Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

You're simplifying out that electric consumption varies during the day.

It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will.

Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024:

https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-...

Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.

I was suspicious of your numbers so I did a bunch of math and then realized you're using the European comma rather than a decimal. So 12,500 means 12.5, not 12500.

(EIA.gov says the U.S. used about 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours in 2020 [1]. 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours equals 3.8 billion megawatt hours, equals 3.8 million gigawatt hours, equals 3.8 thousand terawatt hours per year or 10.4 twh per day. If we figure the U.S. has about a hundred million households and divide 3,800 twh by that, we get 38 megawatt hours per household per year. This is a very rough estimate, as it doesn't include industrial/commercial/government users. If we divide by 365*24 to cancel out the time units, we get an average consumption of .004338 MW or 4.338 kilowatts per household. That sounds about right.)

Current battery production is only just barely getting started. China dominates production of LFP cells (which are ideal for grid storage) because of patents which are expiring, so hopefully we'll see more production outside of china in the near future.

LFP cells aren't bottlenecked by nickel or cobalt, and so the main resource constraints I believe are lithium, aluminum, and copper which are all quite a bit cheaper and available in bigger quantities. I think prices are expected to eventually settle somewhere around $80 per kwh of capacity for the cells, and I don't think we're that far off that now. (LFP may eventually be displaced by something else, like lithium sulfur or solid state batteries or something, but I think LFP is probably good enough.)

Maybe lithium or copper will become bottlenecks and prices will rise. Let's say prices do hold at about $80 per kwh. Maybe we'll round up to $120 per kwh to account for pack construction, a building to store the batteries, inverters, chargers, and so on. If the average U.S. adult-aged person uses about 2kw on average, then they need 48kwh of storage for 24 hours. That would be about $5760. If we amortize that over ten years, it's about $48 a month. That's kind of expensive, but it's within the realm of what can be done without assuming any major technological breakthroughs. We probably don't need 24 hours of storage, though, if we have enough renewable energy over-production and backup fossil fuel plants to use in extreme situations.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

Unlike pledges, which can be produced instantly, actually bringing reliable power online takes more than 3 years.

It's these types of pledges that make the public view these replacement efforts as fundamentally unserious.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of nuclear and think the industrialized west should follow in France's footsteps. But we will not get there by 2025. We may never get there as long as we approach this problem in such an unserious manner.

Solar and wind often overproduce (leading to negative prices). This (otherwise useless energy) will be used to produce dihydrogen (water electrolysis), which will be stored, then used to produce electricity (fuel cell).

It's as simple as that. They are an exporter.

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...

> To start, we’ll consider Sanders’ claim that “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to get to a zero-carbon electrical grid without nuclear power.

> “The shortest answer is yes, that’s true. Scientists do tell us that we can,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

> Ryan Jones, an expert in electricity systems and a co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, a consulting company that models low-carbon transitions, agreed. “Anyone who says that nuclear is 100% necessary on a technical basis, I would claim, just hasn’t looked at the alternatives in enough detail,” he said in an email.

> Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid.

We currently do not have a viable economically well understood solution, not hypothetical plans which may work to use plutonium effectively [1] at costs we have no idea about or disposal facility for which costs are not really known yet for all types (HLW/ILW and LLW) waste products we cannot talk costs of ownership.[2]

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do nuclear or not build new plants, but without knowing these costs any estimate of cost of ownership is useless numbers in the air as nobody knows what it is going to actually cost yet.

[1] Again engineering and economics, engineering maybe well understood, costs are not, we don't know the costs until we build a few, nuclear is notorious for widely over running cost estimates compared to any other power generation method.

[2] We don't need to measure thousand years of disposal to know the costs, we just need to run an actual disposal site for few years to really estimate the costs .

See this graph for the spread based on Z number (Protons + Neutrons).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#/media/File%...

Between dying in next 100-200 years because of climate change or risking nuclear contamination problems 100's of years in the future in concentrated locations the later is always preferable yes.

I am not saying there is no good reason to move to nuclear, but cost is not one of them, as literally we don't know what it will cost yet.

> ". In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"."

