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CommieGIR posted:I may be wrong about the per capita, but there's no way Australia is going to scale to replace their fossil fuel generation with batteries and wind alone. Well, you may be wrong again. This is simply something that we will find out in the years to come. Reducing emissions and increasing renewables is the current trend, for sure.
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Nov 12, 2021 23:24
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FreeKillB posted:Back in the realm of our actually-existing context: *chants mantra* Nuclear power cannot fail. It can only be failed. Nuclear power cannot fail. It can only be failed. Nuclear power . . . Monaghan posted:I guess we'll see if the growth rate continues, as I'm pretty much convinced that we are going to be seeing a major disruption in the eletricity sector in the next decade if growth rates continue. So far, using the EIA figures, solar increasing by around 40% every two years. Storage is going in a similar cost curves that it will be inapplicable. The EIA's 2021 prediction is that in 2050 renewables will generate 42% of the US's electricity. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46676
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Nov 13, 2021 15:12
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The lowest cost grid will not get Toronto through a winter carbon free.
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Nov 13, 2021 15:50
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Again, the idea that we can profit our way out of climate change is absurd. The costs being the deciding factor of how we get clean energy means we won't get it. Yes, cost matters, but it should matter much much less.
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Nov 13, 2021 16:40
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silence_kit posted:The EIA's 2021 prediction is that in 2050 renewables will generate 42% of the US's electricity. Monaghan fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 18:07
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Monaghan posted:The eia prediction constantly puts forward linear growth and their predictions haven't been accurate for a decade. They are constantly orders of magnitude wrong. I think it is true that each year in recent history, they revise their predictions to be more bullish on solar. I suspect that is a lot harder to predict the adoption rate of a more speculative technology compared to an established technology. There is obviously more uncertainty when talking about speculative technologies. As solar matures to become a more established technology, their predictions might become more accurate. edit: If you look at the 2015 EIA prediction for renewable electricity generation in 2040, it was 20%. The 2021 prediction for 2040 is 40%. A lot of this is due to solar. Wow Why this thread primarily talks about normal nuclear power and the oddball even less economical types of nuclear power over the more relevant technologies is a little strange, IMO silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 18:25
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silence_kit posted:I think it is true that each year in recent history, they revise their predictions to be more bullish on solar. If you were to look at the 1985/1990 numbers for what it would be in 2015/2020 how accurate would they be?
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Nov 13, 2021 19:34
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karthun posted:If you were to look at the 1985/1990 numbers for what it would be in 2015/2020 how accurate would they be? If you are referring to renewables, EIA predictions for electricity generation for Hydropower/Other [renewables] in 1985 only go out to 1995. They predicted that % generation of hydropower/other would shrink from 12% in 1985 to 10.5% in 1995. The 1997 EIA report says that renewables in 1995 generated 11% of the US's electricity. So they were a little pessimistic about renewables in 1985. It kind of makes sense, since wind and solar weren't really a serious electricity generation technology at the time. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 19:48
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silence_kit posted:Why this thread primarily talks about normal nuclear power and the oddball even less economical types of nuclear power over the more relevant technologies is a little strange, IMO Personally I like having power at night too so I don't find solar that interesting once it reaches a certain percentage of generation. This is California's net demand yesterday, with the teal being total demand and the purple being net demand after accounting for solar and wind generation. We could add another 10,000MW of solar to make the net demand zero from noon to 1pm, but is that really a good use of resources?  Keep in mind it's currently 88 degrees in Los Angeles and way too sunny at the moment (I can't even wash my car mid-day due to water spots). If you look at the area under the curve it's fairly obvious that our resources need to be spent getting clean power at night, which is why people like nuclear. In real life we're just going to keep on building natural gas plants which I'm ok with but the majority of this thread is not, hence all the nuclear talk. We're not going carbon neutral in the US and certainly not overall in the world, but if you want to pretend you're going to limit CO2 emissions your plan has to involve massive amounts of nuclear power.
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Nov 13, 2021 23:53
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Is nuclear in its current guise, or even reasonably achievable in the next five years, able to act as an intermittent power source? My very limited knowledge of nuclear power plants tells me that they don't like being ramped up/down, and so will always have to fill the "baseload" part of the energy mix. Coal plants aren't coping will in Australia with the intermittent generation of renewables, but whilst I think some of that is the technology, a lot of it is the economics. Coal owners are writing down plants even the newest one and I don't think we'll see another one built anytime soon. Even gas is going out of favour with the newest plant basically being a vote buying exercise funded by the federal government although they are claiming it's necessary to fill dispatch shortfalls as renewables rise.
