Concerned Citizen posted:

westinghouse's reactors are gen III+, not gen IV. it's a PWR so it's hardly skunk works. and talking about operating costs, if their operating costs were really that low, half of us nuclear reactors wouldn't be unprofitable. the operating costs are only low on paper, but in reality they significantly increase as the reactors age. and, of course, most of the cost is in building the things in the first place.

Concerned Citizen posted:

westinghouse's reactors are gen III+, not gen IV. it's a PWR so it's hardly skunk works. and talking about operating costs, if their operating costs were really that low, half of us nuclear reactors wouldn't be unprofitable. the operating costs are only low on paper, but in reality they significantly increase as the reactors age. and, of course, most of the cost is in building the things in the first place.

brugroffil posted:

re: the bolded, does that include if you correctly price in the externalities of coal such as spewing heavy metals everywhere and pumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere?

we also haven't sited a new nuclear facility in this country since the 1970's. The most recent reactor to come online, Watts Bar, was under construction for a long rear end time and is the second unit at the facility. VC Summer and Vogtle are existing old plants that are building the new AP1000's.

Coolguye posted:

the entire concept of Gen III+ is a colossal load of crap brought on by exactly the sort of stuff I mentioned in my post. A Gen III+ PWR is almost invariably trying to crowbar advanced fuel types into a design that wasn't put out to accept that fuel, which is like trying to convert an unleaded car into a diesel one. Sure, you can technically do it, but there's basically never any reason to. Again, this is to dodge regulation that makes building otherwise modern, battle-ready designs not viable.

Also, operating costs go up for older nuclear reactors at a completely analogous rate to fossil fuel stations. The curve is almost identical, actually. If you want to say nuclear isn't profitable because the reactors that are ten years over their design lifespan are requiring more maintenance you can, but that's also why early generation coal, oil, and gas stations are being demolished and rebuilt on their own ashes. They just get to do it more easily because they don't have literal years of hoops to jump through.

Coolguye posted:

probably doesn't include those situations, nope! but since nobody can agree on how much a ton of CO2 should cost, nor things like heavy metal poisoning, you can't include them in any economic model without it being really, really shaky.

Coolguye posted:

Renewables currently generate more value in subsidy than they do in actual electricity produced. Oklahoma is discontinuing its wind program this year for exactly this reason; the subsidy fund they were using to incentivize the program ended, and the state's GDP actually shrank from the operation because the wind farms displaced so many farms and ranches that were actually profitable. The idea was that renewables would have lower operating costs once put up, because they don't require a full time staff, but the reality of the situation is that power storage with batteries and such is still such an expensive problem that it costs at least as much to scale as a power station of any stripe. There's also the cost of the land that you must buy up en-masse to support renewables. It tends to be farmland, which is HELLA expensive. Again, people do not usually count these costs because tons of the land comes from subsidized purchases or land grants taken by eminent domain to make way for critical infrastructure.

If you remove subsidy payments from the equation (nuclear receives almost none, while renewables are extremely heavily subsidized) then the economic viability flips. Nuclear makes sense. Renewables are extraordinarily expensive.

Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:

I was under the impression that wind farms also functioned as pasture as well. It's not like cows give a poo poo. This isn't the case?

brugroffil posted:

As someone who actually is dealing first-hand with AP1000 projects, lol.

Gen III+ is just better engineering for safety, maintainability, and operability of Gen III technology. There's no advanced fuel types. Gen iV reactors are still all research-grade and we're a ways away from them being commercially viable.

Coolguye posted:

could you provide a place to take a look at these AP1000 proposals? i'm fine with it if it's some agency or whatever that i have to write to and not an immediate gratification URL. i'm happy to be wrong on this matter, but the "GenIII+" proposals that got run around and murdered in committee in kansas and missouri were invariably trying to cram some flavor of thorium into a much older reactor type jury-rigged for the job, and had basically every nuclear engineer i hung out with reacting with horror.

brugroffil posted:

Yes, it is. My wife's family used to own some farmland in central Illinois that was part of one of the big wind farms down there. They got paid something like $7k/year per turbine to lease the land. I have no idea why Coolguye thinks windfarms displace a non-negligible amount of farmland. Maybe he's never flown over the many midwestern states littered with them that still grow immense amounts of food?

