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It's almost as though we need a nationalized grid of nuclear, solar, and wind power
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Oct 25, 2021 21:21
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Nuclear energy too cheap to measure? Where have I heard this before? Honestly I'm not sure how that makes any sense considering how expensive it actually is.
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Oct 25, 2021 21:32
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Phanatic posted:They're also fueled with HEU as with ship nuclear systems. VideoGameVet posted:So proliferation concerns. My understanding is that they will be fueled with High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium, specifically due to proliferation concerns. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-high-assay-low-enriched-uranium-haleu
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Oct 25, 2021 21:39
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Nuclear is a terrible investment vehicle. It frequently goes 100% over budget and is delayed by a years to decades. When you finally get it built there's intermittent sources to compete with so you face price uncertainty that may be affected by politics. In the decade(s) it takes you to build it other technologies may have been developed or matured and been rapidly deployed changing the fundamental assumptions of your business model. You don't know how cheap solar or wind is in decades or how much of it there is or what batteries cost or if new types of storage have been developed or if it's now cheap enough to store in hydrogen or methanol or if suddenly geothermal or something else takes off. All of this uncertainty is priced in. Conversely you can build a wind or solar park in 6 months. Construction is simple and straightforward and when it's built you know you can always beat competitors on price because you have no fuel costs. The market isn't going to solve this because nuclear is a capital intensive high risk investment with low yield so it'll never attract enough capital on its own for rapid build out. Nationalizing the grid and power companies seems politically improbable but sure do that if possible. We need reactors that can be rapidly built and deployed for nuclear to be succesful and we don't have that
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Oct 26, 2021 07:01
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I look at the AGC mitigation need: 10+ TW installed excess capacity for [magical sequestration technology here] by 2050. I happen to think that figure is optimistically lean by a whole integer factor. Install every windmill, solar panel, and nuclear plant possible. Our remaining remotely-optimistic concentration paths already count on seriously intense sequestration programs, and IPCC report by IPCC report, we learn how terrifyingly inadequately dire the last report was. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 07:24
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mobby_6kl posted:Nuclear energy too cheap to measure? Where have I heard this before? You heard it from engineers who didn’t understand, and had no practical experience of, economics. _Actually is_ means _under the rules of investment finance_. As someone says above, nuclear is a bad capital investment vehicle. It is a means of taking concentrated capital and creating widely distributed returns which you have no ability to collect. Which is another way of saying ‘make a loss’. The fictional nation of Wakanda, with its Vibranium, was written in the sixties partly taking inspiration from contemporary Ghana and the new wonder-metal, aluminium. Ghana had both deposits of bauxite and rivers suitable for generating hydroelectricity. The bankers of the world were happy to fund either, but not both. At the engineering level, it makes sense to make aluminium using cheap hydroelectricity, reducing shipping costs by refining locally. But at the economic level, it doesn’t. You don’t get your money back from someone who has no need to do business with you any more. The chief advantage of most forms of renewables is little to do with engineering, but that they don’t have that problem. Fundamentally the customer pays for their own solar panel, either directly or via some form of simple indirection. For nuclear to prosper, the required innovation would be mostly financial or political, not a matter of engineering.
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Oct 26, 2021 10:48
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radmonger posted:For nuclear to prosper, the required innovation would be mostly financial or political, not a matter of engineering. Is there any feasible scenario where nuclear generated power becomes substantially cheaper, whilst maintaining/improving actual (not regulatory) safety standards? Say, 50% cheaper? I don't have the knowledge to decipher all the new GenIV/V/+ pebble bed, thorium cycle etc etc. Is there anything in the less than 20 year pipeline where this happens?
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Oct 26, 2021 11:59
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The idea that we can't build nuclear plants because of economic losses is the primary reason we are doomed. Using economics as the guide to climate change will lead us into the dirt. Economics doesn't properly value the costs of not building nuclear plants.
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Oct 26, 2021 14:03
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Is there any feasible scenario where nuclear generated power becomes substantially cheaper, whilst maintaining/improving actual (not regulatory) safety standards? Say, 50% cheaper? That's the trick: The power generation portion is incredibly cheap. Nuclear Plants are not expensive to operate, only expensive to build and decommission.
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Oct 26, 2021 14:04
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:The idea that we can't build nuclear plants because of economic losses is the primary reason we are doomed. Economics absolutely does value it through pricing externalities like GHG emissions. Governments don't then apply those prices to the economy properly; in the UK the Government estimates the cost of carbon necessary to achieve Net Zero is £240/tonne, while the price it applies to emissions via its trading scheme is closer to £50-70/tonne.