I have been following FBR progress especially thorium based ones, as it was considered to be India's path to energy independence since the 1950's. The progress has been slow and expensive and still a lot of research is left to do, so to say meaningfully that waste will reduce is not a viable plan today or next 20 years.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46836

The problem is that Nuclear may not be economical if it is only used when both solar and wind run out. Nuclear has large fixed costs. And almost zero marginal costs. So the average costs -- what needs to be charged in order to avoid bankruptcy, increase as you use it less.

That means every solar panel you add makes the nuclear power a bit more expensive. And that incentivizes adding more solar. Up until you drive the nuclear out of business, and then suddenly you don't have reliable power anymore.

Then you are faced with a situation of

a) only having nuclear power which can provide for all of your needs, in which case adding solar is an unnecessary expense

b) only having solar+wind and an unreliable grid, which means you need to add batteries to cover solar+wind. And the price of those batteries may be more than the price of the nuclear plant.

c) having nuclear and solar both, with enough subsidies given to the nuclear plant to keep it in business so that the total solution is more costly than just going with nuclear.

So yeah, there really is a tension between nuclear and solar.

This is not the situation, however, with solar and coal. Because coal plants are damn cheap, and they have higher marginal costs. Thus solar can coexist with coal or with gas much better than with nuclear.

Therefore the economics is such that as people promote solar the result is a decrease in nuclear and an increase in coal and gas.

Also, be careful when looking at wind and solar minimal percentages. It’s the difference between median output and minimum output that matters not maximum output. Long term it’s likely something like 30 to 50% of all solar generation is going to be wasted simply because it’s just that cheap.

Besides, if you could buy an electric water heater that runs when electricity is mostly free, wouldn't you replace your gas heater? I would.

Is building nuclear power faster than building Lithium Battery Factories?

Geographically independent power, no carbon emissions, and no intermittency. It fulfills anything we'd get from fusion, except we have 70 years of experience using it in our power grids.

The problem is humanity needs to get it's act together and stop allowing politics, NIMBY and a severe lack of understanding of science from getting in the way of saving itself.

Nuclear proliferation is the least of our problems if we can't grow our food outside anymore and half our cities are underwater.

Nothing will work in 100% of the world.

The point is, do it where it does make sense.

He basically shared that some costly energy consumption (such as water heating) can be easily shaped to the supply.

There's no evidence of that. The only evidence is that when the price is exactly the same 24/7, no elasticity is observed.

> and would cost an unbelievable amount of money to replace with electric

I've had to replace gas furnaces and gas water heaters now and then. They don't last more than 10 years or so.

BTW, everybody in Arizona has A/C. Amazingly, A/C demand peaks when the sun is high in the sky.

> I do not know anybody with an electric car

You will.

The first is dubious, the second is... highly location dependent.

Peak demand in California matches peak solar output pretty well; before solar was big, supply concerns focused on peak demand hours, in the afternoon; now they are in the evening because solar has made the highest gross demand time the time where there is the least concern for supply.

> No, but the labor cost of hooking up your pile of rocks battery will be impractical for almost everyone.

The labor cost of hooking it up isn't that bad, geothermal heat pumps aren't that costly.

Insulating the pile of rocks battery is probably the hard part.

Because there's no incentive to do otherwise. Of course people don't time shift their electric use when there's no incentive to.

Again, we're just talking the thermostat for it.

> I don't think there are even any widely available on the market today which will automatically increase the temperature at mid day in anticipation of an electricity shortage later.

Why should there be? Electric rates are fixed 24/7. All the power company has to do is provide an API to get the spot price, and start varying the electric rates according to supply. The market will adapt.

> Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass.

Criminy. Do I have to design it, too? Most homes have a basement or a crawl space.

That’s a matter of forced mixing. The temp coming out of the hot water heater itself should have very little to do with the faucet temp in 2021. (Yes I realize it still does)

Linky is an electric meter connected to the grid through PLC but it embeds the required hardware to eventually drive appliances consumption.

It provides a dry contact which can be open or closed remotely via the grid’s PLC. So it can be open or closed even without internet.

