- cross-posted to:
- greentext@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- greentext@lemmy.ml
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Burning down your house doesn’t poison people thousands of years later, so it’s not a perfect analogy.
Plus we have magic mirrors and magic fans that do the same thing as the magic rocks just way cheaper.
Well, you see, the “Anti Magic Rock” Lobby has immense amount of power because of the money of the still lucrative “burning stuff and pollute everything” business.
That, and the green parties (at least in EU).
The “green” parties 💵💵
Step 1: Get magic rocks.
Step 2: Now design the rest of the nuclear reactor.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.
yes
“Right in the heart of it is an itty bitty windmill and that just don’t sit right with me” - That one cousin at Thanksgiving
I always wonder where we would actually be at as a civilization if it weren’t for fuckass lobbyists and money hoarding greedy assholes. This is a perfect example. If we’d learned from our mistakes and actually improved on nuclear energy there’s no telling where we’d be at this point.
Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?
Not sure I get what you mean by “slow”.
And it’s not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we’ve been building and less of the one we stopped building.
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.
produces amounts of waste orders of magnitude lower than any other means of energy production
reliable when done well
it shouldn’t be replaced with renewables, but work with them
But it’s not done well. Just look at the new built plants, which are way over budget and take way longer to build then expected. Like the two units in Georgia that went from estimated 14bn to finally 34bn $. In France who are really experienced with nuclear, they began building their latest plant in 2007 and it’s still not operational, also it went from 3.3bn to 13.2bn €. Or look at the way Hinkley Point C in the UK is getting developed. What a shit show: from estimated 18bn£ to now 47bn£ and a day where it starts producing energy not in sight.
Yes, but energy density doesn’t matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.
85% of used fuel rods can be recycled to new fuel rods. And there’s military uses for depleted uranium too. So, essentially every bit of the waste can be recycled. Can’t say the same for fossil fuels.
“85% of used fuel rods can be recycled” is like “We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means”.
In theory it’s correct. In reality it’s bullshit that will never happen because it’s completely uneconomical and it’s just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
Recycling nuclear waste is one of those problems that should be easy but nobody knows what the easy way looks like. It’s impossible to tell if some breakthrough will make it viable tomorrow or if people will have to work for 200 years to get to it. But yeah, currently it’s best described as “impossible”.
Yeah, you’re not making any sense. How is the recyclability of nuclear fuel rods an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels? That’s a massive leap in logic that demands an explanation.
They’re saying that plausible uses don’t necessarily translate to real world use, in practice. I have no stake in this, just translating
While I understand where they’re coming from, it should be noted that they’re likely basing their experience with recyclability on plastic recycling which is totally a shit show. The big difference comes in when you realize that plastic is cheap as shit whereas uranium fuel rods are not.
the waste it produces is highly problematic.
It’s a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat, its just the reactors make use of an actual reaction that nuclear waste can’t do anymore. Yever watch the Martian, he has a generator that’s fuel is lead covered beads of radioactive material, it doesn’t generate as much as reactors but it’s still a usable amount.
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat
That’s an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don’t use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.
The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (238Pu, usually as PuO2), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can’t be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (210Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can’t be extracted.
90Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn’t used as RTG fuel today.
Right now we probably use more energy to produce antimatter than getting it back
Energy density is a useless bullshit metric for stationary power.
Produces more waste than almost all of the renewables.
Reliable compared to… … … ok, I’m out of ideas, they need shutdowns all the time. Seems to me it’s less reliable than anything that isn’t considered “experimental”.
And it can’t work with renewables unless you add lots and lots of batteries. Any amount of renewables you build just makes nuclear more expensive.
They are an interesting technology, and I’m sure they have more uses than making nuclear weapons. It’s just that everybody focus on that one use, and whatever other uses they have, mainstream grid-electricity generation is not it.
Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. Renewables are great and cheap, but they aren’t a complete solution without grid level storage that doesn’t really exist yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/24/power-grid-battery-capacity-growth
US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years
Solar with Battery grid storage is now cheaper than nuclear.
If the demand goes up I have some doubt, also, mining for Lithium is far from being clean, and then batteries are becoming wastes, so I doubt you would replace nuclear power with this solution
I guess in some regions it could work, but you’re still depending on the weather
You don’t need lithium. That’s just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.
Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn’t care if the building houising the batteries weighs 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).
PS: And the materials can also be recycled. Funnily there’s always the pro-nuclear argument coming up then you can recycle waste to create new fuel rod (although it’s never actually done), yet with battery tech the exact same argument is then ignored.
Density doesn’t matter much when it comes to grid scale, indeed.
