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Comment by TomK32 | Hacker News Reader

Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old, they simply can't be operated for centuries, instead the are becoming unreliable. In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production. Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules, OL3 in Finland with a 12 year delay. https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un...

You can build a lot of wind and solar parks in that time and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. All that decentralized, thus creating jobs all over the country.

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> Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules

Given China appears able to build quality reactors quickly, this would seem to be the result of European policy preferences with respect to nuclear.

Not saying they’re not, but I’d be curious what measures of reactor quality you’ve seen?

Number of severe incidents divided by number of reactor days?

China has the newest plants in the world: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-o...

We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.

> but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.

That's a strange expectation to have. Ever heard of the bathtub curve ?

In your formula, where do you envision the number of incidents being derived from?

China excels at hiding important information from public view, so I would take their data, and data indirectly sourced from them, with a grain of salt. And oh, by the way, one could say the same about the nuclear industry and its captured regulatory bodies in general as well.

That is true, which is why I specifically mentioned "severe" incidents - even if less severe stuff happens and is hushed up, it's impossible to keep radioactive particles blowing across the globe quiet, so we'd surely know of those.

Wouldn't you want to normalize by Joules produced instead of by reactor days?

China also builds wind, solar, and electrical transmission projects faster and cheaper than Europe. China has lower wages and planners can ignore local objections to infrastructure projects more easily than in Europe. This leads to better outcomes by the numbers but it's not an unmitigated good.

It's not just that. When you build reactors in series, you have economies of scales in term of accumulated expertise, amortising R&D costs, etc. France for instance finished building up its nuclear capacity at the end of the 80s, and every reactor built since has been unique, extremely costly and behind schedule. But the day they will replace their whole estate, the economics will likely be very different.

Of course, given public opinion, that day might never come.

> Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old

Which is half of their lifetime by American standards.

> In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production.

That means 75% of availability. Good luck finding any renewable source with such a figure ;).

Hydro has close to 100% availability, especially if you aren't talking dams.

Hydro is great, but limited.

IMO, most industrialized nations have already tapped hydro about as much as it can be tapped, given some constraints about wildlife habitat. But I'd be happy to be corrected -- what new hydro projects do you think we should be doing, and how much power do you think they'd provide?

It is also very hard to get buy-in for large new hydro plants. The resevoirs behind the damms cover a lot of area and people don't like their homes being under water. There are also ecological considerations like trout and salmon migration. Due to this they are actually demolishing old, low power legacy hydro plants and re-naturalizing the river.

Yup. Somehow climate change is supposed to be this planetary existential threat, but not, you know, so existential as to allow a salmon to be endangered or to risk building a nuclear plant.

Climate change isn't actually a planetary existential threat, despite all the fear mongering you hear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... and the more alarmist https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/impact-climate-change... say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%.

Those are huge, huge numbers! But to put them in perspective, it's less than the difference between living in, say, present day US vs present day UK. Big impact, but hardly planetarily existential.

And, yes, there's more to live than economics. But if life goes on normally enough that we can even not only still talk about GDP with any meaning, but even say that we are going to preserve 80% to 90% of GDP, things won't be too apocalyptic.

Keep in mind that this is 80% of a far larger pie than today, since normal economic growth will continue.

> Climate change isn't actually a planetary existential threat, despite all the fear mongering you hear.

Well, no, the planet will not be destroyed. The issue is the lifestyle of the semi-hairless apes on the planet.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... and the more alarmist https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/impact-climate-change... say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%

No, its that it will grow to that share by 2050 (which is less than 30 years away) and keep growing.

> At a (somewhat generous) 3% baseline growth rate,

At a fairly generous 3% baseline growth rate, 2.35× current world GDP, for a projected population of 9.7 billion to todays 7.9 billion, so (pre-climate change impacts) a little under double the current GDP/capita.

Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.

Yes, those are big impacts. Just not existential impacts even just for humanity.

> Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.

Yes, averages hide a lot of variance.