You can imagine to use this contact to drive a power line dedicated to your water boiler, electric car …

IIRC, atm, the only provided possibility is to open/close the contact via a web API / a smartphone app. But in the future, it may become controllable by the electricity provider to be automatically opened / closed based on the grid’s state (and the electricity price)

(Disclosure: I work for this company, although not on these products.)

Our house built 7 years ago has an Enefarm fuel cell/hot water heater. Every house in our neighborhood and every house I’ve seen by the same builder has one. It approaches things a little bit differently but to the same effect. It learns your energy use patterns and turns on the fuel cell (using LP gas) when you usually use electricity, generating hot water as a side effect. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

https://www.j-lpgas.gr.jp/en/appliances/index.html#ENE-FARM

> it's a safety hazard in homes with small children; hot water temperature should never be hot enough to cause burns when someone turns on the faucet.

Internally it stores water at 65 degrees C but mixes it with cold water to to supply all water to the house at a certain temp. We have ours set to 40C but you can change it on a control panel. Of course, there are mixing taps at the sinks/showers. It’s very common for shower temp controls here to have a extra stop at 40C that requires pressing a button to exceed.

> Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass

I don’t know about cooling but the ones that take advantage of cheap electricity at night to store up heat and release slowly over the day are not massive.

https://catforehead.com/2014/02/17/getting-warm/ https://www.sanica.co.jp/aldy/products/rdf40.html

Even if it is only 10%, that's 10% less grid storage batteries needed.

Ya know, car engine efficiency has improved dramatically over the last 50 years. Each specific improvement was small - but the aggregate adds up.

That said, the parent comment's ideas are bad and ignorant, for the reasons you mentioned and more.

I don't think that's the right way to phrase it. The South was clearly economically viable before A/C. It's kinda like saying that New York City wasn't economically viable until the invention of the safety elevator.

Overall I agree with your views on "half-assed ideas". I want to elaborate on this one topic a bit more, because it presses a button of mine.

On thing A/C did was make it possible to build cheap homes following northern tastes and styles, on the assumption power would remain cheap. Northerners could move in without having to adapt their customs and practices much.

Southern vernacular architecture includes high ceilings (so the heat rises above the people), lots of windows (to let the air go through and heat escape), and with the house raised off the ground (so cooling air flows underneath). This describes the A/C-less Florida house I grew up in. An even more traditional design would have a wraparound porch, to provide extra shade and let the windows stay open even when it rains.

OTOH, A/C encouraged house designs which require A/C to be comfortable - a sort of co-dependency. These vernacular features make the A/C bill higher, so they weren't included in newer homes. I tried living in a Florida home designed for A/C, but without using the A/C. Not only was it much less comfortable, as you write, but we started getting mold because of the humidity. A house made for A/C doesn't have much air flow.

So I don't think the argument is simply 'getting people to turn off air conditioning', but 'getting people to design houses which are a better fit for the local climate and have better long-term sustainability.'

That's of course hard, and expensive.

It's also hard to change lifestyles to fit the climate. Eg, the dominant US culture doesn't appreciate or tolerate siestas, even if it's locally more appropriate.

Oh, and this isn't unique to the South. It's cheaper to build a frame house in Arizona, which requires A/C to be livable, than to build an house (like an adobe house) with thick walls that moderate the temperature fluctuations.

Nor is it just A/C. Earthship designs, for example, show what is possible ... for people who are willing to put more work into daily maintenance. Which is part of the lifestyle change that's hard to do.

Okay, depressing button. :)

No he didn't, the rocks are for asynchronous heating/air conditioning, all you need to get the energy back is a water pump or air blower and tubes.

Your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. All of those ideas are easy to do projects for individuals.

The only thing you need to implement on a global/national/regional scales is a spot market for electricity accessible for everyone. Then you can lean back and watch people implement all those simple ideas and many more.

All in all, your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. Those ideas are not "brilliant ideas" (btw you should learn about correct quoting). Of course those won't solve the problem all at once, but they will have a huge impact.

> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.

well, actually car are parked and not used most of the time, even more during nights when there is no solar energy. And TBH this is my mid-term plan: solar panels to charge it by day and use its battery by night for lights and electric appliances (moving to an electric cold/heat pump for heating it's out of my budget currently, I'm on natural gas)

> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.

Most people drive about 20 - 40 minutes per day. In large cities, it is 2+ hours. The remaining 22 hours, EV is an energy sponge. Take the current peak load, produce more renewables than the peak, turn renewables to 11, absorb all the excess free energy. EV is primarily an energy storage device, some people take trips on them once in a while. None of this energy is wasted. There is no need to think of a round trip for this scenario. All energy for transportation can be free and clean, we are capturing excess production. Utilities are curtailing renewable production, this is a shame, we have built solar/wind farms, but not using free energy! This is a huge barrier for new renewables, producers have to consider growing curtailment.

> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many.

Utilities are a monopoly, guaranteed a cost + profit formula. Utilities increase their costs to increase the profit. We see the same formula play out in health care, hospitals charge $1,400 for a band-aid. Energy can be a lot cheaper, and zero. It is entirely possible for Utilities to pay us for using our electric cars storage, they provide the best grid stabilization and smooth out demand and supply curve, flattening the peak rates. Instead of paying 10 - 20x for peaker gas plants, why can’t Americans be paid? There is a nexus of Utilities (generators, producers, distributors) and jacking up capital costs.

> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea".

Because these are produced by the utilities. Economists and scientists are funded by the industry to write their view. This happened and continues to happen. [1]

Lead is a gift of God. [2], this view was supported by scientists, surgeon general, AMA, public health and nearly all Govt bodies. Industry sets the rules for all of us so they can continue to extract profits for as long as possible. With this rule, we are all poisoned by lead for ~100 years. Lead poisoning is permanent! "lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears. modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times" [4]. We not only have polluted ourselves, but made a permanent toxic change for all of humanity. For what? To make the richest people a little bit richer?

Koheo's rule (put in place by the industry) was used and continues to be used for thousands of other toxins.

"Using the Kehoe Rule, Ethyl Corporation was a winner in either situation: if its product was actually safe, Ethyl would be seen as a responsible party. If, however, its product was unsafe, it would take decades to demonstrate that with certainty. The process of getting to certainty could be prolonged by challenging the methods and results and calling for more data, and while it was going on the product would continue to generate profits. Kitman indicates that the strategy taken by the lead industry, referring to use of the Kehoe Rule, similarly "provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other(s)... for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty."[4] Kettering Laboratories under Kehoe's leadership also certified the safety of the fluorinated refrigerant, Freon, "another environmentally insensitive GM patent that would earn hundreds of millions before it was outlawed."" [3]

Innocent until proven guilty is for people. Should we use the same rule for stuff that harms us? How can we prove this harm when all the studies on harm are done only by the insiders?

The internet that we see today, all the things that are happening in the tech space directly result from the breaking up of AT&T monopoly. We went from circuit switched to packet switched networks, built the underlying networks to throw packets at each other."AT&T, a powerful gatekeeper, controlled innovation by controlling access to the resources needed to innovate – the wires – the physical layer of the telephone network. AT&T's view of Paul Baran's packet-switching design was: ‘It can't possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves.’ [5]

The current configuration of the grid is a creation of this utility nexus. We must break this monopoly. If we can figure out how to sling IP packets at each other, surely we can imagine a reconfiguration of the grid that will let us throw electrons at each other. This will result in upto a thousand dollars/month saved for all of us (residential use), as well as making all the energy clean and renewable. Forever.

---

[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/industry-weaponizing-scie... [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.75.4.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe [3] https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/the-hour-of-lead.pdf [5] ATT and packet switched networks: https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/oucontent/view.php?...

[4] https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/... "Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears.

For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains–in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that “it is doubtful whether any part of the earth’s surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead.”

(edit: formatting)

If you store the energy by heating the rocks, you can recover it to heat your house by simply blowing air over the rocks. No need to convert it to electricity, which would indeed be silly.

