to that problem. What batteries bring to the table are grid stability, which addresses exactly the types of damage problems you are talking about.

Agreed in theory, but we're honestly just not there yet. In fact the large grid-size batteries aren't even a 1/10 of a percent of grid capacity. Getting enough batteries to cover hundreds of GW of demand ain't cheap.

Coal is not exactly cost-free either. And you don't need to match the grid capacity... that's a red herring. Even a tiny fraction of the grid capacity having battery backup is enough to have a disproportionate positive effect on grid stability.

Never said coal was cost free. Economically coal flat out loses. Everyone knows that and it isn't relevant to the discussion of grid reliability/resiliency. A tiny fraction of grid capacity having battery backup would be nice. Well, technically they already have lots of batteries and auxillary power, but you're talking about really big batteries I assume. Regardless, the answer in the short term isn't get rid of coal and replace with batteries and more renewable. Indeed that will most likely happen in the long-term, but not in the ~5 year frame.

That'll cost one hell of a lot more than just subsidizing those power plants for a bit. Meanwhile batteries are getting cheaper.

We will do this, do not worry. But give it 5 years, maybe a decade.

How'd you figure out which solution was the lowest cost? Because if subsidizing these power plants was the lowest cost, that would probably be already happening. Normally grid operators use an economic model (including huge penalties for blackouts) to pick the solution with the lowest cost. Batteries are cost-effective in the short-term, and natural gas storage is cost-effective in the medium-term. Subsidizing expensive coal and nuclear is not cost-effective at any timescale.

Add a carbon tax, then maybe nuclear might still make sense.

As much as I propose to shut down coal plants everywhere, fast, grid operators don't have a natural incentive to keep the grid stable.

It's the job of the State (in broad terms) to either force how that's supposed to work through legislation, or to nudge it with legislated incentives.

If what we have now is that coal is a guarantor for base load conditions, I can see how a politician may come to the (on the surface) reasonable conclusion that we need to prop up the guarantor of base load, coal in this case, if coal was in danger of being closed due to it not being profitable anymore.

This kind of thinking has a LOT of precedent in other areas. (The US subsidized corn to make starvation in case of a global blockade/war impossible. The EU subsidized farms in general for the same reason.) These stop gap measures can easily spiral out of control.

What see is a severe lack of vision. We should legislate, by force or nudge, towards a bright solution with modern solutions. Batteries, a decentralized grid etc is much better option for national security than some large coal plants.

The idea that grid operators don't have an incentive to keep the grid stable is completely false. I work with and talk to and support system operators on a daily basis and it is pretty much the only thing on their minds as they monitor the grid 24/7 and some days can get very tense. To use an analogy, you basically just said Air Traffic Controllers have zero incentive to keep planes from crashing.

On that level yes, just like doctors care about patients. But the owner of a coal plant will not keep operating a coal plant at a loss. The plant will be shuttered. The same goes for a private hospital operating at a loss.

I was referring to those regulations/legislated incentives, actually, sorry that I wasn't very clear. Usually they're monetary and the utility gets to choose the most cost-effective way to meet these requirements.

Regarding your last point. You're thinking in the long-term (5-15 years). The fuel-security concern is right now and batteries aren't going to fix this in a couple of years.

So the vision should be something like: “we will subsidise coal with this many dollars and match that with investing in batteries “ (or whatever).

Not just defending status quo.

Canada is a great place to generate huge amounts of reliable power; there's large masses of relatively geologically stable and safe space to build nuclear on, and huge amounts of flowing water through most of it that makes for lots of Hydro. Canada already sells huge amounts of cheap power to the USA.

If only Trump wasn't hell-bent on spoiling that relationship.

So one can keep the coal plant but don't run it.

Subsidizing running it when you only need it around as reserve seems like a really bad idea.

Yes. Coal plants take a long time to spin up or down, so are mostly suitable for base loads.

Methane is a much more potent (up to 100x) greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide [1] and previously unknown methane leaks could greatly undermining our current understanding of the carbon footprint of methane.

While I do think other renewable energy sources (solar/wind/geothermo) are the true safer source for mankind's long term continuity, I don't think we can achieve carbon neutral without Nuclear. If we discourage nuclear, it might not even matter in the carbon neutral in 50 years as climate change could potentially wipe a lot of us out on mother earth as it's currently enroute to a irreversible disastrous future.

[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/natural...

Methane is a potent GHG, but its residency time in the atmosphere is on the order of one quarter as long as CO2.