Of course, this is another good reason in favour of allowing freer migration around the globe.

> Of course, this is another good reason in favour of allowing freer migration around the globe.

From the perspective of the people in places likely to see lesser adverse impacts, its a reason against freer inbound migration.

Why? For those people it's at worst a neutral argument, as getting migrants ain't bad for you (and is arguably good).

Of course, now we'd have to discuss who 'you' is. If you are talking about individual people, or about eg some statistical measure of the country or county as a whole.

See also https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/ which would suggest to eg just charge people to immigrate.

> say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%.

So maybe that's why governments don't act, relying on abstract GDP numbers. «A good chunk of the tropical era of the world is going to be uninhabitable[1]? Who cares, it's only gonna cost us 10% of GDP».

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/climate/climate-change-he...

> it's less than the difference between living in, say, present day US vs present day UK. Big impact, but hardly planetarily existential.

Like, the difference between living in Birmingham or living in the death valley?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/world/canada/bc-canada-he...

Dam the Gibraltar! ;-)

Totally renewable - and not just hydro, but also solar (which takes care of the water you let in)!

And yes, this has been proposed and is physically possible & it alreadyhappened for geological reasons in the past:

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

There's a far better option with the Qattara depression.

Careful there: you might mess with the salt and mineral concentrations in the Mediterranean Sea. And, of course, there's lots of shipping through the straits of Gibraltar that you have to accommodate.

No problem withbsalinity in the most extreme varuants of this - you effectively let the whole Mediterranean Sea evapirate and only let in enough water to keep it this way, effectively making the whole scheme solar driven. That way you can also build multiple dams between island chains and get even more power, before the water eventually evaporates on the bottom most salt pan.

Also takes care of shipping. ;-) Although I guess you could build a near shore shipping channel, possibly filled with fresh water from rivers.

> No problem with salinity in the most extreme variants of this - you effectively let the whole Mediterranean Sea evaporate [...]

Well, then you still need to deal with the salt both as a onetime measure.

Hydro is amazing when it comes to electricity generation, but for that reason it has already been developed as much as possible during the whole 20th century and there's really little room for enhancement (and when the technology progresses, it's quickly deployed).

In fact, I like to say that the only viable option to get 100% RE is to lower our energy consumption until hydro can cover the majority of our needs.

And there are so many valleys you can flood.

And dams are incredibly ecologically devastating.

There isn’t enough hydro potential on the planet to produce the amount energy we need.

It’s also worth pointing out that while hydro is renewable, it isn’t clean. Dams are ecological nightmares.

Hydro will like be part of our energy profile indefinitely. But it will never be more than a small fraction. And in the long run that fraction will get smaller as global energy demand continues to grow.

There is enormous potential for off-river pumped hydro storage, though. Geography that doesn't have much if any natural water flow can still hold vast amounts of water in enclosed areas.

It has something like 100% availability throughout the day, yes.

But throughout the year capacity varies.

And, of course, there's only so many sites that can support dams. So you have to ask 100% of _what_? And is that enough?

According to the IEAA power plants have a typical design lifespan of 30-40 years which can be extended with proper care https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/extending-operational-l... and let's be honest, the US aren't that much better: > "Since 2001, the ROP has resulted in more than 4,000 inspection findings concerning nuclear power plant licensees' failure to fully comply with NRC regulations and industry standards for safe plant operation, and NRC has subjected more than 75 percent (79) of the 103 operating plants to increased oversight for varying periods" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-06-1029.pdf Those findings are mostly small unimportant issues, but if the lifespan of a plant creeps upwards the severe issues will become more common.

BTW, the list of cancelled power plants (even ones under construction) in the US is pretty long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_reac... and even the only reactors currently under construction where are risk of being abandoned. The budget is of course overrun and completion set back by six years, so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month. I

The cancelling of power plants is a political decision due to the lack of popularity of nuclear. It's not that we can't build plants, it's that there is no political will to do so.

> Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month.