The same goes for air conditioning. Excess electricity could be used to cool the rocks, which then can be used to cool your house when electricity is expensive.

The detour through the rocks (or anything with thermal mass) costs next to nothing.

I am not talking about using the EV battery to run the house. I am talking about using the EV battery to run the EV. Simply charge it when electricity rates are cheaper. It's shifting the demand.

> thinking that they constitute a solution

They are perfectly and cheaply implementable, and are part of the solution.

> half-assed

I actually have a degree in mechanical engineering. You shouldn't be so hasty in your inferences.

Ridicule and condemnation was heaped upon me, all explaining how it simply must take 2 years at least.

And yet it was released 6 months later, more or less doing what I suggested.

I'm going to be proven right on this one, too :-)

However, that doesn't help during period when there is hardly any wind. It is not as if you can stop heating your house for a couple of weeks.

I'm curious have this will play out. On a bright summer day, there is plenty of solar power. So it make sense to do everything during the day. During winter, it is better to distribute the load and move load to the night. That requires quite a bit of signaling to get right.

I have a Swedish fireplace. The firebox is very small, and the masonry is rather massive. The idea is for the masonry to soak up the heat, then slowly release it long after the fire dies down. Apparently the Swedes have used this design for centuries. I don't imagine the Swedes are such fools that they wouldn't notice for centuries that it doesn't work (it does!).

People also used to put rocks in the fireplace, then pull them out to put in their beds to warm them at night. This is just a primitive method of doing the same thing.

You, the consumer, can override it. You get to decide between donning a sweater or paying more. Isn't that objectively better than some bureaucrat simply turning off the power to your neighborhood (rolling blackouts)?

Never mind that the pump price of gas changes every day, especially when there's an oil refinery explosion, or glut, or whatever. It's a classic example of demand shaping via price. And it works because demand for gas is elastic.

The only time this did not work was when the government regulated oil prices and which stations got a gas allocation. Older folks like me might remember this - long gas lines in the 1970s. Gas lines that disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed the price and allocation controls.

I'd be very surprised if France didn't do things like this. edit: googled it:

https://thegoodlifefrance.com/french-hot-water-tanks-tarrifs...

So, one of the "unacceptable" solutions to fighting climate change, is something that countries with the highest nuclear mix have been doing for ages.

Criminy. Of course it isn't. It's a storage device for HOT WATER.

I have an experiment you can try. Unplug your hot water heater. See how long the hot water lasts. (For me, it remains hot enough to shower for TWO DAYS.) That suggests, to ignorant me, that one does not need to heat the water in it at a moment's notice, but it can be deferred to the cheaper times of the day.

Furthermore, water doesn't have to be heated to a precise temperature. The temp of your shower is controlled by mixing it with cold water. Hence, one can heat the water to a much higher temp when electricity is cheap, further extending the "battery" effect of storing hot water.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling-idUSKBN1J...

https://www.firstsolar.com/modules/recycling

the first link is basically your second link [2]. the rest are mostly links about that the problem from non recyclable is mostly a problem that only exists, because these fiberglass blades are dirt cheap compared to alternatives and it's cheaper to dump them in landfills. in fact in 4 european countries it's forbidden to put them into landfills. in fact a spain company _can_ recycle fiber to fiber glass to 100% (reciclalia) and they do it even for differnt uses cases (formula 1 and aerospace). of course if landfills are accepted in a country it's cheaper than to recycle. dumping is always cheaper than recycling thats why we dump so much (not just wind turbines...) in fact in germany a lot of our "recycling process" is asically thermal recycling which is not "real" recycling. we basically cheat the stats. a shit ton of stuff can be recycled if somebody wants to, which is often not the case, not even on a governement level and sometimes it's just stupid to even create non recycable waste for no reason (which happens often in the food industry because the non recycable case is often cheaper)

Outrage is what identifies a problem, but to solve the problem requires state capacity to deploy infrastructure cost effectively and at scale.

Now we have no shortage of outrage. We've got activists blocking traffic and having "die-ins" in which they lie down on the grass and sob. We have endless moaning about 'climate collapse'.