So in terms of our ability to adjust future climate forcings, releasing lots of methane in the short term and observing the many negative effects in the near future seems much better to me than releasing lots of CO2 and seeing the cumulative effects of those CO2 emission grow more slowly but last longer.

I think humans tend to deal better with quickly emerging crises than slow ones, so I’d much rather have a methane ecosystem we see problems with than exchange it for an equal forcing amount of CO2.

Of course, we can and should pursue CO2 reductions and fix accidental CH4 emissions at the same time.

Many of the problems caused by warming would effectively be permanent though. Melted ice caps wont reform any time soon, especially since when they stop reflecting sunlight, the Albedo change alone will kick in even more warming. It could also take thousands of years to melt the tundra, slowly releasing vast quantities of methane, so even though individual molecules break down they will get replenished constantly over a long period.

Finally the biggest sink of methane in the atmosphere is the hydroxyl reaction in the troposphere which - generates carbon dioxide.

Excellent points, all!

Certainly the hydroxyl reaction leaves behind CO2, but much less of it than an equivalent forcing of plain CO2, is my point.

I still tend to think investing in cheap CH4 plants and pipelines is better than investing in coal, but I’ll happily concede the point that increased radiative forcings from any source have non-reversible effects, and we should be pricing in those externalities as soon as we can.

The sooner we can get a (high) radiative forcing tax in place, the better.

When methane's "residency time in the atmosphere" is over, doesn't that mean it's just converted to CO2? So wouldn't that mean its time is effectively 1.25x CO2's?

I'm actually asking, I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge on this.

Because each molecule is more potent before breaking down than a long-resident CO2 molecule, you’re talking about a much smaller mass of CH4 per unit of forcing.

Of course our knowledge of all the current and emergent syncs and sources for all GHG emissions is an evolving science, so we can’t speak with precision about all this.

> I think humans tend to deal better with quickly emerging crises than slow ones, so I’d much rather have a methane ecosystem we see problems with than exchange it for an equal forcing amount of CO2.

yeahnah, we can see the problems with CO2 just fine thanks.

> All the while, nuclear is falling further behind renewable solar and wind power. As Schneider notes, the 3.3 GW of new nuclear capacity connected to the grid worldwide in 2017 (including three in China and a fourth in Pakistan built by Chinese firms) pales in comparison to the 53 GW of solar power installed in China alone.

Somehow I don't think nuclear has any chance of coming back. The tone of the article is that no one can figure out how to build them.

By the time we have lots of nuclear plants, we'll have even more cheap solar panels and cheap batteries.

> By the time we have lots of nuclear plants, we'll have even more cheap solar panels and cheap batteries.

Probably true, for the better. But we shouldn't shut down all the existing nuclear plants prematurely simply we fear a meltdown. Newer design are MUCH safer and Fukushima type meltdown is much less possible.

Don't forget, the weather dependent, and high peak output during daytime but zero output at night time nature of the solar is still unresolved until mass grid-scale battery or some sort of energy storage device is deployed ubiquitous into our power infrastructure. That's gonna take forever.

We haven't found another truly safe and renewable yet mass-scale energy source yet - nuclear is one right now. Don't abandon it before we find a reliable replacement.

I think many people miss the larger context of why nuclear (fission for now, fusion hopefully someday) is so important to continue to develop alongside of sources such as solar and wind- energy density and ultimate cost per kWh.*

Solar is good, but the amount of power we can get out of it, even at much greater saturation levels than where we are at today, is not a vast amount more than we have access to today with fossil sources. Many of the upcoming resource issues (cheap, potable water and phosphorus for fertilizer come to mind as some of the more pressing needs) are not an issue from a lack of the material itself, but an issue of being able to provide quantities of the material at a low enough price, because the energy required using current systems of production is too expensive. If electricity were, say, 10x or 100x cheaper than it is today, entire categories of issues would simply cease to be, because we could, quite literally, power our way out of them.

(* nuclear as it stands today is not cheap. It has the potential to be, however. Solar and wind have much harder limits simply due to the physical constraints of having less energy available to harvest per unit space.)

Relevant links for the interested:

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization

I'm just going off the wiki articles [1] and some random articles [eg, 2], but given the rarity of 'Fukushima type meltdowns' I'm still confused about why people are worried about them. Flooding and violent storms are much more dangerous. Fukushima's meltdown doesn't appear to have posed (or be posing) any particular threat to humans, given the drought of observable impacts. That said, I'm starting to understand that the risk is to farmland (although I am /extremely suspicious/ that most of the people who don't like nuclear haven't figured that out).

