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Comment by j-pb | Hacker News Reader

Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough.

I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow.

I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand. That link was unsecured radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a drone.

And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products.

The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.

And that's only the long term cost of pulling it out of the ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million literal years is not included.

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You could say the same thing about any power source though - humans have created way bigger disasters with fossil fuels than nuclear power.

> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.

How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.? Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be good to know.

Sites of nuclear accidents can't be remediated. They're essentially lost "forever".

This is highly debatable. There are places on Earth with natural radiation fields greater than large swaths of the evacuation zone around Fukushima. For Chernobyl, see [1].

https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...

I don't think the evidence supports that, and even if it did, we create the same dead-zone conditions using chemical energy and fertilizers, so I'm not sure why it counts against nuclear any more than it would against petrochemicals.

No, thats not true. It is only because people are mis-informed on the actual facts and dangers of nuclear reactors, that we treat them as if they are lost forever.

> Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough.

The Fukushima plant was hit by:

1) Magnitude 9 (!) earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Massive fire 4) Total loss of all power to control circuitry.

Even after that, it still didn't kill anybody from radioactivity (some firefighters were killed fighting the fire, not from radiation).

What do you suppose would happen if a similar series of catastrophes struck a hydroelectric dam? Say, the Three Gorges Dam in China?

Hint: nothing good.

> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy Germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.

Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants).

Solar can't be used for base load at the moment.

Yeah but wind and solar on a european power grid can.

A nuclear power plant that's finished in 10 years is not gonna provide you with the baseload to stop climate change.

That's only possible with expanding the existing tech we have.

But gas-fired power plants will?

We won’t stop climate change, we’re decades late. What we need is everything we ca have, which includes solar and wind where appropriate, but also nuclear. The fact that people pretending to care about climate change are pushing for gas is absurd.

I was writing a comment on how hard/impossible it is to get politicians to understand the fundamentals of what makes an electric grid work - then I saw the other comments here and despaired.

It's like all the people who didn't understand grade 7-9 physics conspired to make us all miserable.

Is it grade 7-9 physics, though? I learned about power grid structure (base load, etc.) and such at the university.

To the down voters: just because you learn about electricity in secondary school, it doesn't mean that the second or third level effects are obvious and that you immediately understand what their impact on a power grid is. But hey, maybe some people were super interested in power grids or just super gifted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You're not wrong, but I honestly think most don't really even understand the difference between power and energy. If you don't understand that, trying to explain base load is an uphill battle.

Either way, in almost every online discussion I see the term base load is used in the wrong context.

Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the producer side since the cheapest power plants were also inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load providers, although it was purely an economical coupling leading to a term existing.

Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are the new base load providers, but it also brings new challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more variability in the supply. This is our current world were the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally. This is unless they can find a way to get their prices below renewables, but that is getting more and more unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.

Base load exists on the consumer side and unless energy storage ramps up 1000-10000x across the world, I don't see how solar and wind could ever cover it until then. Human power usage patterns don't change that much because we don't change much. You need to be able to provide X energy at all times, no ifs and buts.

Actually, there is one thing, we need super capable and reliable super long distance power grid connections, maybe there's some progress on this front?

Because solar and wind absolutely are unreliable on a local front.

With HVDC and UHVDC lines there are progress on the transmission front. The main question though is the economical race between geographically decoupling your renewable power supply versus storage, this is something we will see play out in the next 10-15 years.

China recently finished a 3300 km UHVDC line from Xinjiang to the east coast with an expected loss of 1.5% per 1000 km.

Energy storage is not a problem in the long term. Making sure that polluting power plants only run 10% of the time is a short term problem that has a solution today.

Agreed. I edited my sibling comment. I totally agree that electric grids and base loads are pretty complicated things. It's just that the base knowledge level is infuriatingly low.

I quite often see journalists writing about energy politics confusing power and energy.

Base load is just a made up convention though closely related to traditional fixed rate prices, and may become increasingly fictional in the future as demand adapts to more variable supply and dynamic pricing.

> Base load is just a made up convention.

Seriously.

Ok, bad wording. How about: It emerges from conventional fixed supply. In any case it's no law of nature. So not a concept that is necessarily relevant in the furure.

Base load results from demand, not from supply. You positively, absolutely must provide a certain amount of power at all times.

> In any case it's no law of nature.

Yes it is. It's a law of human nature :-)

The relationship of supply and demand in the grid is an equation, if they don't match you get blackouts or other funky things. When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power.

Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand), but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard production quota.