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Oct 26, 2021 14:11
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Is there any feasible scenario where nuclear generated power becomes substantially cheaper, whilst maintaining/improving actual (not regulatory) safety standards? Say, 50% cheaper? All of those are engineering ideas, none of which would address the actual problem; the inherent cheapness of the generated electricity, and the consequent lack of a market-based means of recovering the high fixed costs of construction. Most would make it worse, e.g. thorium would presumably further reduce fuel and security costs. French electricity, almost entirely nuclear, costs 0.17 Euros per kilowatt, about half that of Germany. This is already too low for the companies involved to make expected profits; Only a fool would invest in French rather than German power companies; any further price reductions would completely bankrupt them. Any successful change would be politically driven; at most some engineering fix might help with public perception. Something like reclassifying spent nuclear fuel as a financial asset, rather than a liability, would probably be along the right lines.
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Oct 26, 2021 14:34
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Germany is pretty uniquely expensive though, and most EU is around French level regardless of how much nuclear they have going. I guess I'm still not following your economic argument. How can the low fuel & operation cost be possibly bad? I mean if that's the problem, why not employ personal butlers for the janitors on site or something? Or use champagne to cool the used fuel? The margin between the market rates and your cost of generation is what pays off the initial investments so you want the costs as low as possible (and marker rates as high as possible). A few plants aren't going to bring down the maker prices significantly at all. Your previous post and this makes much more sense to me: Owling Howl posted:Nuclear is a terrible investment vehicle. It frequently goes 100% over budget and is delayed by a years to decades. When you finally get it built there's intermittent sources to compete with so you face price uncertainty that may be affected by politics. In the decade(s) it takes you to build it other technologies may have been developed or matured and been rapidly deployed changing the fundamental assumptions of your business model. You don't know how cheap solar or wind is in decades or how much of it there is or what batteries cost or if new types of storage have been developed or if it's now cheap enough to store in hydrogen or methanol or if suddenly geothermal or something else takes off. All of this uncertainty is priced in. The engineering breakthrough needed would have to be on making the initial construction much more simpler, faster, and cheaper. Some of the challenge is red tape but there's also just inherently a lot of safety-critical poo poo that's very expensive to do right.
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Oct 26, 2021 15:36
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I mean, to go back to the economics: One thing Renewables has done already is actually resulted in power prices dropping into the negative during people renewable generation, so how does that figure into it?
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Oct 26, 2021 15:40
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mobby_6kl posted:The engineering breakthrough needed would have to be on making the initial construction much more simpler, faster, and cheaper. It is not engineering difficulties that make initial construction so expensive, and there are not engineering solutions to that problem. I mean, okay, small modular reactors, nice, but as long as the design certification and site licensing procedure is the same it's not going to fix anything.
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Oct 26, 2021 15:43
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There's already been a fair amount of discussion about how nuclear power is hamstrung by countless environmental studies and safety surveys that are conducted as if no one has ever built a fission power plant before. But there's also all the money required to be set aside for future hypothetical radiation disaster remediation - almost $50 billion in the United States. No other power source needs to set aside money like this, or even consider cleaning up after themselves, and that's one of the many reasons that they artificially appear to be so cheap. Certainly coal is not so economical if producers have to pay to recover all the soot, radiation, and GHGs they emit into the atmosphere. The much maligned carbon taxes are one step to begin remediating this issue of externalized cost and risk. It's similar to how the US Postal Service has been intentionally sabotaged by Republicans who forced USPS to pre-fund retirement benefits for all its employees, making it appear to operate in the red. One suggestion that has been made is to invest five percent of this fund annually in nuclear plant upgrades, expansions, and subsidies to less profitable nuclear power plants. Kaal fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 16:08
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mobby_6kl posted:
In a commodity market, you can’t just choose to charge a higher price; people will buy from your competitors and you won’t sell anything. Any engineering practices that reduces costs also reduces your competitors costs, leading to a price war and collapsing profits all round. To cut the complex game-theoretical modeling short, you can only charge a given margin on your inputs, expressed as a percentage. Uranium costs ~130 dollars per kilo, so the marginal price of a kilos worth of nuclear electricity is some small multiple of that, Thorium is 30 dollars per kilo, so if the plants were similarly efficient, the same percentage markup gets you a lot less actual money. A few plants won’t bring down the price significantly; a large number would. So the economically optimal thing is to ensure the cost to build plants are as high as you can get away with; this is much more profitable than supplying electricity cheaply. So, since the failures of the seventies, all existing nuclear companies have successfully migrated to this business model. The same economics applies to fighter planes, subways, train tracks and so on. The French were perhaps the slowest to learn that lesson, but they seem to have got there in the end.