Concerned Citizen posted:

yes, renewables still require subsidies. no type of energy can currently compete with natural gas on cost alone. but a state like iowa, for example, generates like 40% of its energy from wind alone. and texas is investing enormous amounts of money into renewables.

nuclear receives "almost no subsidy?" every single part of the nuclear industry is subsidized, from uranium mining, to financing, to maintenance & ongoing operation, to tax credits for just existing. there is no world where nuclear is even remotely economically viable without the massive number of state and federal subsidies. even with these subsidies, many plants are closing in the face of cost pressures by natural gas.

Coolguye posted:

you seem as though you're comparing subsidy for existing infrastructure to subsidy for new construction? that's the definition of apples and oranges and not remotely what i said.

Concerned Citizen posted:

every part of nuclear is subsidized, both new constructions and existing infrastucture. it's apples-to-apples because neither industry can survive without enormous government subsidies, and nuclear will require more over the lifetime of a plant until such time that we develop more economical reactors.

Concerned Citizen posted:

every part of nuclear is subsidized, both new constructions and existing infrastucture. it's apples-to-apples because neither industry can survive without enormous government subsidies, and nuclear will require more over the lifetime of a plant until such time that we develop more economical reactors.

brugroffil posted:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0715/ML071580895.pdf

brugroffil posted:

Maybe it's the suck rear end states you live in, there doesn't seem to be a problem in more northern Midwest states with wind?

Do you have any links to studies about those sorts of claims? Because a quick google doesn't really turn up anything reputable.

Coolguye posted:

okay, your sense of scale is absolutely insane here for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which is you're effectively implying that they receive proportional subsidy, which isn't true - renewables receive tons more for a much more sustained time period, especially in the case of new construction. your comparisons over lifetime are also insane because nuke reactors are routinely exceeding their targeted design life span by a decade or more and that is not even remotely comparable to the windmills and solar farms that are already eating comparable amounts in constant battery replacements. i'm willing to drop all of that in an agree-to-disagree.

what i'm more interested in is why precisely you think it's an apples-to-apples comparison when you say both of them require mammoth investment, mammoth research, mammoth subsidy, mammoth effort to make reasonable, but you have such wildly differing interpretations of how renewables are worth researching and pushing forward while nuke reactors are not.


thanks! i'll read that this weekend.

Coolguye posted:

the most reputable thing i can offer is the economic impact assessments done by the oklahoma legislature when deciding to end the recent wind subsidies, but those aren't online because lol oklahoma. i read them thoroughly when i was in tulsa for a week alternately working on a contract and getting drunk on their microbrews. i'll see if i can request a copy of the report to be delivered since it was actually an interesting read, but no promises.

e: to answer your edit, the fundamental answer is no more interesting than "i'm curious." the managers tend to be really passionate about their work, if disillusioned a bit about the implementations, and are so used to be ignored when they try to talk that they're generally pretty happy to open up. trying to get a couple of them to start blogs.

brugroffil posted:

They are able to do this thanks to very expensive upgrades that sometimes go horribly wrong and break the entire plant, like when SONGS replaced their steam generators with new ones that had a critical design flaw, leading to both reactors being permanently shuttered. Or when Crystal River thought "hey, we can save $20m on this steam generator project by running it ourselves instead of hiring the one company that's done dozens of them around the country!" and promptly broke their containment building twice. Collectively, that flushed over $10B worth of assets down the drain.

fun fact about SONGS: it's right next to a state park and there's a public walkway that runs along the seawall directly in front of the plant. Camp Pendelton is also just across the highway so you can hear artillery shells going off in the background!

brugroffil posted:

I'm very skeptical about anything coming out of the Oklahoma legislature, especially when it's being used as a justification to say "lol gently caress liberals and their dumb green energy, ROLL COAL!"