Given how hysteric the response is to radiation risk, I'd really like to see a trustworthy source describe how and why the legal limits are set to what they are - maybe one day I will.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136

From a cognitive/psychological/understanding perspective:

Fundamentally the reason it is hard for average citizens to understand the dangers of radioactive materials, is because humans are pretty bad at understanding huge numbers, similar to how we are poor at dealing with low probabilities.

The big number in question is avogadro's number. A tiny speck of material contains huge amounts of nuclei. A single nuclear disintegration (after being say ingested) can cause mutations in multiple ways (chemically by daughter nucleus and alpha particle, compton effect knocking an electron away, beta particle ionization, ...). for a given level of enrichment in a radioactive material, the number of fissionable nuclei is proportional to Avogadro's constant, it's pretty hard to fathom the number of future disintegrations.

Another way in which the paramount requirement that these materials not mix with our environment is hard to visualize is again Avogadro's number: once mixed into the environment it becomes very hard, to unmix them, again because of the sheer number of nuclei in even small samples of normal matter.

Then there is also of course our poor intuition with low probability events, and that any unforseen rate/probability that is greater than the sum of all rates/probabilities of all known failure mechanisms would easily dwarf this sum of known failure probabilities, since we engineer the known ones to be as small as possible.

Just today I read in the local paper that our nuclear reactors apparently weren't built to specification, and the steel in the reinforced concrete is degrading, and would not withstand many events (like a plane crashing into the reactor)

There is a known example of a hijacked plane, where the perpetrators threatened to crash into an experimental nuclear reactor. Cryptocurrencies did not exist yet so they were forced to land in order to receive their demands, today they would not have to...

The legal limits are defined in terms of natural background radiation.

...what?

I don't agree with any part of that. Public fear of nuclear power has nothing to do with the magnitude of disintegrations per second/becquerels/curies, Compton scattering, schroedingers equation, or any other science buzz word you want to apply. Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about?

The resistance to nuclear power is a straight up FUD campaign. Everyone knows how radiation works - you get sunburned every day and you drastically raise your chances of getting skin cancer. In fact nuclear power is safer per twh than any other fuel source, by a lot. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

I think you simplify a bit. Nuclear is scary because it's something invisible that can kill you. No smell, no sensation of heat or light, nothing. Oh, and it can take a long time after exposure before it kills and then it's too late to do anything about it.

This is the stuff or horror movies and the supernatural. It even comes with the same kind of charms and potions that the supernatural stories do! You take pills to protect you, and your wear a charm in a string around your neck to detect the evil. You give the charm to a temple where the learned priests pour over the results. (Not really, but you give the film to a lab for development.)

This is not like sun bathing at all - you sit in the sun for an hour, you feel the heat and the radiation, and you think, maybe I should get inside? Nah, not yet, it feels so good. Maybe I should not have another drink? Nah, it feels good. These are normal tradeoffs we do all the time between pleasure (or convenience) and risk.

We often fear what we don't understand, correct?

I was not explaining public fear of nuclear power, as you seem to think I was explaining that, I was explaining why it is so hard to scientifically understand the level of danger of radioactivity without exagerating the threats (wheither nuclear power, or other sources of radioactivity).

"Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about?"

I am not making this complicated, I am replying some of the ways why understanding the real dangers of radioactivity are hard to understand, as the post to which I replied asked. It's laudable and pretty rare when a person solicit's a greater level of detail of why a certain class of threats (here radioactivity) is treated as so dangerous by governments and scientists.

No not everyone knows how radiation works, and I specifically consider the comparison to sunburns very disingenious: UV has a shallow penetration depth, and organismms succeed in evolving proteins to absorb the UV in this thin layer of penetration depth in the skin: melanin!

There is no melanin for gamma rays!

That said, of course certain forms and levels of UV can be very dangerous (i.e. ozone producing mercury line in cramped spaces, cataracts, inadequate natural or artificial skin protection,...)

Let me illustrate how Avogadro's constant is essential to understand threats from radioactivity:

Suppose it was a much smaller number, say a hundred, then mole of material consists of ~ 100 molecules/atoms/nuclei (I am knowingly conflating them because I consider orders of magnitude not a pedantic factor of low order).

1. That means that a typical mole of material could only have ~100 future disintegrations, since the radioactive nuclei have a decay chain of a certain length, and we ignore small constant factors. So in this alternative unniverse with small Avogadro number, the same amount in weight or volume of material has much less opportunity to cause mutations.