> When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power.

No, thats not really how it works out.

Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum level of electricity, that will always be demanded, almost no matter how high prices go.

Or, in other words, there is some about electricity demand is very inelastic.

So no, you can't just increase electricity costs. Because then electricity costs will massively spike, and cause huge amounts of problems.

You are massively underestimating the amount of problems and costs that it would put in people for demand to be as elastic as you want it to be.

It would be way cheaper and better for everyone, if there was simply enough baseload supply to meet the baseload demand.

I think the situation in Texas recently illustrated this pretty well.

Texas illustrated what happens in the current old system if there are unexpected drops due to breakdowns in supply when consumers are relying on affordable supply following consumption. Pricing can't fix a situation like that.

Big problems maybe at first sight, but there are many ways of overcoming them. When automated price following behaviour is implemented in eg AC and heating and car charging systems, the spikes will be greatly lessened. Also, energy storage actors can sell into spikes, which will work to clip the spikes and encourage investment into energy storage.

> demand adapts to more variable supply and dynamic pricing

You want demand to adapt? I'm supposed to turn the lights out when the wind's not blowing, or what?

Demand shouldn't adapt, supply should adapt. Connect more and bigger power grids, add energy storage to the grid in large enough quantities.

Your "solution" is like telling people to give up cars. They won't.

Yes, you get the gist of my position (for cars too).

So when it gets really cold and there's little wind, we'll freeze to death? Gotcha.

People who decided to use directly grid electricity for heating but are not willing or able to pay for it during cold spells will find they have a summer house. Consumers can of course have electricity contracts that have fixed monthly prices as a derivative bought from electricity market actors. As the transition doesn't happen overnight, people and the social safety net will have time to cope and adapt.

In cold climates people have increasingly well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non grid electric heating. And can also shift power usage around the day because it takes a day or so for the house to cool uncomfortably.

Well, it's good that you're transparent. People should abandon their homes because of your policy.

Which energy sources that emit less co2/kWh than nuclear power should be used to heat houses in that case?

> (In cold climates people have well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non electricity heating, like thus far)

What are talking about? What kind of non-electricity heating? Let's burn some coal or what?

I'm in Sweden. It gets cold. Houses are well insulated and typically heated via quite efficient electric air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps. Our electricity has been like 98% co2 neutral since the 70s because of a 50/50 mix of hydro and nuclear as a base load.

Now, ironically, the leftist politicians (including the green party) here are dismantling all of this because they and the journalists don't understand the concept of base power, because they don't understand the difference between power and energy. Their solution is to build lots and lots of wind power plants.

So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with local hydro and nuclear power?

By non electric heating methods I meant CHP and biomass based heating.

But yes, old energy inefficient houses in cold climates should be replaced. There's no need to get dramatic over it, houses are machines for living and it depends on circumstances how far to extend their lifespan. (Except some historical houses of course)

> So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with local hydro and nuclear power?

Umm. This whole thread is about the existence of nuclear power. Is it hard to understand that if nuclear power went away, the baseload would become extremely expensive during cold and wind-free days? That's a substantial part of the year, here.

In a nuclear rampdown scenario, hopefully it would not come as an overnight surprise. Usually there are plans on a 10 year timescale or more. But I'm not arguing against nuclear, just for dynamic electricity pricing.

Like some people found out in Texas, with 5 digit bills due to short term spike?

That's the kind of thing we need to design for and handle using contracts containing hedges or cutoffs and price reactive usage. Texas isn't a cold climate place so relying on grid electricity to cover the exceptional weather is probably not the best plan in the post fossil future. But insulation will help with this and hot weather AC electricity usage both.

It's unrealistic. Policy based on everyone living in Neverland doesn't work.

So you believe the grid can be said to be working well with occasional dips to 0MWh? Or is some base load in fact an obvious necessity?

You may argue that the current value of the base load is artificially high, but there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.

> So you believe the grid can be said to be working well with occasional dips to 0MWh?

With distributed generation and storage, yes, it's plausible to have periods of 0MW grid demand.

> there obviously is some fundamental base load given by the kinds of consumers you have.

The kinds of consumers you have are not a fixed quantity; particularly their on-site use, generation, and storage patterns all vary over time.

I'm talking about 0 MWh for the entire grid, which includes all of the distributed generators. So, by definition, shutting down each and every piece of electric equipment connected to the entire grid. You truly believe that is a tenable position?

If not, than you must accept there exists some necessary base load. That can be provided from base production like it is today, or it could theoretically be provided from storage and over-production in a hypothetical renweables-only grid.

