Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by 28511524 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

28511524

“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.”

Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

View on HN

> Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer

Is anti-nuclear sentiment consistent across Europe?

It is here in Germany. Nobody here likes nuclear. My ex is a PhD in bioinformatics and argues against nuclear using quite outdated information, even.

Nuclear is a non-starter for many. Too many people afraid of another Chernobyl or nuclear waste handling without understanding what caused the former or not being informed about how we deal with the latter, today.

> how we deal with the latter, today

News and images like this https://www.thelocal.de/20141010/one-third-of-barrels-leak-a... (2014) don't exactly help restore confidence.

(If you can't get that to load, here's the same in German https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Loechrige-Atom-Faesser-entdeckt-...)

Edit to add, the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine: https://static.dw.com/image/16445664_303.jpg - while this happened decades ago, the mine is an ongoing problem that makes the news every year with new leaks or progress of the remediation effort, lack of progress, or predictions of collapse before the remediation can be completed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine).

From the first article:

> “The chambers are secure and there is no danger for the personnel or the local population,” Vattenfall said in a statement released on Thursday

I don't see how that has... anything to do with anything. Proper inspection revealed this problem and it's been rectified. Mission accomplished.

> the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine

> while this happened decades ago

Right, again, I don't see how this is relevant to modern nuclear handling. That's a cleanup effort from poor procedures from decades ago, and it's been pretty well contained. Compare that to the current cleanup efforts of decades of fossil fuel burning, and the effects that has had.

I don't see how any of this is an argument against nuclear.

The inspections caught it after almost half the barrel was gone from rust. That doesn't inspire confidence. Neither does the way Asse II is being handled currently.

People also tend to not believe "no danger" claims - such claims, especially when coming from the companies running those plants, provide very little information, as we have learned that we should expect to hear the same claims even if a reactor core is currently melting its way through the containment (both in Chernobyl and Fukushima, false reassurances were given long after the people in charge knew of the seriousness of the accident).

Likewise, officials claim that nothing is leaking from Asse and it is safe, yet there is an unexplained but very significant (p<0.01) increase in various cancers.

Even if this was just feelings (and I disagree with that - seeing partial failures that get caught by other layers of a multi-layered safety system does provide information about the risk that one day the "holes in the Swiss cheese" [1] will line up), it explains why people in Germany are so opposed to nuclear.

Fukushima was particularly devastating for public trust, because Japan is seen as a developed, industrialized, "orderly" nation, so if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Additionally, nuclear power plants in developed countries were portrayed as absolutely safe, so it's a "fool me once, fool me twice" situation. (Since this is usually countered by "they couldn't expect the Tsunami": that just means that when an unexpected event - e.g. a 300 year flood event, as has recently happened in Germany - comes, we should expect a similar outcome and similar attempts from the people in charge to weasel out of the blame. Again, not helpful for trust.)

In short, people - me included - don't believe that the plants will be operated to the claimed safety standards. The trust in the industry is gone, and people don't want to take the gamble, even if rationally, it may be the lesser evil than e.g. coal.

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

You must mean tomorrow, because today, we just keep the stuff around in intermediate facilities.

The thing is, we know how to store nuclear waste in such a way that it's a solved problem forever. Literally gone and not a worry for any generation from now until forever.

It's called deep borehole disposal[0]. Drill a hole all the way down to Earth's crust, put your waste there = it's not coming back on anything shorter than geological timescale. " It is estimated that only 800 boreholes would be sufficient to store the entire existing nuclear waste stockpile of the USA"[0]

From what I understand it isn't being done for two reasons:

1) cost

2) once stored this way it's almost impossible to retrieve. Spent nuclear fuel is kept around partially because we know we might be able to recycle it into fresh fuel in the future. If we dump it in a hole deep in the ground it's gone forever.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal

The problem is that there's no place where not anyone's backyard. Even the big US failed for Yucca Mountain.

You can live on top of the borehole though, no issues. It's not like the area has to be cordoned off forever.

Technically true, but not work for most people's feelings.

Doesn't seem much different then designating space for landfills and other forms of waste. Sewage treatment plants aren't pleasant but provide great benefit to society.

We can currently refine waste down to levels safe enough to keep out of containment facilities, and can dispose of it by landfill in a way that will have zero ecological risk or impact, forever.

So no, not "tomorrow".

In Germany, today, there is no refinement. I'd be interested about how much refinement is happening as a percentage of waste generated, globally. At first glance, the US doesn't do it, either, for example.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennelement

Nothing, especially sentiments, are consistent across the entirety of Europe.

I think Fukushima killed much of the remaining enthusiasm, but really it's the high cost of building new nuclear plants across Europe that's keeping it from being an option. If building a new plant was cheap, I'm sure you'd see a lot more happening.