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Oct 26, 2021 16:10
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Kaal posted:There's already been a fair amount of discussion about how nuclear power is hamstrung by countless environmental studies and safety surveys that are conducted as if no one has ever built a fission power plant before. But there's also all the money required to be set aside for future hypothetical radiation disaster remediation - almost $50 billion in the United States. No other power source needs to set aside money like this, or even consider cleaning up after themselves, and that's one of the many reasons that they artificially appear to be so cheap. Certainly coal is not so economical if producers have to pay to recover all the soot, radiation, and GHGs they emit into the atmosphere. The much maligned carbon taxes are one step to begin remediating this issue of externalized cost and risk. well ... that may not be what's driving costs up. “But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"—the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent. ... But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.” https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/
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Oct 26, 2021 16:56
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VideoGameVet posted:https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ So lack of experience and redundancies in the workforce and among suppliers which is probably what drives cost overruns in most large scale infrastructure projects. Chronic cost overruns in the nuclear sector is only one problem though.
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Oct 26, 2021 17:12
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mobby_6kl posted:The engineering breakthrough needed would have to be on making the initial construction much more simpler, faster, and cheaper. Some of the challenge is red tape but there's also just inherently a lot of safety-critical poo poo that's very expensive to do right. I'm not suggesting we cut back on the safety factors in the construction process, but something seems to have changed in the last few decades with how large construction projects are handled that has made them far less efficient. Not even talking about nuclear plants, most any large public project that involves a large amount of concrete like airports or highways just can't get done on time and on cost, and when they do it's still massively more expensive than it used to be. It's not like we've regressed on the technology involved, is it just a failure of project management or what? Are relatively small scale or modular projects like wind turbines more efficient in practice because as a society we've gotten worse at building big things?
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Oct 26, 2021 17:20
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Owling Howl posted:So lack of experience and redundancies in the workforce and among suppliers which is probably what drives cost overruns in most large scale infrastructure projects. Chronic cost overruns in the nuclear sector is only one problem though. I think this is a national issue not just for nuclear but for any large projects. There's so much grift in these things, profits to be made with delay, for example California's High Speed Rail mess. I blew my chances to run a major game studio in 2007 because after several flights and interviews, and on the Friday when they had flown myself and my future wife up to find a place to live, I had a meeting with the (smart) CFO and remarked that their web-game projects were probabily delayed because of the "time and materials" payment to the contractors they had gone with. I suggested milestone-based payments in the future. My guess is the guy I reported to, with all of 2 years of experience at Yahoo Games before going to this Seattle based studio, realized that if they hired me he might just get shitcanned because of this. So on Monday they withdrew the offer. Currently my little company is producing a word game and a visual novel and because payments to the development companies are all based on events happening, the teams are responsive. VideoGameVet fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 18:50
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radmonger posted:All of those are engineering ideas, none of which would address the actual problem; the inherent cheapness of the generated electricity, and the consequent lack of a market-based means of recovering the high fixed costs of construction. Most would make it worse, e.g. thorium would presumably further reduce fuel and security costs. But isn't this the same economic model that solar and wind has? All the costs are all upfront capital build costs, marginal cost per MWh to generate is almost zero. Sure solar build costs aren't the same as nuclear but neither is output. A solar farm with 100MW nameplate still costs hundreds of millions to build, and has a much lower nameplate output and capacity factor than a modern nuclear plant. Sounds like my original question has been answered, which is that developments in nuclear tend to be towards inherent safety features, addressing proliferation concerns, or opening up alternative fuel cycles. None of which appear to be addressing build costs. I was hoping that the "small modular reactors" that are talked about would result in lower overall capital costs. I agree that solving climate change shouldn't be left in the hands of the market, or economists, but in the absence of some large government mandated effort, the only way it will be addressed is if someone can make a buck out of it. Kaal posted:There's already been a fair amount of discussion about how nuclear power is hamstrung by countless environmental studies and safety surveys that are conducted as if no one has ever built a fission power plant before. But there's also all the money required to be set aside for future hypothetical radiation disaster remediation - almost $50 billion in the United States. No other power source needs to set aside money like this, or even consider cleaning up after themselves, and that's one of the many reasons that they artificially appear to be so cheap. Certainly coal is not so economical if producers have to pay to recover all the soot, radiation, and GHGs they emit into the atmosphere. The much maligned carbon taxes are one step to begin remediating this issue of externalized cost and risk. Would be great if there was a similar indemnity clause that operates for vaccine development in that the government acknowledges the public benefit of a heavily regulated system and provides a common insurance pool against rare but highly costly future negative outcomes. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 21:49
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Would be great if there was a similar indemnity clause that operates for vaccine development in that the government acknowledges the public benefit of a heavily regulated system and provides a common insurance pool against rare but highly costly future negative outcomes. Isn't that what the CICP and VICP are?