Welcome to the real world of industrial processes, these aren't cars. Maintenance are run on tight schedules[1], so there can easily be delays (this isn't specific to nuclear though, you'd find delays during maintenance for every kind of electric production site). Also, small problems happen all the time, and because of nuclear's super high safety requirements, when those small things happen, you stop the reactor and fix it.

BTW, around one third of those 1700 days came from small issues at Fessenheim that EDF decided not to fix and keep the reactor off because the plant was planned for closure by the end of the year. You're not gonna fix you car if you know it's gonna be seized soon right?

[1] mostly because like in every business, project manager are like “it's late: workers were lazy. It's dine before the deadline: we gave them too much time”.

The cancellation of new nuclear power plants in the US was overwhelmingly due to economics. In the first nuclear buildout, reactors came in more expensive than promised, demand growth slowed, and then the grids were opened to non-utility generators. This happened again more recently with the nuclear renaissance: projected demand growth again failed to materialize, reactor construction was more expensive than promised (Watts Bar 2, V.C. Summer, Vogtle), and large quantities of fracked gas became available.

You can't easily turn just any dam to do pumped storage - you essentially need at least 2 dams, pumping from the lower one to the upper one. Normal dam will simply not have enough water "under" its single dam to pump up when needed.

Not to mention the power transfer to pump water up & down being possibly a big multiple of what a regular hydro plant on that one spot would even need to transfer.

On the other hand, pumped hydro doesn't require the substantial average flow that a hydro generator would need. One build pumped hydro systems where there is no sustained source of surface water flow at all -- for example, in deserts. A proposed pumped hydro facility in Arizona would lose (to evaporation) an order of magnitude less water than a nuclear power plant with capacity = that hydro facility's average throughput.

Unfortunately lots of windy locations in Europe are not good locations for hydro-works, too. I’m thinking Netherlands and Northern Germany (even though knowing the Dutch they might come up with something), and closer to me (I’m from Eastern Europe) the locations close to the Black Sea, which are excellent for wind farms yet are a poor choice for hydro solutions.

Of course, you could let’s say transport the energy produced by wind farms from Northern Germany to hydro projects built in South Germany, but that opens a new can of worms: loss of energy because of the transport itself, extra costs, actually building the energy transport infrastructure (a huge task in a NIMBY world).

The transport losses are by far the smallest part of that. HVDC is available at 3.5% loss at 1000km as a standard product, but if building it at the required scale was trivial we’d be doing it rather than talking about it.

Biggest issue lately seems to be right of way/approvals - most of the paths between hydro and wind sources are overland.

Most of the existing HVDC interconnects are undersea.

You don’t need to deal with 10k different landowners each wanting their own special deal if you’re connecting Tunisia and Spain, vs North and South Germany.

Not to say that what you’re saying isn’t a problem, but that’s what eminent domain is for.

Using that is a good way not to get reelected, so politicians are a bit reluctant.

It happens very regularly. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. Eminent domain doesn't generally directly impact enough people to make a serious election issue, unless we are talking about either very local elections, or when the thing being built is something people feel strongly about like an oil pipeline.

By very regularly, you mean ‘regularly tarpitted for a long time anytime there are a decent number of people near the work’? Bridge widening work on 101 has been delayed for decades by this in the Bay Area, CalTrain electrification was delayed by over a decade, etc. etc.

Most utility corridors are in the middle of nowhere and already established (and people stay away because of this), so reusing an existing corridor is relatively easy - unless it widens into someone’s yard. Then it’s a matter of how much money that person has.

For connecting previously not connected areas with a new line, especially if it goes through somewhere folks are living? Be prepared for the actual work making whatever you are doing to be a tiny tiny percentage of the time and costs involved.

In most of the rest of the country we manage to build new roads and new transmission lines without the extreme issues you're describing. Over the last few years, I can think of hundreds of homes and businesses near me that were moved to widen existing roads or build new ones. A few people/businesses tried to fight it, they all lost quickly.

You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.