> it's the high cost of building new nuclear plants

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

So would renewables, but even without that they are becoming the cheapest option.

> If building a new plant was cheap, I'm sure you'd see a lot more happening.

Not only that, but running it. No private company insures a nuclear power plant (at least in the densely populated Central Europe). We're talking about dozens of billions each year.

Currently the operator does a token insurance of a few hundred million but if things really go south it's essentially up to the society to absorb the costs of the aftermath.

If you can't socialize the risks and have to pay market price the "cheap" goes out of the window fast.

France gets 70% of its power from safe nuclear energy.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/462535/nuclear-share-ele....

So does Switzerland, but the opinion is already shifting against it.

In Czech republic, there is an ongoing project to extend one of the two nuclear power plants. Although there is some debate whether to do it at all, it focuses most on the high costs.

The bigger issue in the public debate are the national safety and strategic concerns. At the moment, it seems Russian and Chinese companies will be banned from bidding.

So, the sentiment is definitely not consistent. CZ is much more favorable towards nuclear than DE or AT, but it's still a complicated topic.

I think it generally depends on whether or not you're downwind of Pripyat.

mostly in Germany...

In Sweden there is only one 'major' political party (The Liberals) really advocating for nuclear power, and they're currently at less than 3% in the polls.

The major issue is regulation, which is not designed for things like Small Modular Nuclear Reactors:

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

We could be building hundreds of these across Europe, placing them close to small cities and using the waste heat for district heating.

We do hydro and biomass[1] in Sweden. I'm not sure why Germany, France and Italy, given the topographies, would have a problem with that. Have they not diverisifed as much?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Sweden

Hydro already accounts for 10/15% of electricity production in France (thanks FSM for the Pyrennes chains and the rivers) - and it does not seem like we have much more capacity (there are some small dams from the early XXth century that are being reused.)

Nuclear and wind suffer from NIMYBism and are now nothing more than political totems. PV is going this road now that people are realizing installing solar farms means cutting on forest or actual food farms.

Coal is already pretty much extinct.

Whereas gas is "painless" from a political point of view, private interest in the field (total, engine) have a strong history of political influence, and "gas" wins if RE are installed but the sun does not shine nor the wind blows... So gas is the energy of the future for Europe until there is a breakthrough in fusion or safer modular fission.

This will not make the geopol situation any simpler in the east, and is of course a disaster climate-wise - except maybe for coal-heavy countries like Poland and Chez Republic

Hydro is still vulnerable to downturns, though they need to be more prolonged to equal what's happening with the wind in this report. (California's 2021 drought is a good example of how hydro power can fall short.)

I mentally think of power generation reliability as: Uncontrollably variable from hour-to-hour: wind, solar, tidal motion Uncontrollably variable on month-to-year spans: hydro Pretty controllable: nuclear (and fossil fuels)

In France, most of the places where dams could be placed are already taken. It also means that pumped hydroelectric energy storage can only be set up marginally.

Nuclear isn’t on demand, you still need a place to bank energy when you don’t need it since the plant is going to produce a constant load that (given high capital and operating costs of the plant itself) you’ll want to use productively.

Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.

An array of small modular [nuclear] reactors (SMRs) could be set up to switch parts of the array on and off over the course of the day to scale with load. Small plants have shorter ramp-up and ramp-down times, as they move around smaller amounts of working fluid, and power lighter turbines which thus have proportionately higher friction/lower inertia.

Of course, this is a lot less efficient than having one big nuclear reactor pumping huge turbines; but it’s possibly more efficient than other forms of peak-load generation, which is the key issue.

Plus, any given individual SMR would produce a low-enough wattage to be able to reasonably divert/“dump” power from it into an practical-to-construct-anywhere sink or battery (e.g. building-sized pumped storage, rather than huge dam-sized pumped storage) for handling ramp-down discontinuities.

As long as we are going there, backing a traditional nuclear power plant with a reservoir for pumped storage would work as well. But the land needed for such is immense and limited (though great for recreation opportunities). Nuclear could also be coupled with a desalinization plant that would use excess energy to produce clean water for later use (but there are other challenges there).

If liquid hydrogen fuel was ever useful, it could produce that with excess capacity also (but again, other issues).

There's lots of things to do with extra electricity, it's just a question of whether or not it's economical. Here in California, for example, I could imagine the excess being used to opportunistically desalinate water and refill reservoirs. If water and emissions were priced appropriately, it might be worthwhile? It's not exactly a battery, but it's a way to make overbuilding more palatable.

Alternatively if the grid is unreliable, end-use customers will install their own batteries and generating capacity. Voila, problem solved on someone else's dime!

France is a nice counterexample to this. Nuclear is usually used as a buffer for needs and production variations.