But none of that increases nuclear generating capacity. None of that deploys any reliable battery storage at scale.

So then you have the neoliberal free-marketeers thinking that if they impose taxes on oil then magically these nuclear plants will be built, just out of the free market. This is faith-based infrastructure.

But that doesn't happen, so you have the public being burdened by high taxes, then they kick the politicians out of office to lower their taxes, and nothing gets done.

Is that because the public has an emotional attachment to fossil fuels? That they love coal? No, people don't care where they get their energy. Making them care -- e.g. promoting outrage -- does nothing to deploy nuclear power at scale. Lecturing end users about how they are "destroying the plant" also does nothing. That's also just more outrage.

This lack of effective action and the substitution of outrage for engineering competency is why we still need fossil fuels for baseload and will continue to need them.

In fact we are so paralyzed by emotion and irreality that I predict that we will never recover the state capacity we had in the postwar period and instead will just end up buying nuclear plants from China and battery storage infrastructure from China, because we don't have the competency to deploy this infrastructure at scale by ourselves.

But China has state capacity. They do not have the outrage, which is why people who only value outrage think that China is doing nothing. But China will leapfrog the West in things like Nuclear power and even in the area of battery storage at scale.

It may not be according some 2030 timeline, which is again a political deadline rather than a deadline arising from a sober assessment of engineering roadmaps, but China will eventually do it because it has state capacity to act in this area and we do not. When it comes to solving big infrastructure challenges, we have only outrage.

The world wont stop warming at 2 degrees, thats just projection for 2100, it will keep warming after that.

The next generation will have to pay for pulling carbon out od the air to actually stop warming, and that's going to cost $2 for every $1 the oil industry has ever made.

https://xkcd.com/1379/

60% want "the nuclear power to be discontinued" either right now or gradually, and ~27% "don't know". IMHO there is a large majority of citizens wanting a phase-out.

The plants that have had issues were known to be the oldest and most vulnerable ones.

Tihange is a good example of the same political inaction that gave us this climate crisis. It has nothing to do with cutting corners, nor about "designing and running these things". It is (political) complacency, not mismanagement of the plant that's the main problem.

And storage is quickly getting solved. California has gone from almost nothing to more than a GW of storage in a year, and is adding more GW at the moment. Even the "free market" in Texas is choosing to add many GW of storage, even more GW of solar and wind, and almost no new natural gas. And in the US, the majority of new solar projects include storage now, because for a long time there has been more DC production power than ability to convert it to AC, and a few hours of storage makes financial sense because storage has gotten so cheap. As it gets cheaper, there will be bigger an bigger amounts of storage added to every renewables project, on site.

Meanwhile we can't build nuclear in Western countries anymore. France can't, the US can't, the UK is likely going to fail.

The problem in the nuclear industry is that they are stuck on getting even first of a kind plants out. The idea of scaling up to hundreds of GW in the next few years is a pipe dream for the us and Europe. Maybe China will be able to build their 150 planned reactors, but even if they do they will be building far far more renewables than that.

The production capacity of modern Western economies is very well suited to wind, solar, and storage. It is absolutely awful at massive construction projects, like nuclear. Construction productivity has barely changed at all since the 1970s, while other fields' productivity has soared. We should take advantage of that.

And this ain't even talking about the new types of super cheap long duration storage that have high energy/power ratios. There's iron batteries in both traditional solid forms and in flow forms. Noe that the market need is becoming apparent, there are new chemistries being developed all the time that are suitable for stationary storage but not as well suited for cars and other mobile applications. Which is fantastic, as we can then reserve all that quickly growing production capacity for transport.

Those 6 new one was the news from 2020. The one we see in the article is unspecified and could be a reference to the 6 EPR 2 or something else. Same is true for the 150 Chinese plants being planned.

The biggest fault in the old EPR design process seem to be the mid-construct patch that occurred in 2012 as a result of the Fukushima accident. Other issues seems to be related to goals like "world’s highest-output nuclear plant". They decided to use rather exotic form of steel, within the upper limit of what can be created. Given the decision of making the highest-output nuclear plants, and there are only a few places in the world that can create and work the kind of steel that the design require, the budget did not work. In addition, the exotic nature of the material makes it difficult to weld correctly.