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Oct 26, 2021 22:15
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karthun posted:Isn't that what the CICP and VICP are? No idea, never heard of them (I'm not American). e: but if individual companies still have to provide a guarantee against future highly unlikely but very costly outcomes, then surely this is something that could be collectivised (ruh-roh, communism!). Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 22:41
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Capt.Whorebags posted:But isn't this the same economic model that solar and wind has? All the costs are all upfront capital build costs, marginal cost per MWh to generate is almost zero. Sure solar build costs aren't the same as nuclear but neither is output. A solar farm with 100MW nameplate still costs hundreds of millions to build, and has a much lower nameplate output and capacity factor than a modern nuclear plant. All the technology development for solar costs go into how to manufacture better solar panels (and a few other bits of auxiliary equipment) . These are sold as items either directly to consumers, or to operating companies that do simple bundling. If prices drop in future, that matters not to the manufacturer; they already got their money. So investment in reducing costs is a viable strategy to the one actor that is in the position to do so. In other words, solar has the same economics as car or computer manufacturing; the customer is continually getting a better product at an ever-lower price; the manufacturer still gets high profits from the expanding volume of sales. This is why the only private money considering investing in nuclear is looking at small scale modular reactors that can be built on an assembly line and carried on the back of a truck or barge. Engineering concerns say, all things being equal, these will be much less efficient, and probably somewhat more dangerous, than larger reactors. But selling such reactors does have at least the potential to be a viable business model without requiring political or regulatory change. Or at least, companies like Seaborg technologies think so. If their product ever does materialize, no doubt it will be reassuringly expensive.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:47
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Is there any feasible scenario where nuclear generated power becomes substantially cheaper, whilst maintaining/improving actual (not regulatory) safety standards? Say, 50% cheaper? Do what South Korea did: standardise on 1-2 reactor types, build a fuckton of them in a row staggered by a few years so construction crews gain experience and move on to do the same thing again but better and cheaper the day they finish the previous project.
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Oct 27, 2021 02:13
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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karthun posted:Isn't that what the CICP and VICP are? Yeah, that’s exactly the function they serve.
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Oct 27, 2021 03:01
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Kalman posted:Yeah, that’s exactly the function they serve. Ah, poor wording on my part... I knew there was an indemnity program for vaccines in the US and was saying something similar should exist for energy.
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Oct 27, 2021 03:30
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Ah, poor wording on my part... I knew there was an indemnity program for vaccines in the US and was saying something similar should exist for energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
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Oct 27, 2021 04:10
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I looked back a few pages, and it doesn't look like this has been covered in this thread. Sorry if it has, though. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/business/energy-environment/green-energy-fortescue-andrew-forrest.html tldr: NYTimes fawning over Aussie iron ore billionaire/dickhead Twiggy's forays into hydrogen energy. Ignoring that the article reads like an advertorial, what is this thread's take on hydrogen as a viable energy source? I've got some colleagues who thought the article was so impressive and cool, and while I have some scattered understanding of hydrogen from dropping in this thread and the climate change thread over the years, I can't really pull it all together in an articulate way. Am I also totally missing something about how dumb it is to brag about the environmental friendliness of hydrogen-powered trucks... to load and haul iron ore? Edit: Iron ore not coal. Tripped over my shoelaces in my maiden post in this thread! Smeef fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Oct 27, 2021 |
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Oct 27, 2021 11:44
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Can't read the article, but Fortescue mines iron ore, not coal. It makes sense for him to invest in green hydrogen production, as at least one low carbon steel route uses hydrogen to reduce iron oxides. Hydrogen is energy dense enough to run big mining rigs too, reducing mining emissions. Obviously using such rigs for coal is silly.