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Nov 14, 2021 02:05
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You definitely want to run nuclear at 100% for economic reasons if nothing else. Which is why it should've looked like this: With the rest filled by wind or hydro or gas. Solar might be the cheapest per MWH of capacity when it's sunny but you still have to pay to build and maintain whatever is generating at night
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Nov 14, 2021 03:00
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The French did the work on nuclear power ramping a couple decades ago, it's very capable of it.quote:Flexible Operation of Nuclear Power Plants Ramps Up Kaal fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 03:26
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Is nuclear in its current guise, or even reasonably achievable in the next five years, able to act as an intermittent power source? The current U.S. fleet of nuclear power plants can, follow load around slowly. They generally raise and lower the temperatures, make fuel adustments gradually. A rather interesting reddit article on it here. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4etazk/eli5why_is_load_following_hard_to_do_with_nuclear/d249ff5/ Hopefully the upcoming modular reactors will allow for some more flexibility. (They can at least step up/down to go with seasons.) The way I read the tea leaves of the green future... -Immediate dispensible load. (Pumped hydro, battery, molten salt, pressurized gas storage underground., potentially hydrogen gas turbnes) -Base Load (Hydro and Nuclear) -Renewable cyclical load (Wind, offshore Wind, solar PV, solar thermal)
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Nov 14, 2021 03:27
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Thanks for the info. I figured that immediate frequency and load response was possible, as it's still a steam turbine that can be controlled to a fair extent (although you end up having to dump unused heat out of the primary loop), but was wondering about the ability to bid into the generation pool and operate for 12 hours on Monday, 8 hours Tuesday, 16 hours Wednesday depending on the going price. Sounds like it's technically no big challenge, but problematic if someone insists on maximising the financial return.
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Nov 14, 2021 05:38
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Yeah it's certainly technically feasible. The biggest thing is just modernizing the reactors and the regulatory system. The American plants are rather old, but they're also designed for a world where gas and coal do all the load following. Changing that is very doable, it just needs to actually be updated (both the hardware and the regulations so a nuclear plant is allowed to perform load-following). The French started figuring this out back in the 1980s, so it's hardly cutting age technology. And doing the upgrades isn't prohibitively expensive. The capability just needs to be implemented.
Kaal fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 05:46
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Is nuclear in its current guise, or even reasonably achievable in the next five years, able to act as an intermittent power source? Coal operators need to ramp down because a huge percentage of their operating costs is in fuel consumption; nuclear operators don't have that problem. With nuclear power the power is almost free, so you can just add/remove load
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Nov 14, 2021 07:03
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mobby_6kl posted:You definitely want to run nuclear at 100% for economic reasons if nothing else. Which is why it should've looked like this: If CA implemented this we could not worry about rolling blackouts in the summer, but instead we're about to do the opposite which should be interesting.
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Nov 14, 2021 08:00
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Worth noting that the new Russian VVER is much faster at load following they did some tests this past week to demonstrate it. the AP1000s being built at Votgle and possible exported elsewhere are capable of load following as well https://aris.iaea.org/PDF/AP1000.pdf quote:The AP1000 is designed for load-follow operation for up to 90 percent of the fuel cycle using the MSHIM Nuclear Plants in the US are required to be able to operate in load following mode by default, and SMRs look to be able to do the same thing on a smaller scale. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 17:06
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The problem with integrating nukes into a power system isn't whether they can technically ramp but whether it's economic to do so, as poster upthread pointed out. High capex plant like nuclear are always more cost effective when run flat out, as lower load factors mean you have to smear the same fixed costs over fewer running hours. The UK's System Operator assumes no more than about 20-30% of load from nuclear in 2050.
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Nov 14, 2021 18:39
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Even without load following you can derive value out of nuclear plants if you have a coherent national strategy. Use that power to create fuel for vehicles, or for carbon sequestration, or for molten salt storage, or for literally anything else where power costs are a limiting factor.
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Nov 14, 2021 18:41
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Aethernet posted:The problem with integrating nukes into a power system isn't whether they can technically ramp but whether it's economic to do so, as poster upthread pointed out. High capex plant like nuclear are always more cost effective when run flat out, as lower load factors mean you have to smear the same fixed costs over fewer running hours. The UK's System Operator assumes no more than about 20-30% of load from nuclear in 2050. Yes but that same energy can be used to, say, prime batteries and redirect renewables to the grid or pump storage, or desalinate water, or generate hydrogen. All energy intensive tasks that are far better done by something with a consistent output.