The open questions I see is if EPR 2 also require similar exotic materials, if the exotic materials has improved in availability and price, and if the experience in welding it has improved to the point where fewer mistakes are done. It is also possible that by not trying to achieve new world records in plant size and output, the budget might be more reasonable. The world largest and highest wind turbine might be a nice research goal, but building one at the limit of current material would not be my first choice if costs were a priority.

There is a big difference between the naturally occurring isotopes of thorium/uranium, and what comes out of a reactor.

Then, years later, you read HN comments downplaying the effects and the affected with the same types of arguments as Holocaust deniers.

It's emotional, but it's not manipulation. It is the reality how it happened.

You go away from arguing about the topic on hand and instead proclaim that all your opponents arguments are not valid. It is basically a "You are stupid and I do not have to listen to your points".

Further true rationality does not define any goals, because it is just about using reason to come to conclusions or for deducting how to best get to a goal. People that claim to be ideology-free are very dangerous, as they are not ideology free, but cannot accept people seeing different goals.

You can see this romantic view of science in a lot of nuclear power advocates. Nuclear power has, standing for progress and a representative of science, become the goal in itself that is needed to be protected.

To come back to the dumping of nuclear waste: For a while that practice was not even illegal, contrary to what you claim. Nuclear power leads to nuclear waste, which has to be handled properly. Because that is expensive, there exists a high probability for improper handling to happen. Given how often improper handling of nuclear waste has happened, it seems like a systematic problem that is also very likely to happen again, as nuclear waste is an issue that stays for a very long time, which probably also means different political systems.

Your argument that improper handling is only the fault of the bad actors that in the end acted out the dumping is invalid. It ignores on one hand, that the responsibility for toxic waste lies with the producers. If they did not take care for a proper disposal it is their fault. On the other hand it ignores the reasoning of the people that do the toxic waste dumping. Usually that happens in poorer regions and people do it simply because they have no alternative way of earning money.

> Mr Burns was the most environmentally responsible Simpson's character and likely a real scientific expert.

And it's clearly wrong.

Now:

> * Portrait nuclear energy tycoon as the only villain is sad. Because it reflects a unconscious strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful.

From the top of my head the show had a corrupt and inept chief of police, a corrupt mayor, a crazy homicidal clown, a fat tony hanging around freely and an unstable clown. Burns was not the only villain.

He was not a villain because of being a nuclear energy tycoon. He was a villain because of his actions (greed and arrogance and grandeur disillusions).

Now of course by association you could defend the idea that's it's a full blown attack on nuclear. And yes there is a strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful in the US but I'd argue it has more to do with real life events and... I don't know.. cold war era craze for home bunkers to survive an nuclear winter than a cartoon that started at the end of the 80's and uses a badly managed nuclear plant as a laughing device (humor device ?) not even present in every episode.

> * The show can portrait coal miner. Instead of hiding nuclear waste in the tree. Coal miner can pollute the sky as some form of "sky painting".

Are you trying to build the argument that being against nuclear means being for coal ?

Anyway, apart from that three eye fish I don't recall the springfield nuclear plant had incidents that had lasting consequences like Chernobyl or Fukushima had. So apart from being comical...

I don't see where in the show it transpires that the depiction of the springfield nuclear plant reflects a " strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful".

Compared to other forms of energy generation, measured in illnesses, injuries, maimings, and deaths, past and plausibly attributed to the future, per KWH? Not really, no.

Why. What risk of proliferation is there in France, UK or U.S.? These states already have nuclear weapons.

So with the Iran deal, what do we have? Well they would have needed around 3-6mo to enrich their stockpile for enough material for a single weapon. Something they haven't done before and do not have the technology to do. Also something they did not appear to be attempting to do.

But I talked about consensus. I'd say Nature is a good source for that[0]. You'll note here that Nature is talking about getting enough enriched material in months but several other news sources I looked at used the phrase "build a weapon" instead. I'd call this fear mongering and misunderstanding the science.