2. It also means that if we consider a mole of contaminated material from Chernobyl in our alternate world, that we are talking about ~100 nuclei, some of which are radioactive. Then it becomes feasible to sort all matter which we suspect contaminated by say mass spectrometer.

However in our world Avogadro's number is enormous, so for us it is mandatory to monitor radiation levels, and to lock away and protect radioactive materials until they decay.

I agree there certainly EXISTS a straight up FUD campaign, but not all of the resistance to nuclear power is part of this FUD campaign. Just like there is a campaign to manufacturee consent for nuclear power, and not all people pro nuclear power are part of that campaign.

The exposure limits are based on the number of cancers from Fukushima, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, them extrapolated down to tolerable population limits (reduce exposure until signal is below background). A multiplier was added in to account for the fact that radiation workers (x-ray techs, power plant staff, etc) are at far more risk of slipping above background than the general public.

The noise is non-trivial: 1 in 4 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point.

Compare the fallout map for land that's still uninhabitable in Japan due to Fukushima to the area surrounding the Indian Point plant outside of NYC. If all of the Nuke plants were on the far eastern seaboard ~100 miles from civilization, it'd be one thing, but many of them are immediately proximate to major cities (since that's where power is used!).

Fortunately, the meltdown at Fukushima didn't cause too much damage, but that was mostly just luck and a beneficial location. Can you imagine the cost and disruption of a similar meltdown 25 miles outside of New York City? Or at the Pilgrim Nuclear Station that's ~30 miles outside of Boston?

Umm.. yeah, I can't quite imagine the death and destruction if a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hits New York, followed by 10+ meter tsunami. People seem to gloss over that part.

> ...until mass grid-scale battery or some sort of energy storage device is deployed...

I'm not confident we'll ever see anything of the sort. Just based on the scale of current/projected electricity usage we're talking pyramid++ level projects.

Assuming we did have reasonable grid-scale storage, though, we'd bump into a pretty painful issue: the climate crisis is one of energy of which electricity is just a portion.

We don't just need grid scale storage, we need storage to handle gridS for low carbon synthetic fuels, shipping, and air travel. We know what that looks like for fission: approx 10 times current reactor numbers. We have no idea what that looks like for WWS...

Nuclear power requires grid-scale storage. The power output can't vary much, so excess needs to be stored for when there's a shortage.

No it does not.

The power output can cary massively, especially with multiple reactors, and there are verified designs that are inherently load-following. You build nuclear capacity to demand, including peaker plants and such, you do not (and in all probability can not), try and store your way through peak demand.

1. China bought 4x nuclear plants from Westinghouse. It was clear to everyone involved that China was going to clone their design. Everything had to be built with Chinese labor and engineers and the entire blueprints were handed over to the Chinese. After those 4 are built, China will build as many as they want themselves, likely royalty-free.

2. the 3.3Gw is 24x7 minus downtime/maintenance. The 53GW is less than 12h/day, depending on how it is installed it may well be far less than 12h/day of peak output. So likelier to be ~ 12-18Gw on a continuous basis given night time, cloud cover, rain, efficiency losses, etc. I agree the solar is still significant but it is less than the raw numbers make it appear.

1. For the near future, it seems China is planning to build lots of their own designs (which AFAIU are improved versions of previous generation French designs (not EPR)). https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/07/03...

2. Some quick duckduckgo'ing suggests average capacity factor of Chinese utility solar is around 15%. (Really good locations like SW USA can reach up to 27%) . With a capacity factor of 90% for nukes, it's 3 GW nukes and 8 GW solar.

Methane gun hypothesis (ie ESAS) is a real concern. Nuclear maybe necessary to drive carbon sequestration and complement other power gen.

clathrate gun is the pascal’s wager of climate change

This is just nuts. They throw a fit about solar subsidies but now they want to subsidize coal. This makes no sense unless you are a total reactionary.

It makes perfect sense if you assume the words and the actions are mere advertising for votes rather than anything intended to be consistent.

https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

Exactly. Solar and wind don't need fuel to be stored on-site, so they should benefit any national security needs. Yet, they are excluded from this latest picking-winners-and-losers subsidy.

>The administration is extending the life of coal plants that aren’t profitable.

Those free market lovers at it again!

trump is not exactly known for his free trade rhetoric

Advanced + nuclear sounds scary to me.

I would think 'primitive + nuclear' the scarier prospect.

May I intrigue/terrify you with naturally occurring fission reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

Of the kind that can't stay hot without water moderating, which is a different category in my book.

Is this comment supposed to sound like it comes from the anti-vax that lives in my head?

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