Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Sure, there's plenty of reasons not to build nuclear. Firstly, it's not cheap compared to modern solar and that trend is likely to continue. Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily. Thirdly, it takes a long time to bring on line, especially the more modern reactors have been prone to massive delays with an EPR reactor in Finland being over a decade late and Hinkley Point C in the UK, and Flamanville in France both being massively late, massively over budget and still unfinished. Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.

I'm not saying there's no benefit to Nuclear, there definitely is, and it should be part of the mix, but it's not a replacement for a decent investment in Solar.

View on HN

>Firstly, it's not cheap compared to modern solar and that trend is likely to continue.

But with solar you must include the cost of large scale energy storage, which makes it more expensive

>Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily. 1) that's what pumped hydro is for, 2) modern reactors can alter their output by as much as 5%/minute

> Firstly, it's not cheap compared to modern solar and that trend is likely to continue.

Only if you omit cost of energy storage infrastructure and grid upgrades necessary for VRE.

> Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily.

Repeated often by nuclear critics even though there's evidence out there of German nuclear modulating load within 24 hours.

> Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.

French powerplants did not go offline last summer, a few of them that lack sufficient cooling tower infrastructure had to eject hotter than usual water into rivers.

Much of the nuclear delays are due to political ambivalence, not technical issues. Once there is a clear will to move, they can move very fast.

Finland that you quote was marinating it's Olkiluoto reactor for many years. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and Olkiluoto got from "let's think about approvals for a few more years" to pumping out electricity in a flash.

Not just not cheap. 5x more expensive.

It doesnt really matter what kind of storage you have to pair with solar (batteries, pumped storage, windgas) it still delivers cheaper power.

> Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily.

Yes. Yes, you can.

--- start quote ---

Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany [ report from 2011 ] operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.

Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr [rated power] per minute.

--- end quote ---

https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

> the more modern reactors have been prone to massive delays with an

This is mostly a political issue. China and South Korea are bringing reactors online faster.

> Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.

Again, that was a combination of things, including politically-motivated underinvestment in maintenance of nuclear power plants

You can technically run them in load following mode and some countries have but the cost is even more insane than using it as baseload.

The vast majority of the cost of nuclear power (which is very, very, very expensive) is capex for building out the capacity. Building it and then leaving it idle is crazy.

Cost of NPP with load following > NPP paired with storage > solar+wind paired with storage.

(where storage could be batteries, pumped storage or windgas).

> You can technically run them in load following mode

The quote literally is: "Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode".

Edit: the requirements are literally "For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute."

> but the cost is even more insane than using it as baseload.

And you have sources for that "insane cost"?

Wikipedia has sources:

"While most nuclear power plants in operation as of early 2000's were already designed with strong load following capabilities, they might have not been used as such for purely economic reasons: nuclear power generation is composed almost entirely of fixed and sunk costs so lowering the power output doesn't significantly reduce generating costs, so it is more effective to run them at full power most of the time.[10][11]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant

France using Nuclear Power for load following is more a signal that they'd misjudged and significantly overbuilt nuclear capacity, not that it's a good idea. EDF has overwhemling financial problems and went spectacularly bankrupt in large part because unlike with, say, solar and wind - that spare capacity is very, very, very expensive.

tl;dr - as I said before, you technically can do it but it's absurdly expensive and just not worth it.

> While most nuclear power plants in operation as of early 2000's were already designed with strong load following capabilities, they might have not been used as such

Again. Very, very VERY slowly:

--- start quote ---

Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode

--- end quote ---

And these countries have more power plants than the rest of Europe.

If you bothered to read the report, and not just wikipedia, you'd see graphs for plants built as early as 1978 happily operating in load-following mode. E.g. Unterweser, commissioned in 1978, operated between 700 MW and 1400 MW per day in load-following mode. Same for Grohnde (commissioned in 1984). Etc.

> tl;dr - as I said before, you technically can do it but it's absurdly expensive and just not worth it.

And, of course, have sources for this?

Of course there will be no source, but just FUD, so I had to look it up myself.

https://energiforskmedia.blob.core.windows.net/media/18663/h...

--- start quote ---

Additional Costs for Load-following Nuclear Power Plants. Experiences from Swedish, Finnish, German, and French nuclear power plants

The conclusion from this report is that with a well-prepared load-following, there are very few additional costs...

It is concluded that if the load-following is planned and the regulation is done within determined levels specific for the plant there is no hindrance or addi- tional costs for load-following.

<Summarising: the actual cost is minimal, but may affect the resulting MWh price because nuclear power plants have high fixed costs and low variable costs.>

--- end quote ---

> a signal that they'd misjudged and significantly overbuilt capacity, not that it's a good idea.

Unlike, say, renewables, that have overbuilding as a requirement I guess: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396

What this means is that they built enough capacity to counter most requirements for power, and hand handle elastic demand without the need to overbuild or extensive expensive storage (something also absolutely required for renewables).

>Unlike, say, renewables, that have overbuilding as a requirement I guess

Right, except at 5x the cost.

Nuclear power, and indeed, load following would make a lot more sense if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible.

> Right, except at 5x the cost.

Source?

> if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible.

It's currently both [1].

BTW. Case in point: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396

---

[1] Edit: This is a nice quick overview from a year ago https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-ana...

"Cheapest" option is pumped hydro storage. To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.

The most expensive option is Li-ion batteries, clocking in at a measely 1.1 trillion dollars.

Cheap and feasible.

>Source?

Odd that somebody who is trying to school me on the realities of renewable energy is unaware of this, but here you go:

https://energycentral.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_meta...

>>if grid scale storage were prohibitively expensive or impossible. >It's currently both

For something that is prohibitively expensive and impossible we sure are seeing a lot of it rolled out.

>"Cheapest" option is pumped hydro storage. To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion

Meanwhile, Hinkley point C is projected to cost $28 billion and for that we will get just 3.2GW.

Europe used 2785 TWh last year. Even if you assumed that storage is free, that still requires a minimum of 317GW, which would require about 100 Hinkley Point Cs, which would cost $2.7 trillion to build.

$100 billion would be a bargain.

> Odd that somebody who is trying to school me on the realities of renewable energy

Odd that someone who keeps reeating falsifiable untruths about nuclear couldn't be bothered to provide their sources even when repeatedly asked

> https://energycentral.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_meta...

This is a graph with no context and no explanation. And of course it doesn't include things like the need to overbuild and projected costs of storage.

> Meanwhile, Hinkley point C

Meanwhile if you selectively look at a single nuclear plant built in conditions which the FUD you spread around has been the norm for the past three decades, sure.

> $100 billion would be a bargain.

Of course you continue to ignore everything from what I write but what makes your FUD look plausible and good. Of course it won't be 100 billion because there's literally no way you could build that many PHS (and not at that cost). You'd know that if you actually read the links I provided, and not cherry-picked whatever you want from my words.

I have no interest to continue talking to someone who argues in bad faith.

Adieu.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com