Unlike your examples, HVDC lines have no real negative impact on anyone but the immediately impacted property owners. If you're building HVDC transmission lines between countries, you can also very likely reuse existing utility corridors for much of it, and build through lower density areas for most of the rest. The actual number of property owners directly impacted won't be high enough to make an impact on elections.

Or some random place in Ohio for that matter.

The regulatory hell that cities and states wealthy enough to afford it impose on themselves is not representative of the entire country.

Take a look at the map of existing and planned HVDC links and tell me again how this doesn’t apply? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current]

Europe is at least as regulation heavy as California.

I don’t think that map is either evidence in favour or against your position: HVDC has minimal impact, yes, but partly because you can bury the cables more easily, and buried cables are still more expensive.

HVDC is (I think) the only thing that can be used for underwater connections, so it’s used where the price makes sense. If the question is regulation we should also see all proposed and recent AC lines in Europe.

(Edited for clarity)

It is dramatically more expensive running HVDC under water than above ground, as the cables need to be incredibly tough even compared to buried land cables. I ran across a price quote that seemed like 10x the cost per km installed. If you can do suspended overhead cables, even cheaper. HVDC has pros/cons around the inversion/rectification on either end.

Yet essentially all planned or existing HVDC lines (at least ones notable enough for the map), are undersea cables.

Why would that be?

There are definitely undersea HVAC interconnects - https://www.nkt.com/products-solutions/high-voltage-cable-so...

They seem non-notable enough I had a hard time finding a good combined list anywhere.

I ran across plenty of references to HVAC being used for offshore wind turbines and the like too.

And they were the default standard (and still are for shorter runs and where the grid frequency matches). There are AC solutions for lack of grid frequency matching and the like.

I can’t find a list or easy map for major new on land grid connections - if you can find one, that would be great. Might be national security concerns or something?

Huh, TIL. I got the impression AC underwater was too high loss to bother with.

AC has a capacitance/inductance issue in any sort of run where it is surrounded by metal or metallic elements. Usually the runs are short enough and inconsistent enough it doesn’t matter. Metal shielding (required for undersea and most underground) and certain types of soils are pretty much terrible. That said, for ‘short’ runs of less than a couple hundred km, the cost of the HVDC inverter/rectifier drowns out the losses most of the time, so AC still wins most of the time. Sometimes there are still niceties around HVDC (like easier load management) that can still tip the scales.

If it’s a 1000km single run, the math is definitely different, but there aren’t a lot of those. If there are transformers, taps, generators, or other live equipment in the middle, those also change the equation, and in a grid environment, there are a ton of those.

Maybe because they can be implemented with only one pole/conductor for the underwater part. AFAIUI two poles go to the shore, where one pole ends in a metal-mesh underwater, using the salty sea as conductor until the remaining single cable reaches the other shore, where another underwater metal-mesh exists, and from that emerges the remaining piece of dual pole HVDC overland.

I know of at least one such solution between Germany and Sweden trough the Baltic Sea.

edit: This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable

It’s even easier to do that on land by the way. You’d use large Earth grounds, which also don’t corrode as badly as grounds in saltwater. And running it on land (minus permitting, right of way, etc) is dramatically cheaper as the cable itself also doesn’t need to be as sturdy.

I found this neat paper on HVDC grounds and interconnects too [http://b-dig.iie.org.mx/BibDig2/P13-0399/files/PESGM2013-001...]

The point is that right of ways and permits are super hard on land, which is why most of these are run via the sea.

Skimmed the 5 pages and saved to Tsundoku-stack.

One thing to consider here too, as I think we might be talking about two different types of situations.

Even in the US (which is very low density compared to most places), most people live in cities or denser suburban areas (80.7%). 97% of all land Area in the US however is Rural.

So you are right in that this is not a problem in most of the US (by land area), and this isn’t a problem in elections in those areas either - it won’t negatively impact enough individuals, and problem cases can often be routed around, because the pop density is low.

However, this IS also a problem for most of the US (by populations), as this directly impacts costs and infrastructure upgrades for the majority of the population in the US.