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Oct 27, 2021 12:23
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New York TImes posted:Can a Carbon-Emitting Iron Ore Tycoon Save the Planet?
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Oct 27, 2021 13:25
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For what it's worth, it seems like a pretty legit article to me. The company is developing worthwhile technologies, the approach is multi-faceted and feasible, the owner appears personally and professionally invested, and the goals and methods appear to be in line with climate science. This quote spoke volumes to me, “We have to get to a point where everyone realizes blue hydrogen is a con,” Dr. Forrest said. “It’s no better than fossil fuels.” If he understands that, and is pursuing green hydrogen via the copious availability of co-located Australian solar and wind (which is also intended to run his iron mines), then it's a project with real legs under it. It of course should be recognized that this sort of pursuit is technologically difficult, and that a lot of the green hydrogen projects have stalled out, but one particular aspect of this endeavor is that a lot of these big trucks can't operate via battery alone (at least not currently). Getting such GHG-heavy equipment to be hydrogen-powered would be a real advancement in terms of the climate crisis. And of course it should be pointed out that Australia is near the hub of hydrogen vehicle development - Japan. There's a real opportunity for companies in the two countries to work together on developing a functional hydrogen infrastructure for heavy industries such as trucking, mining, shipping, and aviation. The crux of the matter will be doing so with green hydrogen rather than blue (much less grey, brown, or black).
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Oct 27, 2021 13:49
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I gotta say, that is one of the more positive articles I've seen in this thread.
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Oct 27, 2021 14:01
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Andrew Forrest (first time I've ever seen him referred to as Dr Forrest) is from a Western Australian wealth & politics dynasty. Being into resource extraction he has a spotty record on taxation and interactions with Indigenous people. On the latter, he does put a lot into Indigenous work initiatives and philanthropy but has been accused of divide & conquer techniques when it comes to getting endorsement from traditional owners. The last 5 years or so has seen him move into philanthropy in a big way (along with his wife) and recently he has appeared to be genuine on moving to a sustainable mining and power industry, of course through the prism of continued wealth generation. As said, one of the biggest positive outcomes is calling blue hydrogen complete bullshit, just another ploy to continue extracting fossil fuels. Hydrogen is touted as making a big impact to the energy landscape in Australia, probably because it can be seen as a genuine storage medium for actual green energy by environmentalists; and as a new market for natural gas expansion by the cretins that have made their money from fossil fuels. I'm curious to see how the hydrogen generation technology copes with intermittent power and can ramp up and down with solar/wind output. I don't know enough about industrial scale electrolysis, including any potentially limited resources such as catalysts, anodes/cathodes etc to see how big this can ramp up. But if it does show promise, then shipping liquified hydrogen could be a great way to export the abundance of clean energy resources (read: lots of sun soaked land) to high power users in Asia. e: just had a quick look at wiki and he actually has a genuine Ph.D that he gained in 2019 after working for four years on a dissertation in marine science. I thought the Dr would be an honorary award like a lot of wealthy people. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Oct 27, 2021 |
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Oct 27, 2021 21:26
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:I'm not suggesting we cut back on the safety factors in the construction process, but something seems to have changed in the last few decades with how large construction projects are handled that has made them far less efficient. Not even talking about nuclear plants, most any large public project that involves a large amount of concrete like airports or highways just can't get done on time and on cost, and when they do it's still massively more expensive than it used to be. It's not like we've regressed on the technology involved, is it just a failure of project management or what? Are relatively small scale or modular projects like wind turbines more efficient in practice because as a society we've gotten worse at building big things? If you have some free time you can read the Bechtel report for the failed V.C. Summer units. It shows the problems with both large construction projects and the problems unique to building a new nuclear design. Take it with a grain of salt though as this is a report produced by an outside firm that didn't have access to all the relevant information AND it just so happens would be happy to come in and help you fix your messed up project. Some problems in no particular order: The issued design from engineering can't be constructed as designed so it must be modified. Kind of like the engineers at Audi who came up with ridiculous timing chain designs that face the firewall and are prone to failure, but those actually are serviceable just a pain in the rear end. I would have thought part of learning engineering would include learning how to design things so they can actually be built in the real world but apparently that's not the case. The engineering was not complete when construction began. Multiple companies in a consortium with commercial interests that aren't aligned, resulting in finger pointing when milestones/payments are missed. General bureaucracy when minor changes needed to be made. It was typically over an hour from when a worker arrived on site to when they actually started doing proper construction work, due to busing people around, overly long daily briefings, etc. Difficulty in attracting skilled workers. The modular design of the AP-1000 was supposed to make it easier to construct different versions of the design but actually resulted in a plant that is more complicated to build. and I'm sure a ton more I'm forgetting.