What battery technologies are you thinking of? Zinc-ion? Flow batteries?
you know that grid storage does not always mean “a huge battery”, you can also just pump water in a higher basin oder push carts up a hill and release the potential energy when you need it…
Pumped storage is a thing yeah. But might just as well go full hydro, if you’re doing the engineering anyways.
They’re currently bringing sodium batteries to market (as in “the first vendor is selling them right now”). They’re bulky but fairly robust IIRC and they don’t need lithium.
Yeah, lithium mining and processing is extremely toxic and destructive to the environment. On one hand, it’s primarily limited to a smaller area, but on the other hand, is it sustainable long-term unless a highly efficient lithium recycling technology emerges? And yes, I know there are some startups that are trying to solve the recycling problem, some that are promising.
Would love to see a source for that claim. How many 9’s uptime do they target? 90%, 99%
This is old news now! Here’s a link from 5 years ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/
This is from last year: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
As to uptime, they have the same legal requirements as all utilities.
I was pro nuke until finding out solar plus grid battery was cheaper.
Source (1)
Later this month the LA Board of Water and Power Commissioners is expected to approve a 25-year contract that will serve 7 percent of the city’s electricity demand at 1.997¢/kwh for solar energy and 1.3¢ for power from batteries.
The project is 1 GW of solar, 500MW of storage. They don’t specify storage capacity (MWh). The source provides two contradicting statements towards their ability to provide stable supply: (a)
“The solar is inherently variable, and the battery is able to take a portion of that solar from that facility, the portion that’s variable, which is usually the top tend of it, take all of that, strip that off and then store it into the battery, so the facility can provide a constant output to the grid”
And (b)
The Eland Project will not rid Los Angeles of natural gas, however. The city will still depend on gas and hydro to supply its overnight power.
Source (2) researches “Levelized cost of energy”, a term they define as
Comparative LCOE analysis for various generation technologies on a $/MWh basis, including sensitivities for U.S. federal tax subsidies, fuel prices, carbon pricing and cost of capital
It looks at the cost of power generation. Nowhere does it state the cost of reaching 90% uptime with renewables + battery. Or 99% uptime with renewables + battery. The document doesn’t mention uptime, at all. Only generation, independant of demand.
To the best of my understanding, these sources don’t support the claim that renewables + battery storage are costeffective technologies for a balanced electric grid.
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
So it’s flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.
Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn’t take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.
The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.
For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.
So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that’s when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let’s sick with 14.
For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW “storage” for 24hrs.
So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.
The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don’t think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it’s mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.
So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
That’s stored energy. For example: a 5 MWh battery can provide 5 hours of power at 1MW. It can provide 2 hours of power, at 2.5MW. It can provide 1 hour of power, at 5MW.
The max amount of power a battery can deliver (MW), and the max amount of storage (MWh) are independant characteristics. The first is usually limited by cooling and transfo physics. The latter usually by the amount of lithium/zinc/redox of choice.
What uptime refers to is: how many hours a year, does supply match or outperform demand, compared to the number of hours a year.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This is incorrect. Under the assumption that nuclear plants are steady state, (which they aren’t).
To match a 1GW nuclear plant, for one day, you need a fully charged 1GW battery, with a capacity of 24GWh.
Are you sure you understand the difference between W and Wh?
Thats a chicken/egg peoblem. If enough renewables are build the storage follows. In a perfect world goverments would incentivice storage but in an imperfect one problems have to occure before somebody does something to solve them. Anyway, according to lazard renewables + storage are still cheaper than NPPs.
Imagine this (not so) hypothetical scenario:
Yellowstone or another supervolcano erupts and leads to a few years of volcanic winter, where there is much less sunshine. This has historical precedent, it has happened before, and while in and of itself it will impact a lot of people regardless of anything else, wouldn’t you agree it would be better to have at least some nuclear power capacity instead of relying solely on renewables?
Sure, such a scenario is not probable, but it pays to stay safe in the case of one such event. I would say having most of our power from renewables would be best, having it supported by 10-20% or so nuclear with the possibility of increase in times of need would make our electric grids super resilient to stuff
Yeah let me imagine a supervolcano explosion of that scale to effect global weather patterns. What do you think will happen to your reactors? No, they are not indestructable just because they can handle an earthquake of normally expected proportion.
Nature catastrophes are the top 1 danger to nuclear energy. See Fukushima.
And the real question here would be a comparison between risk of a nuclear accident event and a renewables-impacting climate event.
This argument again?
Yes, it’s called reality. I know it’s an ugly thing that just doesn’t go away no matter how hard you want it to.
Dude, thorium reactors will be ready any day now, along with mini reactors! Everything will be super cheap and all the waste will be reused and we won’t be dependent on any fuel sources from Russia and all our problems will be gone!
/s, in case it’s not obvious