In fact, modern Combined cycle natural gas plants are less controllable than nuclear ones.

(That being said, given that the cost of a nuclear plant is mostly independent from its energy output, why would you build wind farms if you already have nuclear plant? Except for political reasons of course)

> Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

Maybe this statement is just a reflection of what can be done in a reasonable amount of time (a few years)? Planning and building nuclear plants takes an order of magnitude longer, it seems.

The best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago, the second best time is now.

If you need a tree in 10, maybe don't plant one that takes 20 years to grow.

If nuclear were the only option, it would be different. But the only pro-nuclear policies that make sense for achieving 1.5-2 degrees are keeping existing plants online and reactivating old ones (also policies with reasonable disagreements, but at least positive regarding climate change afaict). Building new ones simply takes too long to achieve climate goals while wind & PV are reasonably quick to do (if the political will is there).

realistically building batteries or thermal storage at that scale will probably take as long as nuclear plants

With batteries and thermal storage you can scale up over time. You can have a new small thermal storage or battery facility up and running in 2-3 years and slowly build it out over the next 20 years, with the option to change technology or capacity as needed during that time. With nuclear you have 20 years of 'nothing' before you have anything to show for your efforts.

It’s true you can start small and scale up, but it still would probably take many years to accumulate enough batteries to make a significant difference. Secondly, it doesn’t make 20 years to build a modern nuclear power plant, 5 years is a better estimate. So nuclear is still easily the cheaper/faster/proven method compared to batteries or thermal.

5 years is a better estimate.

How I wish that where true. But looking at all current new Nuclear power plant projects in Europe and the US it's clear that we are incapable of that. Yes we can argue about why that is and how in theory it shouldn't take that long, but the truth is that best case scenario it will take you more than 5 years just to get a building permit to start buildings a new nuclear power plant.

Increasing nuclear capacity is a long-term task, it's not possible to do it quickly in response - all the major nuke plants would be already running at capacity most of the time, there's no option for them to just generate more.

Maybe someone can correct me, but I don't see how we're going to get out of climate change (generally, but also specifically) without nuclear power. We need something which can produce a reliable base load and I don't think there are any other widely available options which don't produce heaps of emissions.

Or better reactive demand. Could my fridge/freezer run at deep chill when energy is cheap? Could an a/c build a block of ice for later? Could tank-based water heater recover more slowly when energy is cheap? Could a parked EV schedule its recharge better? Could a washing machine defer or go into “slow-mode” when cost is high? Same with dishwashers? Could lights dim a bit? Could hvac go into slow mode?

In a way, my utility can do things that force this (voltage reductions), but it’s only really effective for resistive loads, and could increase resistive losses on the transmission/distribution network.

https://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/IESO-News/2021/01...

One big problem is that transmission/distribution costs aren’t variable based on time-of-day, but they could be too.

Yup.. This HAS to be on the table if we want ANY hope of powering a society anywhere near 100% renewable!

The prevailing nuclear designs are not an option. They are only suitable for base load production, whereas wind is only suitable for peak load production. They serve entirely different purposes on the grid and are not meaningfully interchangeable. When the wind stops blowing you need another technology that is suitable for peak load production (batteries, natural gas, etc.).

Current-design nuclear plants themselves are perfectly capable at ramping up and down on demand on the order of 10s of minutes. They usually just choose not to because fuel is a small fraction of their total cost and so the current (and adjustable) markets pressure them into selling as much electricity as possible by staying near 100%.

This is why we need to consider energy demand, as well as supply.

Specifically, if we had a whole continent's worth of electric cars charging during the day to soak up excess solar production (8am - 6pm);

And allowed them to offload the same energy back into the grid from 6pm - 8am.

To deal with the duck curve: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Milshtein/publicati...

The simplest way to solve this is to mandate EV charging points at all workplaces and commuter parking lots, and require all new EVs include the UI and functionality necessary to upload to the grid interactively, and adjust regulations to actually allow and encourage that.

We could also build giant solar farms in Morocco and Western Sahara, a comparatively stable and friendly part of Northern Africa, where peak solar times conveniently align with the evening peak of Central Europe.

Once you have them, is there any reason why you would want to ramp it down, other than trying to justify the existence of wind turbines?

Yes. Demand does ramp up and down every day, so you have to follow that. For example, in California the demand varies from about 22 GW to around 30 GW on a typical day.

Yes, the economics is why they are not suitable.

Yeah but it if you just made a market that valued the ability to ramp up and down on demand then that could be fixed pretty easily. Some form of capacity market exclusively for low-carbon energy could do it.

https://learn.pjm.com/three-priorities/buying-and-selling-en...

Nuclear falls under thermal power plants. It would be redundant to simply add it to the list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com