Three Mile Island closes for good
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
There are three types of energy production, as I see it: those that have little control of their production (wind, solar); those that have control of their production but are hard to change (nuclear); and those that can rapidly change their production (fossil fuels, hydro-electric).
Demand, on the other hand, fluctuates based on all the wants and needs of humans. You need a mix of all three.
http://www.ieso.ca/power-data (the supply graph over the last week is the most interesting).
Ontario has made nuclear work by demanding from it what it is absolutely best at: an unchanging, fixed supply of a large amount of electricity. 10.3-10.6 GW at all times for the last week (and probably a lot longer). Wind and solar help, but their inputs are so variable that they can't suffice. Gas and hydro make up the rest because it's easy for them to adjust their production.
Nuclear can work and be profitable, but only as a piece of the puzzle.
https://www.thestar.com/business/2009/07/14/26b_cost_killed_...
What about paying to store the (albeit small amount of) long lived waste? What is the cost of permanently, and safely, storing a tonne of very poisonous material for hundreds of thousands of years? And do not say " deep-geologic placement" as there is no geological structure that we know of that is stable and seperated from the biosphere for those periods.
Nuclear power is socialising extraordinary risk and making future generations pay for today's energy.
Yes it can be profitable. But never moral
And more modern designs than most countries use are much safer than the ones in the link.
This is where the detonation occurred
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hiroshima+Atomic+Bomb+Hypo...
It's not particularly relevant, but I thought it was interesting seeing the people living so close to the site of a nuclear detonation.
There's an interesting documentary, "The Babushkas of Chernobyl" about some women who refused to leave.
Sounds like bullshit to me. There's no way to tell if it's due to the accident, and the statistics of such cases are not conclusive. And of course it's a German organization, which is a country known to be irrationally anti-nuclear, burning brown coal just to offset the closed nukes which had zero impact on the environment.
I've never really understood this argument. Even if we set aside 1000 square miles of land for waste disposal, that's a rounding error in the amount of uninhabitable land on the planet. It's probably even a rounding error in land that has been made uninhabitable by humans for similarly long time spans.
I think the waste problem is awkward but far from a dealbreaker for nuclear energy, especially with breeder reactors and other more efficient designs.
The problem is that even though nuclear reactors work the overwhelming majority of the time, such that disasters are practically a rounding error, when they happen they're rather spectacular.
Where is the evidence of your century of uninhabitable failure mode going forward?
If you’re going to criticize, be sure to apply the same standard to all methods.
When you dig into it carefully, you’ll find nuclear to be one of the cleanest, safest solutions, taking into account cost to build and externalities, cost for waste, lifetime of the plant, etc.
And modern designs don’t render a place dangerous after failure. That’s 1950 talking, not 2019. Google nuclear reactor safety and read about it. You’ll be surprised.
It’s not the terror so many associate with the word nuclear.
Large scale hydro is probably the closest to nuclear in this respect.
And is notable because it's success mode also does something similar.
(Of course, the “success” mode of fossil fuel power renders the whole planet uninhabitable, but not from a single average-size generating station.)
Without comparing it to the morality of the alternatives, it's not really fair to say that.
The only other large power sources in existence today that are reliable and sufficient to meet demands are fossil fuels. Burning them has been demonstrated time and time again to shorten the lives of the millions who have to live near the pollution. Not to mention climate change, which is happening as a result of CO2 emissions.
Solar and wind are cheaper, but not reliable. You need to either have massive energy storage- whose cost to build would greatly exceed nuclear plants- or else additional fossil fuel plants to handle the fluctuations.
> if the operators have to pay insurance premiums against the possibility of catastrophic failure?
Nuclear in Ontario uses CANDU[0] reactors- a design which has never had any disasters. Insurance against catastrophic failure wouldn't be expensive given all of the long-proven safety features built in, and strong engineering regulations around operations.
> What is the cost of permanently, and safely, storing a tonne of very poisonous material for hundreds of thousands of years?
Cheaper than the costs to society for the thousands/millions of premature deaths each year from pollution and hundreds of millions who are going to be displaced from climate change. And worth pointing out as well that the CANDU design is versatile enough to be able to use the waste of some other reactor types or dismantled nuclear weapons as fuel.
It's all about context, is my point. And in the context of the world today, nuclear is (imho) the best choice as the baseline power generation system.
Consider the Hornsdale Power Reserve- the big set of Tesla batteries in Australia that everyone uses as an example of storage working. Very successful project. Storage for 129 MWh of energy.
Ontario's baseline need for energy, at the dead of night, is 11GW. This means you would need 85 of those facilities to handle just one hour where there's no wind (nor sunlight, given it's night time). In the winter, we have 15 hours of night per day in this province, so we need nearly 1300 of those facilities. And that's very dense energy storage.
Others have proposed pumped-water, which is actually a great fit given the number of dams we have, but is a problematic choice during times of drought when there's simply no water to pump (which are more and more common because of climate change). This is made worse when drought correlates with hot days when everyone wants to use their air conditioner.
To me, the ideal solution is a baseline of nuclear, along with solar + wind + batteries.
I only saw part of the picture, though. I didn't spot the revolution in natural gas extraction that was occurring and which is the interesting part of this story: nuclear power can't compete with natural gas! The prices of fossil fuels are simply too low.
This makes me happy that I chose a career in programming and crypto currency instead of trying to solve a problem that wasn't there.
We’d be much better off if, in fact, we were running out.
Steam turbines requires at least two systems to transfer heat across solid/fluid boundaries. In a coal burning power plant, these are the boiler (where heat is transferred from the hot combustion gases to the water/steam) and the condenser (where waste heat is transferred from the low pressure steam to the cooling water). PWRs have three such boundaries (fuel rods, steam generator, condenser).
In constrast, simple cycle combustion turbines requires no transfer of energy across solid/fluid interfaces. Combined cycle plants do, but for only 1/3 of their output. As a result, the power density of a combustion turbine based power plant can be very high.
So in evaluating coal vs natural gas in the US we commonly see the number quoted that it released 50% less CO2 at the pipe. But we never see the amount of methane included that otherwise wouldn’t be released. I would like to see something that compares the total effect of all greenhouse gases from coal vs natural gas not just the CO2 number. Gas may still be better. But it just obviously wouldn’t be the 50% that everyone loves to quote.
However, it's not a net positive for carbon emissions if it replaces nuclear, which is what's described in the article.
Solar and wind, meanwhile, are cheap enough that they're being built in massive numbers even without subsidies.
We just need to solve the energy storage gap.
Seasonal issues are more complex and likely involve other sources like Wind/Hydro/etc.
And you can get EVs today that have the same range as petroleum-powered vehicles, which is much, more longer than the average trip. EVs have well over 20X the range they did a century ago, so no, they don't have "exactly the same problem today".
Nuclear had a good run until the Three Mile Island accident.
We can certainly do much better today, though.
Nuclear was having serious cost escalation problems in the US even before the TMI accident.
Anyone saying the storage of energy is a problem has not looked at what traditional power generation plants use for power storage after generation.