Nebakenezzer posted:

Prav posted:

that's not a very subtle cross there

Nebakenezzer posted:

Actual bad ideas for nuclear power:

crazy cloud posted:

stop loving with atoms the audacity of you fuckers

we could be drinking filtered river water and communing with nature in a Pan-worshipping state of Edenistic Hedonistic Utopia but you need to build nuclear reactors to charge your iphones?


you're sick in the loving head all of you electrocucks

Nebakenezzer posted:

1950s Life: Military not giving up on the whole 'atomic airplane' idea

You have to admire their perseverance, I suppose.



The main debate among the brains of the time was "should we modify an existing airframe or design a new one?" The main concern was of course a atomic plane gap with the Soviets.



This concept is interesting, though like the last atomic atomic bomber we've seen, it places special emphasis on putting the crew far away from the reactor, which tells me even 1950s engineers were not so confidant about the the whole 'lightweight radiation shield' problem.



The atomic powered early warning aircraft makes sense, assuming you could build it big enough so that the crew isn't forced to live in Type VII U-boat squalor in a tiny shielded compartment at the front for weeks at a time. I'm not seeing the advantages of a nuclear powered B-57, though :/



Launching ICBMs from a nuclear powered airplane is, ah, interesting. You guys have been talking about servicing the past few pages - imagine the service bulletins that thing would generate. It has *twin* reactors, and carries something like 2 Titan IIs fueled on its wings, in the upper atmosphere, during all weathers. The "low level supersonic ramjet bomber" is probably actually less problematic from a maintenance standpoint, since I think Ramjets don't need moving parts. I also can't imagine it'd be more dangerous to its crews than the B-58. Then again, the accidents would probably be memorable in a way that a supersonic bomber merely exploding and crashing with a thermonuclear bomb on board positively dull.



Given how the 1950s rolled with Health and Safety, I think we should be glad it never happened.

brugroffil posted:

They are able to do this thanks to very expensive upgrades that sometimes go horribly wrong and break the entire plant, like when SONGS replaced their steam generators with new ones that had a critical design flaw, leading to both reactors being permanently shuttered. Or when Crystal River thought "hey, we can save $20m on this steam generator project by running it ourselves instead of hiring the one company that's done dozens of them around the country!" and promptly broke their containment building twice. Collectively, that flushed over $10B worth of assets down the drain. The industry as a whole had to spend over $1B on Fukashima upgrades. Similar numbers were spent on post-9/11 security upgrades.

fun fact about SONGS: it's right next to a state park and there's a public walkway that runs along the seawall directly in front of the plant. Camp Pendelton is also just across the highway so you can hear artillery shells going off in the background!

rudatron posted:

Chernobyl was a flawed reactor design (that the designers knew about but which the plant technicians were never informed of) and fukushima wasn't nearly as bad aa the reaction to it would have you believe - the evacuation occurred as a precaution but its not as if the entire site was irradiated, it was mostly leakage into the ocean.

In terms of death per kilowatt hr, nuclear kills less people than coal, biofuels or even solar (mostly people dying when they fall off roofs). Importantly, nuclear is the only feasible non-carbon baseload that's not limited by geography (hydro is better but there's a maximum capacity to that that we've already practically reached).

Concordat posted:

hydro has it's own problems, sedimentation, local environmental destruction when creating reservoirs, and most notably, the one you mentioned.

my favorite insane nuclear weapon idea is Project Pluto, which was basically a supersonic cruise missile driven by a nuclear scramjet that would drop nukes on pre-programmed targets then just loiter around an airspace making GBS threads out radioactive death before eventually crashing.

Ytlaya posted:

Hahahaha you actually left out the part where, after expending its warheads, it would fly low over populated areas in order to cause damage with the ensuing shockwave.

Coolguye posted:

and nothing on project orion yet?

FOR SHAME: http://www.islandone.org/Propulsion/ProjectOrion.html





because there's no CONCEIVABLE bad repercussions to detonating nukes in high orbit!

Concordat posted:

hydro has it's own problems, sedimentation, local environmental destruction when creating reservoirs, and most notably, the one you mentioned.

Tunicate posted:

Also occasionally killing a couple hundred thousand people

Nebakenezzer posted:

North Korea?

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Nuke plants are good. gently caress the haters.