I'm not trying to tell you that you're dumb, but rather that this is a complicated matter and that amateur levels of understanding aren't quite enough to even get the basics. I have a degree in the field, have worked in the industry and in energy departments. My level of understanding is barely enough to get the basics. I'm calling you out because we're talking about something extremely complicated that people vastly overestimate their expertise to handle. Atomic physics is not a simple thing where you can get a basic understanding through even months of googling.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00254-7

I believe it is in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or was proposed as another agreement.

After all, climate change kills a lot of people, we only have to kill less.

But the problem here is that climate change is not shocking to people. But a nuclear accident would be. In fact, 2 of the 3 nuclear disasters we had are burnt in the collective memory for ever.

So strong action to prevent such accidents are also needed as a communication measure, to reasure the population. Given you are "anti-anti-nuclear", I think it's a good step to reduce the "anti-nuclear" sentiment.

Oxide fuel technology is of course pretty mature, as that's what current generation LWR's all use. However, it has severe disadvantages in a LMFBR. US thinking was apparently that they would jump straight to metal fuel (EBR-II and the canceled IFR), other who have used it see it as a stopgap until nitride fuels become available (e.g. Russia is experimenting with nitrides in their fast reactors).

As for economics, technically breeding is extremely cool (catnip for physicists!), but with current uranium prices there's no particular economic driver to develop and commercialize the technology. I think it's very hard to compare prices for mature LWR technology and various one-off fast breeder prototypes, let alone paper reactors. It's useful as a backstop for rising uranium prices, however.

> There is a precedent for commercial licensing of the LMFBR in the US. Terrestrial Energy (Bill Gates's company) is making noises about building one but they are holding their cards so close to their chest that it's hard to believe they have a realistic plan to do it.

The Bill Gates backed company is Terrapower. They have some agreement with GE Hitachi to develop and commercialize the technology, called "Natrium". AFAIU the Natrium reactor is heavily inspired by the canceled IFR, using metal fuel. We'll see what happens, interesting tech though.

(Terrestrial Energy is the company behind the "IMSR" molten salt reactor. It's a thermal spectrum uranium burning, non-breeding reactor design, though)

You're right though that before the final Merkel administration the Greens, the CDU/CSU and the FDP had talks, which ultimately failed because the FDP passed the CSU (the right-wing regional appendix to the CDU) on the right, which was a bit too much for the Greens, which at the time largely occupied the same center-ish position they hold today, having shifted right considerably in the time between 2005 and 2017.

Overall the impact of the Greens party has been very small on the Merkel administrations, however, some parts of the green movement (which is not closely tied to the Greens party) in Germany are the majority opinion in Germany (especially when it comes to a heavy anti nuclear stance) and that's sufficient to drive Merkel policy making. It's also important to note here that Germany has a very strong NIMBY attitude, so while the majority "wants" green energy, they don't want any of the infrastructure in sight.

I'd also like to point out a fundamental difference between Bundestag culture and US Capitol culture. There are bi-partisan bills in the Capitol, but in the Bundestag it is customary for the ruling parties to unconditionally veto drafts introduced by other parties - exceptions are rare. Almost all votes in the Bundestag are under Fraktionszwang i.e. MPs deviating from the party line won't get on the election list next time around, so don't have a safe seat any more (because parties in Germany can't literally force their MPs to vote their way, they can only "incentivize" it).

.32 is in my book far from "almost 2 times" .19

> Germans already are having the highest income-tax and social-security costs of the developed world

Nope, the tax burden is way higher in France: 46.2% of GDP in 2020, while Germany is at 37.5%

Secondary source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...

Having lived in a couple of Nordic countries for most[1] of my life, allow me to be sceptical about that.

___

[1]: Unter fünf Johr im Ländle wo jeadas Haus a Häusle isch.

I’ve worked on steam turbine before that had boiler fed from bio-fuel or kerosene.

Is the turbine itself not just a shaft with a series of blades, an inlet and an outlet?

Any specifics you can get in to would be very interesting to me! Thanks

The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).

Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.

Complements: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

(Thanks to Y. Marignac for part of the data)