Comment by Galaxeblaffer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Galaxeblaffer | Hacker News Reader

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that's simply still not true. the last three plants built in Europe (England, France and Finland) has been very expensive because they've all been first of its kind and there hasn't really been built anything else. but if you take a look at what's happening elsewhere in the world KHNP for example has their standardized APR1400 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-1400 reactor that seems to be very affordable

Poland just decided to build our nuclear to the tune of 40bn eur and their first contract is with westinghouse and their ap1000 reactor but also signed a letter of intent with KHNP to also built out further. I'm sure they cost Westinghouse for strategic reasons though and not because of price.

heck.. even Finland with their massively delayed and over budget Olkiluoto 3 also plans to built out even more nuclear. it's almost like some countries are now realizing that putting your faith in the weather gods for supply safety is not a good idea and that solar and wind are simply not viable for baseload or the grid in general.

i still think wind and solar has a place for creating synthetic fuels, but let's stop pretending it's been comparable to nuclear for the grid.

edit:

also.. are your saying IEA has wrong data? and if so, would you mind bringing since sources into your argument about people being way too optimistic

It’s not just the United Kingdom that has had issues with APR-1400.

United Arab Emirates has had massive issues. Unit 1 began construction in 2012 and was “completed” in 2018, but didn’t enter commercial operation until 2021 due to literally hundreds of issues. “In December 2018, it was reported that voids were found in the concrete containment buildings for units 2 & 3. Grease was found to have leaked through the unit 3 containment, which may have been due to a crack in the concrete.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant

South Korea also ran into multiple delays, “Shin Kori-3 was initially scheduled to commence operation by the end of 2013, but the schedules for both Units 3 & 4 were delayed by approximately one year to replace safety-related control cabling, which had failed some tests.”

Poland isn’t a failure at this point, but they don’t have a power plant yet and their cost projections before delays aren’t very rosy.

Objectivity it’s reasonable to blame bad management for issues within a single project or even country, but when several different projects in different countries run into issues that suggest more fundamental problems.

The reality is that these are learning costs.

If Britain decided to build 10 APR-1400 in the next 10 years with each one they would improve.

France built like 50 reactors in 15 years with 60s technology. Yes they had issue early on but after a while they were completing reactors within 4-5 years and very few issues.

The reality is from 2000 to 2020 every country in Europe could have 100% green energy if they had just started building multiple reactors every year.

Germany could have easily have a green grid by now. A nation like Germany could very much have gone and do that, just as France did in 1980s.

Note that economics doesn't work even with Korean nuclear plants: Korean nuclear is cheaper than Korean gas, but more expensive than European gas, because European gas is pipelined, Korean gas is liquified, and liquified gas is so much more expensive than pipelined gas.

European nuclear initiatives are mostly about strategic concerns to get out of Russian gas. Economically, even the cheapest nuclear power on Earth can't compete with gas, if it is pipelined. (It can compete if it is liquified.) Or you need to penalize gas to unreasonable degrees for carbon emission.

European gas is cheap as long as we're willing to hand over control of Europe's energy supply to Putin. Which most countries in Europe no longer are, and maybe never will be again.

Meanwhile the largest known deposits of Uranium can be found in Australia and Canada, making them much safer sources for western countries.

If EU countries allow fracking domestically, this will change, of course. Though the same "green" movement that opposes nuclear is likly to try to block this. Maybe we should look at how much funding these people get from Russia?

In Germany none, because the Greens are against Putin. So instead Putin finances the people that protest against wind power and solar.

Maybe you're right, but there are sources claiming otherwise:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/putins-green-fifth-co...

Just to pick a few random google results.

As far as I can tell, it's in Russia's interest to encourage any energy source that synergizes with NG (ie wind and solar) and to work against energy sources that are full alternatives (nuclear, coal and large scale storage), while at the same time ignore the downsides of NG.

It would make sense to fund groups aligned with these interests, even those that are generally negative to Russia politically. Such funding would not need to be done directly, but could be done through subsidiaries.

Someone suggesting the organization which made these predictions about solar https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOoa6xYXIAQKUnv?format=jpg&name=... and is headed by an ex OPEC employee might be making bad cost projections when real prices of real projects in 2022 have a median far lower than their projection from 2020?

Must be a conspiracy theorist.

solar is fine in some places for some usecases and yes it's very cheap to add, but we've currently got no viable solution for storing the energy efficiently.

Batteries, pumped hyrdo, compressed air energy storage, hydrogen, the (large and growing) EV fleet, thermal energy storage

Batteries have had a lot of problems meeting capacity as a storage solution. Pumped Hydro is pretty good but highly location dependent, Gravity and compressed air I believe show a lot of promise. I don't know enough about Hydrogen or thermal storage to comment. But we are no where near actually solving the energy storage needs to use solar and wind exclusively. Unless we demonstrate real breakthroughs in production ready storage we'll always need a backup. Nuclear whether fission or fusion would have been a better route to clean energy but we basically stopped innovating there decades ago and now we are too far behind.

Gravity storage is an absolute joke. About the cheapest substance you can use is iron ore because it reduces the size and cost of the frame, and if you had everything else for free it would still cost you over $70/kWh for a box of it to store 1kWh in a 500m high tower.

Renewables with straight gas backup and no other storage are already lower carbon than any other option, and batteries and off river PHES have only just started getting cheap.

The breakthroughs we need to cover the final gap have already been made if you're paying any attention at all.

Stop concern trolling

Pumped hydro is not, in fact, "highly location dependent". It needs a hill, but there are many millions of hills.

Storage does not need any "breakthroughs". It will be built out when there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, NG plants fill shortfalls.

The best storage solution is to offset normal hydro generation to build up capacity to be released when you have unmet demand. That massively changes the need for storage because dams are already storing months worth of energy so shifting demand within the day is effectively free barring possibly adding some turbines.

Globally 16% of electricity is produced by traditional hydro annually that can cover the majority of the projected need for storage in a pure wind/solar grid.

Also, by the time we need significant batteries the costs will have fallen even further. If you want to eventually cover 10% of the grids daily demand from batteries using projected costs from 2030 to 2040+ it doesn’t look unreasonable.

And also what is slowly starting to emerge: adapting the load back down during peak hours

The current technology mix is capable of meeting more of electrical demand than nuclear has ever achieved at lower cost with zero storage https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

It is also perfectly capable of meeting dispatchable loads like heating, chemical production, and EV charging, and adding them to the grid will bring the ability to meet electricity even higher. Considering the storage and dispatchable low carbon energy that already exists, the remaining part would produce less carbon than would be released by expanding Uranium mining.

There is not enough uranium to meet 50% of world electricity demand using current technology for long enough to wear out a single generation of wind turbines or solar panels.

Your imaginary all nuclear future is both impossoble and worse than the trajectory we are currently on.

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