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Nov 14, 2021 19:15
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Aethernet posted:The problem with integrating nukes into a power system isn't whether they can technically ramp but whether it's economic to do so, as poster upthread pointed out. High capex plant like nuclear are always more cost effective when run flat out, as lower load factors mean you have to smear the same fixed costs over fewer running hours. The UK's System Operator assumes no more than about 20-30% of load from nuclear in 2050. Enact real legislative change to limit fossil fuels and promote nukes. When nuclear plants are your best option for reliable overnight power the market will price it accordingly and two things would hopefully happen: demand follows the cheap power into daytime renewable generation; nuclear plants become economically viable generating primarily overnight. They could also generate during the day for extra gravy, but wouldn't need to run 24/7 to be viable.
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Nov 14, 2021 22:20
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But... why wouldn't you run them 24/7 if you have enough capacity? Solar isn't free in financial terms but also all those panes take resources and energy to build. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it would make sense to idle them for 8-12 hours every day. E: incidentally this seems to be what France is doing  https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source They could probably double the wind and solar output to get rid of a good chunk of has but this seems to work out pretty well mobby_6kl fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 22:51
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mobby_6kl posted:But... why wouldn't you run them 24/7 if you have enough capacity? Solar isn't free in financial terms but also all those panes take resources and energy to build. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it would make sense to idle them for 8-12 hours every day. It would be better to replace the natural gas other fossil fuels than decom any nuclear. Also: France has said its expanding its nuclear fleet and intends to build SMRs. Worth remembering: The average life span for a nuclear reactor is easily 50 years or more, that's going to outlast any new solar or wind build.
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Nov 14, 2021 23:29
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mobby_6kl posted:But... why wouldn't you run them 24/7 if you have enough capacity? Solar isn't free in financial terms but also all those panes take resources and energy to build. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it would make sense to idle them for 8-12 hours every day. So one thing to consider here is that load-following can actually be more profitable than simply providing base power. This can be because dispatchable power is priced differently, or because the plant diverts power into ancillary markets that perform other functions (such as acting as a guaranteed power reserve, or modulating power levels to maintain grid stability). Allowing nuclear plants to perform these functions, rather than fossil fuel peaker plants, ends up being a financial benefit for them. https://greeningthegrid.org/integration-in-depth/ancillary-services
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Nov 14, 2021 23:54
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Senor Tron posted:Lol at misreading per capita numbers as total and then digging in ignoring everyone pointing that out. So, the South Australia energy figures. Is that all their electrical generation? Did they get electricity from other states? Because I really hope it's factual for the very reason you stated. It has the benefit of being politically possible as well as rapid implementation.
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Nov 15, 2021 00:06
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mobby_6kl posted:But... why wouldn't you run them 24/7 if you have enough capacity? Solar isn't free in financial terms but also all those panes take resources and energy to build. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it would make sense to idle them for 8-12 hours every day. If there is zero marginal cost of generation then sure, why not run them 24/7. Solar/wind have an extremely low generation cost and can probably outbid any other source. So it comes down to build costs and the returns you can get on those which is high for renewables but not negligible for nuclear either. If renewables bid into the market at $1/MWh, can nuclear outbid? I'm not advocating decommissioning nuclear, I think you need more of them, lots more. But they'll make most of their money at night when few other generators can (assuming a forced decline of fossil fuels). It'll be interesting to see if we really do get "too cheap to meter" power during the day or if some ideological bent stops it from happening. Use that sweet, sweet, solar generated electron flow during the day to pump water uphill, charge batteries, desal water, generate hydrogen etc.
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Nov 15, 2021 00:11
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VideoGameVet posted:So, the South Australia energy figures. Is that all their electrical generation? Did they get electricity from other states? Total generation. They do go completely renewable for increasing periods of time. But as I stated upthread, conditions apply. They have to export some of that renewable energy to be able to run about 200MW of gas generation to maintain system inertia. If the tie to Victoria fails then they have to load shed renewables. Hopefully the market operator / grid service providers will get comfortable soon with co-ordinated synthetic inertia and that requirement will go.
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Nov 15, 2021 00:17
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Total generation. They do go completely renewable for increasing periods of time. Thanks for the explanation. Their lower rates was a surprise to me. I expected the opposite.
