This is a good move.
Nuclear power is poorly understood and easily stigmatised but on balance is far less harmful than burning fossil fuels.
Nuclear power is poorly understood and easily stigmatised but on balance is far less harmful than burning fossil fuels.
(and I know the accidents were worse, but we iterated on car and plane safety, so why not energy safety?)
It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous.
The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit in air travel.
Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obvious that it's killing us and in such numbers as it is. Nuclear is a dramatic killer, when we die from radiation it's clear and obvious and horrific.
Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.
And yet we seem to be doing just that here in Finland. The for profit companies operating and building the plants have been trying to get permits to build more (and very likely are going to get another one soon). Even with the "failure" of Olkiluoto 3 they seem to find a way to do it in a profitable enough way that they (2 companies TVO and Fennovoima) want to build more.
There are no subsidies for nuclear power at all in Finland.
Also our permanent spent fuel storage site is almost finished and should hold around 100 years of spent fuel. Though there have been now some talks to not really use it for most fuel as it makes more sense to build breeder reactors and just burn that fuel into much smaller amount. If that happens it will fit much more then 100 year of spent fuel.
>This month, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland was supposed to start producing power. Instead, the plant is at least three and a half years late and more than 50 percent over-budget. Olkiluoto was to be the “poster child” for the new generation of nuclear power plant designs that would drive the “Nuclear Renaissance” and if any nuclear project was going to go well. Instead, it has become an example of all that can go wrong in economic terms with new reactors. The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130728115821/http://www.psr.or...
There does seem to be another reactor being built in Finland, but it's being built by Russia.
With the contract TVO signed with Siemens and Areva for the plant they will never end up having to pay all the cost overruns. It was basically a fixed price contract.
What ended up happening is Siemens got the fuck out of the deal (it was originally a Siemens and Areva joint project) and French government broke up Areva Group into smaller entities and took a hit on the failed project. From the legal fighting Areva agreed to pay TVO 450 million due to failing to deliver on time with some extra money going one way or another based on if it will deliver in the new revised timelines (ended up Areva having to pay TVO another 450 million).
According to TVO at the end of the day the project cost them 5 billion instead of the original 3.2 billion with Areva saying it cost the 8.5 billion so Areva took a huge hit on making a bad contract and/or failing to deliver.
Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of power.
How can anyone argue against nuclear being part of the solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build?
Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China have the skill and the will to make it happen while everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to pump out co2.
However, also 50% over budget.
Funnily enough most of these loans are from German banks and various export agencies backed by the French government. Even still all these loans were given at market rates so EU would not kill the project (Greenpeace etc did make a complaint to EU and a investigation was done)
This kind of seller arranging some part of the loans is very normal in large infrastructure projects like these.
The other new project I mentioned is Hanhiviki in which Rosatom won the bidding. Areva and Toshiba also left their bids but as I understand it Areva was thrown out due to their failure to deliver Olkiluoto 3 in time/budget and Toshibas bid was not competetive. Though this Hanhikivi plant is still waiting for permits and there has been some obvious issues with it being built by Rosatom and the Russian sanctions going around. It also has some American and UK interests as Rosatom contracted the turbines to some GE subsidiary and Rolls Royce.
Nuclear looks pretty good in comparison.
FYI, oil & gas industry receives a lot of subsidies (just google it). On top of that, nuclear is extremely regulated compared to oil & gas. For instance, we have to capture and store nuclear waste. That's not the case for oil & gas CO2 waste.
This is nonsense. We are basically using 60s technology that has some of these problems.
A modern reactor facility could be 10-50x smaller for the same output and that makes think like decontamination cheaper as well. Also, these facilities can run 100 years potentially, so the amount of money required for decommissioning is amortized of gigantic amounts of energy.
There is nothing inherent in nuclear that make it super expensive or unsustainable.
well, a lot of people simply refuse to air travel because of perceived safety issues
Also when comparing nuclear to “renewable” energy, you are really comparing distributed low density investments with monolithic ones. Nuclear is 1e6 the energy density of chemical reactions. And wind/solar is basically heat exchangers positioned 8 light minutes from the nuclear reactor. The Sun incidentally, is just as renewable as that Uranium we are discussing.