Europe is even denser, and some locations have just as bad if not worse regulatory environments, so it’s the same factors at play. Some countries in Europe excepted of course.

Not in Germany. We are great NIMBYs, elect greens and have the nicest Gartenzwergs.

Of course, and probably 50% or more of those landowners are going to fight you tooth and nail in court in that proceeding. Some so you’ll pay them more to settle/go away, some because they just hate you on an ideological level or refuse to budge [https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...]

If you’re covering significant distances that people live in, you can expect to spend a decade or sometimes more in court before being able to build - if ever.

Because of course there are the environmental reviews, the impact assessments, etc. and each of those will be hundreds to thousands of pages long, and you’ll likely have to fight over each page, also in court, with folks who don’t like that you’re going to dig up that random patch of flowers to install your power line or whatever.

And that is assuming you’re lucky enough to not have any endangered species in the way, in which case you might literally not be able to build at all if it is in an area you have no choice to go through.

So far no one is staking out patches of ocean floor, and generally even if they did, the topography is usually more forgiving there. So all you need is landing approval, which means one government and one compliant landowner on each side somewhere along each coast that is close enough to an existing grid that you can interconnect to it. Much more solvable. Still not easy or straightforward.

In California it took me 4 years and $18k worth of professional help to get approval to do completely standard fuel reduction work on a completely uninteresting plot of land that was super overgrown with brush and dead trees - with no one objecting to it - in the middle of a historic wildfire crisis in California that actually expedited the process.

I had to notify 10 something local native tribes (in case they maybe were somehow attached to the land, which they weren’t), had to do a detailed archeological survey, had to have a licensed biologist do a detailed walkthrough to look for endangered species (there were none).

Meanwhile the 3 largest fires in the states recorded history burned nearby, and they wouldn’t let me clear brush and remove dead trees from a clear fire hazard area and it’s a miracle the place didn’t burn to the ground.

this is an important story ! you might need to bolster the facts with some non-anonymous details (not here) but if this is as you say - your County officials are certainly not going to be pleased at the portrayal.. so you need to skip them somehow and get to the public.

This is CalFire - it’s a state responsibility area. These rules also apply state wide, however. It’s a well known problem in the state. My 4 yr timeline was, as I mentioned, expedited due to the fires. 6 yrs is more typical.

your experience is directly at odds with the policy story that some govt elements are trying to present, along with numerous, repeated stakeholder processess that claim to be trying to do exactly what you were trying to do .. You are saying that the current, expedited and "combined " permit process as recently amended by the Governor's Office, reduced your "years of applying for permission" from SIX to FOUR at a time of catastrophic fire hazard.

The details will have to speak for themselves and this is not the forum, however I strongly encourage you to seek some kind of outsider, and avoid those for whom the reputational damage occurs..

Lol, are you saying the PR doesn’t match the reality with CA gov’t is news?

I got my thing approved and done with (finally), zero interest in getting involved any more. Everyone else involved knows this is how it goes too.

If you think me going to some news agency is going to do anything but get me stomped on in some future year (and it ending up being a decade instead), you might want to take a look around first.

edit: all these records and more are also public records and should be trivially available via FOIA requests - which said PRcoughnews outlets would be pulling if they wanted to know what was really going on.

There are only 100k private timberland owners in CA (and mostly nutballs like myself that seem to like pain and suffering in the form of paperwork), so it’s an easy group to stomp on, relatively speaking.

There's only so much a landowner can. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. It's a fairly common occurrence.

Oil pipelines are bit different because there are tons of people and organizations outside of those directly impacted who are willing to join the fight.

Most places you can do that without any permits at all. Or maybe a burn permit from the fire warden, but that is $10 and issued in 10 minutes unless there is fire danger that day.

Not true if you’re talking about California.

You can remove small amounts of nuisance stuff in small areas, and burn in small piles during days you are approved to burn (which are limited). Maximum pile height of 3 ft, and 3x3 ft diameter if I remember from the last burn permit I pulled?