It's unlikely to hit 0 even at night, no reason to stop all the windmills and hydro, and there will be stored energy buyers and sellers. But there won't be production guarantees to some level based on anticipated demand.

I know it's unlikely, but the point was that there exists some minimum need of energy, even in the most flexible grid imaginable, some base load necessary.

Technically yes, I guess the grid has to be kept energized to work.

We don't have all that many tsunamis in Germany...

No but we have a lot of terrorists

Modern nuclear power plants such as the German Konvoi or modern Russian VVER survive plane crashes. Some German plants even have military defense systems on site.

“A lot of terrorists”? In Germany? I’m not saying it is perfect, but you might want to balance a bit your news sources.

I was including France in the group in that statement

I'm sure our nuclear plants are safe against all foreseeable dangers. So only unforeseeable dangers are a problem. I can't foresee any, so we're safe?

Nothing is perfectly safe. Hydro dams fail. Wind turbines throw ice. People fall off roofs installing solar.

But 8 million people per year are killed by particulate emissions from normally-operating fossil and biofuel combustion plants. Nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are all orders of magnitude safer ways, per TWh generated, than the dominant worldwide sources. Therefore we should replace fossil and biofuel with nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro.

Conveniently, those 4 are also very low carbon, so they prevent climate change along the way.

[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Killing a predictable number of people each year is not danger, it's damage. The danger posed by hydro is real, but entirely negligible compared to nuclear.

But of course we should replace fossils by renewables and phase them out before nuclear. And if nuclear wouldn't take too long to build building new nuclear plants as a stopgap may actually make sense. Unfortunately, they do.

Fukushima was a triple meltdown after total inundation of 1960s-class reactors. The short and long-term death-toll from radiation was quite literally zero, as reaffirmed by UNSCEAR just last month [1]. I don't think the "boundlessly large nuclear accidents make the technology untenable" argument really holds water given this kind of experience.

[1] https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419....

You cannot demonstrate the safety of something by pointing at an example that did not go as terrible as it could have.

So... so you must always postulate the worst possible scenario, no matter how unlikely, and judge any technology solely by that? Even in the face of 60 years of worldwide operation providing huge swaths of the world's carbon-free energy while injuring only a vanishing fraction of the people injured by the most common alternate sources?

I cannot see how this view can be justified.

But if you want to take this view, consider this hypothetical worst case. Imagine we push forward with wind, solar, and batteries, but human rights issues related to manufacturing with slave labor, corruption, mineral shortages, grid instabilities, and land usage issues that emerge once these technologies reach world-scale cause enough trouble that we just keep on operating large amounts of fracked fossil gas to the point that climate change hits the bad predicted scenarios and all the bad events of climate change happen anyway. Isn't that hypothesized worst case just as valid as this worse-than-Chernobyl nuclear accident you're holding above our heads?

Since the damage caused by severe nuclear accidents is essentially permanent, we cannot recover from them. So in the long run, we cannot afford even an accident per century, and thus, cannot afford nuclear power.

Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.

> we cannot afford even an accident per century, and thus, cannot afford nuclear power.

This statement has no basis. We've had multiple awful nuclear accidents and the world keeps turning. We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.

You are aware that there are places on earth with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants that have natural radiation dose rates from the geology that are well beyond the dose rates in almost all of the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones?

> Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.

That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years. When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.

Today, we've seen reactors of the Hualong One, ABWRs, VVERs, and ARP-1400 designs built in wholly reasonable times.

And for deep decarbonization, we plan to use factory/shipyard production techniques to serially produce thousands of standardized low-carbon power plants even faster.

> This statement has no basis. We've had multiple awful nuclear accidents and the world keeps turning.

You hadn't forgotten I was writing about severe accidents within half a sentence, hadn't you?

> We are headed towards a much worse scenario of climate change if we don't effectively decarbonize.

I'm quite aware of that. And if I considered stopgap nuclear realistically possible, maybe I'd support it.

> That's a thing anti-nuclear institutions have been saying for sure but it doesn't hold even a little water. France, for example, decarbonized almost all of its electricity with nuclear in 15 years.

Building nuclear is not even the hard part. Deciding to do so is. Changing public opinion to favour nuclear won't happen in time so there's no point. The decision to decarbonize using renewables has been made, there's actually no need to even discuss it further.

> When you take a look at achieved decarbonization rates per capita, nuclear is at the top.

The available technology and political climate has changed since then.

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