What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)
I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic assumption you could dismantle:
1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for transporting electricity where it's needed. So shouldn't that stitching be quite solid anyway? Also, at a national level, I'd imagine solar and wind probably have rather solid statistical patterns, and those random factors can be abstracted away to a degree (the whole "what happens when the wind is not blowing?" - kind of hard to have the wind stop blowing all over 300k sqkm, all at once :-) ).
2. Once that power grid is solid, does it matter how small and distributed those solar and wind patches are?
3. I don't think Lithium-Ion is the only/main energy storage tech being investigated/invested in for grid purposes. And why couldn't it become a solid alternative for base load? Are base load-capacity energy storage facilities not competitive with gas/nuclear/coal power plants, factoring in pollution or other risks?
Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.
If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.
Doubt it. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-...
> It turns out that the main reason for spiraling nuclear plant construction bills is soft costs, the indirect expenses related to activities such as engineering design, purchasing, planning, scheduling and — ironically — estimating and cost control.
> These indirect expenses accounted for 72 percent of the increase seen in reactor construction costs between 1976 and 1987, a period in which the amount of money needed for containment buildings rose by almost 118 percent.
Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins).
It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from defense and military.
"Dispatchable plants have varying startup times. The fastest plants to dispatch are hydroelectric power plants and natural gas power plants. For example, the 1,728 MW Dinorwig pumped storage power plant can reach full output in 16 seconds.[4] Although theoretically dispatchable, coal and nuclear thermal plants are designed to run as base load power plants and may take hours or sometimes days to cycle off and then back on again."
"Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators, according to market needs. Dispatchable generators can adjust their power output according to an order.[1] Non-dispatchable renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power cannot be controlled by operators."
https://www.nmppenergy.org/feature/dispatchable%20resources
"Dispatchable fuel resources include nuclear, coal and natural gas. These fuel sources are highly reliable because each fuel is a constant supply. These are known as baseload resources."
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nuclear-stands-out-a...
"Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng"
You are confusing dispatchable with flexible.
Precisely. It's not "on demand" if it takes a day to ramp up production and another day to ramp it down. It's on yesterday's demand, which is f***ing useless.
This contrasts with gas peaker plants which can scale up in seconds. These are known as "dispatchable".
>Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng
Quoting an offhand comment from an idiotic energy minister trying to justify a boondoggle plant on a nuclear propaganda website isn't as convincing as you seem to think it is.
>You are confusing dispatchable with flexible.
You are confusing baseload with dispatchable.
If the sun is down no amount of calling up a solar farm will increase output, if the wind isn't blowing or if it's blowing too strongly no amount of pleading will increase the output of an off-shore wind farm. This is because they aren't dispatchable. This is not the case with Nuclear.
Nuclear can do load following, they do it in France. How else do you think they balance a grid which has 70% Nuclear? They use reactors with grey rods which can reduce the reactivity in the reactor without distorting the shape of the reaction.
But all analogies are like that...they need people to squint so details go fuzzy and merge.
The Zeppelin is an equally plausible aircraft analogy. Theoretically it is possible for nothing to go wrong when taking dependencies on a quarter million hand sewn cow intestines.
And, more than 2/3 aboard at the time survived. Hard to say where this fits into any proposed analogy.
Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable again; it has a lot of cost problems.
Like I said, I'm not justifying being against Nuclear, but explaining the challenge with Nuclear's general acceptance, there is a fear response from people, and it'll need to be curbed and addressed. That fear response is due to the grandiose nature of a Nuclear failure which fossil fuel don't have, even if they kill you slowly and might lead to world ending catastrophies.
Pollution from fossil fuel is unavoidable in quite a lot of places regardless of your life style. Also, much more deadly than anything related to nuclear so far.
I don't smoke but until they started banning smoking everywhere, plenty of people would sign me up for passive smoking without asking me anything.
The only "personal" production of energy is from solar panels. Which still comes with its own problems, as you generally still want to be connected to a grid, in which case utility companies generally attach a lot of strings.
Solar will seem to be less centralized but in reality and over the long term we will have huge solar farms owned by big companies, for the same reason we generally have huge actual farms owned by big companies. And what difference does it really make for the regular user if they get their power from 40 nuclear plants or from 200 solar farms?
Wind is super centralized, big companies are building wind farms and big companies are operating them. You need a ton of capital for wind farms.
Oh, wait. Not true for nuclear.
It does not make any rational sense.
The short answer is the oil lobby.
You said it — it's irrational.