You can clear up to 1/3 of an acre, or emergency thin I think up to 3 acres if you comply with those rules, but the 3 acres they reserve the right to come in and fine you if you do something they don’t like, and you have to file a permit to do that too. Any trees about a certain diameter or of certain species, regardless of level of disease or danger they might require you to keep. A dead tree that might have an owl or protected animal in it? Ho boy.

It would take several lifetimes to even attempt that on 60+ acres of overgrown timber. I spent a week and barely did 1/4 of an acre working full time, and it still wasn’t adequately thinned.

In the end, it took a crew of 4 with purpose built heavy equipment (a masticator), working full time over 4 months to do it to state standard -once the paperwork finally cleared this summer.

I'm specifically talking about places NOT California. Stories like your remind me why I refuse to move there.

Ah sorry about that. Yes, most places it is pretty mellow and focused on stopping nuisances. Here it seems to be an excuse to build a Giant bureaucracy and associated fiefdoms that need to be protected.

Each one of which has some plausible reason for it to exist that nominally make sense, but starts of choke out a ton of reasonable behaviors pretty quickly.

Adding a transmission line increases land values in rural areas, since it makes the land more suitable for siting renewables.

Maybe. Though NIMBYs seem to care more about volatility (ie variance) than expected value.

See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.981...

If the was more interconnection between the Dutch and Norway to take advantage of Norways hydro storage that would mitigate some of that issue.

There is such a project already in the planning stage, called SuedLink, and consisting of high-voltage underground DC transmission lines from the north of Germany (where it will connect not only to German wind power but also hydropower in Norway via the existing NordLink project) to the south, where solar is the order of the day.

> a huge task in a NIMBY world

Yes, governments really need to pass laws to muzzle NIMBYs.

This would increase democracy - no longer would small minorities be able to veto government actions for the benefit of all.

How's that increased democracy? Muzzle is also an interesting choice of words. It reminds me more of totalitarian utilitarianism, fascism or communism when you suddenly don't care about objections or "the little/common man".

The opposite. I care about the"little man" as opposed to those with the wherewithal to mount sustained challenges just because the proposed action "disfigures" their local landscape.

Like Trump vetoing a wind farm because it could be seen from one of his golf courses in Scotland.

> and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries.

can that be done in all cases? Most dams I've seen IRL didn't seem to have an area downstream big enough to collect the water to be able to pump it back up.

Long distance (relatively) water pipelines are not to expensive as long as it isn’t vertical cliffs and unstable slopes on the way, so a catchment at the lower drainage or even a low dam can provide the necessary temporary storage, even if 5-10 miles or more away.

Still not super cheap of course, so then the classic ‘what will this get us for the cost, and does it pencil out as profitable’ (generally a good proxy for worth the time and expense) starts to come into play.

Thinking about it, many hydropower schemes are already built as cascades - that could be retrofitted as pumped storage quite easily, if you can interconnect the dams for reasonably cost.

Nice info! Did a bit of digging and here is a detailed analysis of such a plan (recent) for the Indus River Valley I ran across. Pretty neat [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2...]

Edit: According to the paper, it's economically viable when the output power price (post-pumping and running through the turbine again) can be > 2X the price of the hydropower, which with seasonal variation and spikey but 'free' sometimes power, could definitely help. Preferring something like solar over running a turbine could also help.

The challenge of course is that many times hydropower is nearly free and available in large quantities, as the dams are also used for flood control, so they either toss large quantities of water over the spillways (wasting it), or run it through a turbine - but they can't NOT move the water.

Telling that nuclear is a bad technology (compared to wind and solar that are not even competing with nuclear) then suggesting to use a WAY worse technology (reverse dams). Is there any advantage of having a reversible dam compare to a nuclear plant ? I'm not asking of being better, but only ONE advantage, I don't see any.

That's actually the positive thing about covid, is that we had a preview of how the climate crisis is going to be handled. That's going to be a mess, everyone will think they are an expert

I mean, obviously they have the advantage of not requiring nuclear fuel.