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Oct 27, 2021 22:10
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Andrew Forrest (first time I've ever seen him referred to as Dr Forrest) is from a Western Australian wealth & politics dynasty. Being into resource extraction he has a spotty record on taxation and interactions with Indigenous people. On the latter, he does put a lot into Indigenous work initiatives and philanthropy but has been accused of divide & conquer techniques when it comes to getting endorsement from traditional owners. Yeah, I was initially cynical about Forrest speaking out on this. For context of those outside Australia, in the past few weeks NewsCorp has pivoted to supporting Net Zero by 2050, in a transparent attempt to support the conservative government we have in their piss poor attempt at a "plan" to do so. So it looked like another mining industry figure joining in on that. But he has been transparent in calling their plans for blue hydrogen and carbon capture as being cons doomed to fail in significantly reducing emissions. While I don't agree with everything he says or does, he seems to be someone who genuinely believes that climate change is real, we need to reduce emissions to reduce the impact we are having, and also is willing to take a stance of what the long-term consequences will be of not doing so, rather than just looking at the next financial year. In Australia where the mining industry holds the government hostage we absolutely need loud voices like his.
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Oct 27, 2021 23:55
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MomJeans420 posted:If you have some free time you can read the Bechtel report for the failed V.C. Summer units. It shows the problems with both large construction projects and the problems unique to building a new nuclear design. Take it with a grain of salt though as this is a report produced by an outside firm that didn't have access to all the relevant information AND it just so happens would be happy to come in and help you fix your messed up project. I'm going to play devil's advocate here... Neither of this is new nor surprising and it is not an issue limited to Nuclear power plants. Most large (e.g. several thousand personnel) Construction projects operate similarly. There are certainly ways to improve things... but... the issues you bring up are reoccuring historical ones. Engineerng not complete? This is normal in the Construction world. Construction is wanting to start as soon as permits and budget is secure. Because often the project you are building today was approved for the market conditions of yesterday. Multiple companies in consortum, not in alignment? While not desired, it often happens due to how contracts get written. Beaucracy for changes... In Nuclear power plant business, you typically need to have changes approved in advance prior to execution of field work. In other fields (petrochemical) you may be able to route the approval in parallel with the field work. On some commercial (plumbing) work I have seen changes not documented at all. Although it really depends on the scope and significance. For nuclear N-stamped systems, its per current design. Hour for workers to start work? This comes down to logistics, labor agreements, work permits, material etc.. Also depending on site security policies as well. There are multiple things that can affect this. Attracting skilled workers? How skilled? It's on project management to set the bar they desire, have on site training, as well as exercising discipline when needed. If they don't do either, well that is really on them now isn't it? You also get people who want to work 40-50 hours vs those who want to work 50-60. Skilled labor has options and they can pick up and go home if they want. Construction industry in general, you're travelling around. Attrition is a fact of life. Modules? Yes, more poo poo gets crammed in on them. Also more restrictive tolerances. Same thing with skidded pieces of equipment. Same poo poo. TLDR... Construction and Manufacturing are different animals. SA-Anon fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Oct 28, 2021 |
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Oct 28, 2021 02:23
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Capt.Whorebags posted:e: just had a quick look at wiki and he actually has a genuine Ph.D that he gained in 2019 after working for four years on a dissertation in marine science. I thought the Dr would be an honorary award like a lot of wealthy people. Just been skimming through his thesis and it is very, "Hey we are super loving up our oceans, and a lot of the half measures we use to stop it ain't doing poo poo". 100% not what I was expecting from a Australian mining billionaire. Solution is pretty business though, although it is what amounts to a tax on plastic. https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/pelagic-ecology-and-solutions-for-a-troubled-ocean
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Oct 28, 2021 02:56
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We should pretty much ban single-use plastic, a move that some places have already made or are considering, but this isn't the thread for that discussion iirc WA banned single-use plastic bags and that's like 1 step out of 100 needed
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Oct 28, 2021 03:06
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QuarkJets posted:We should pretty much ban single-use plastic, a move that some places have already made or are considering, but this isn't the thread for that discussion Most of the plastic in the ocean is as a result of the fishing industry.
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Oct 28, 2021 04:30
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