Of course wind and solar compete with nuclear. At large penetration, wind and solar make the grid unfriendly to nuclear, as the price drops too often for a nuclear power plant to be economical. Both renewables and nuclear are inflexible, and are competing for the ability of the grid to deal with inflexible sources.

If you look at model solutions to a renewable/storage/nuclear grid, the solutions tend to flip from "mostly nuclear" to "mostly renewable" with little overlap, depending on cost assumptions.

Nuclear should be subsidized to keep them online for sure. All governments should want a backbone that can work under any circumstances (excerpt flooding I guess )

A bigger subsidy issue is wind/solar being given credits for power produced. So, they keep pumping out and putting power onto the grid even when prices go negative. Only when the negative price is lower than -subsidy do they curtail. This is terrible for existing nuclear plants.

What the grid really needs is transparency at the customer level of real time power costs.

I'd like to see a system that prioritised power purchasing depending on predictability, not instant price.

So first buy goes to power plants (including virtual power plants) that can provide stable power generation given a specific window of time - whether that that's nuclear, hydro, or solar+wind+battery+hydrogen - so long as it's close to zero emissions and will pump out required power no matter the weather over specified time.

Let wind/solar fight over peak power, or consolidate into virtual power plants with storage operators (it should also incentivize buildout of storage, so win-win in my book)

I would like to see uncertainty and intermittency exposed to consumers, with contracts that allow power to be curtailed in various ways. The less you value consistency, the less you would pay (up to a point.) Or, if you contract for a certain level of reliability, you could stipulate the payment you'd get if that were violated.

This is already done for industrial consumers that have necessary infrastructure installed - there are also some projects to enable demand response for individual consumers.

The problem is you can't just expose the prices without appropriate infrastructure support on the consumer side.

I was imagining consumers having contracts that stipulate how much the utility can turn their consumption on and off, and how often, and under what circumstances. This wouldn't necessarily require any real time decisions on the part of the consumers, although smart appliances that the utility could control would help. This is already available to a limited extent, with things like remotely controllable water heaters and AC compressors.

You asked for one, so one is what you'll get:

The possible liability from a nuclear accident so large that it basically isn't insurable, because insurance agencies won't promise to pay a sum that large. A dam may be located in such a spot that the worst-case liability is insurable, ie. the electricity can be fairly and properly priced in our present model of society.

(Not necessarily. If the dam could flood Paris and the smaller cities further down the Seine, insurance agencies might refuse to insure that one fully, of course.)

That's just one of few reasons why nuclear power plants shouldn't be owned by private corporations. They should be owned and ran by national operators, so then you don't have the issue of insurable events or worry about private operators not paying for decommissioning the plants at the end of their livespan. Power generation is a matter of national security, so nations should be paying for those plants from the national budget.

Worry about insurable events doesn't go away — the central bank can only print money as long as trust in the currency stays, and that trust isn't infinite.

> the central bank can only print money as long as trust in the currency stays, and that trust isn't infinite.

The central bank can print money without bound. Some of the effects of money printing changes with confidence in the currency, but the core effects that it targets don't really change until people radically change behavior to reduce use of the currency as a medium or even measuring stick for routine transactions.

If people stop treating it as money, then is the thing the central bank prints still money? It can print more of the thing, sure.

Anyway, this isn't relevant to my argument upstream — it just changes the reason why nuclear reactors aren't properly pricable in our market economy, from "can't be insured due to worst case" to "worst case can destroy the currency". (It also doesn't rule out other argumens, pro or contra.)

Why do you think pumped storage hydro plants are worse (thank what) ?

They are not ever strictly power plants, rather they provided the much needed buffer to store energy during fluctuating demand and/or supply.

Pumped storage is also completely compatible with both nuclear base load (store extra from base load that can't be easily throttled) and unpredictable renewables sources (store extra when needed, cover - reasonably short - periods of no supply from the source.

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