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Nov 15, 2021 00:29
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Capt.Whorebags posted:If there is zero marginal cost of generation then sure, why not run them 24/7. Of course this is well into SimCity fantasy scenarios since nobody is actually building all those nukes.
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Nov 15, 2021 02:17
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Total generation. They do go completely renewable for increasing periods of time. All of this is correct. In the medium and longer term there's a couple of things being pursued to increase grid stability further: 1. A new interstate connector is being built to link our grid with NSW. With more interconnections local fluctuations can be more easily balanced out. 2. Continuing well past 100% renewables into 200%+ renewables territory, with excess power being used to generate green hydrogen.
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Nov 15, 2021 02:25
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Kaal posted:So one thing to consider here is that load-following can actually be more profitable than simply providing base power. This can be because dispatchable power is priced differently, or because the plant diverts power into ancillary markets that perform other functions (such as acting as a guaranteed power reserve, or modulating power levels to maintain grid stability). Allowing nuclear plants to perform these functions, rather than fossil fuel peaker plants, ends up being a financial benefit for them. This is an interesting market design question - right now in the UK nukes are often contracted on year-ahead prices rather than day ahead, which reduces their ability to capture upside prices. However, increasing exposure to volatile prices has historically increased the cost of capital for all ZMC generation, which tends to overwhelm other price signals for investment decisions. Not sure how you'd design around it.
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Nov 15, 2021 13:10
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China now has an active High Temperature Gas Cooled Pebble Bed Reactor https://twitter.com/karnfull_en/status/1460230940186365952?s=20
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Nov 15, 2021 14:06
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Capt.Whorebags posted:RTGs have issues with efficiency, cost to produce the isotopes, and security of the material which could be used as a "dirty bomb". Long-lasting, stable, safely-packageable RTG material is, last time I checked, the most valuable matter on Earth.
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Nov 15, 2021 14:18
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CommieGIR posted:China now has an active High Temperature Gas Cooled Pebble Bed Reactor This is the bugfixed version of the Jülich experimental AVR and its enlarged commercial versions, the unbuilt Siemens HTR (from which the downscaled HTR-10 testbed was derived, which was upscaled again as the HTR-PM) and the actually built THTR. The Jülich AVR operated with 15MWe/45MWth for over 20 years and proved the concept but was  since it had all the bugs you'd expect from the first prototype of a new reactor type built in the early 1960s. Apparently the main problems were in fuel handling and managing core temperature: fuel pellets ended up abrading more than expected, creating large amounts of radioactive dust (not nearly as much as detractors make it out to be, but could be blown or washed out of the core in the case of a major leak) and the core was inhomogeneous with hot spots reaching more than 200K above the set temperature. After the reactor was shut down it additionally turned out the whole floor of the core had cracked. It was also run by morons who disabled humidity sensors instead of shutting down the reactor for repairs when the steam generator sprang a leak and spewed 30 tons of water into the primary helium coolant loop. It took these morons several days to realise that there was a real leak, and after finally shutting the reactor down they proceeded to spill the contaminated water and the fuel pellet dust (including metallic fission products, as their migration out of the fuel particles into the rest of the pellet wasn't understood at the time) suspended therein into the reactor building's basement where it would be ignored for years. The extent of the water leak was not reported to the nuclear regulator, fuel handling improvements weren't seriously studied until after both the AVR and the THTR were shut down, with a full scale reactor mockup cycling mock fuel pellets at realistic temperature eventually being built and operated until the early 2010s. This and the degree of willful incompetence in operating the Jülich AVR would later be written up by a disgruntled AVR engineer*, which apparently was a contributing factor in the South African pebble bed reactor project getting shitcanned when the design was almost final (can't design better fuel handling systems if the people who ran the prototype didn't tell you what fuel handling issues they had lol), probably didn't help with the THTR's design (ditto), and combined with post-Fukushima nuclear panic ended up putting German pebble bed reactor research out of its misery after it had already been stuck in an extended post-THTR death march. As a side note, despite the staggeringly irresponsible operators and multiple leaks of radioactive material, the AVR failed to give anyone in the surrounding area cancer even according to highly critical evaluations of the program.The 300MWe/750MWth THTR was apparently the 1980s enginerd's wet dream version of a commercial pebble bed reactor, with too many new complicated awesome-sounding features thrown in that ended up turned the thing from a power reactor into another oversize experiment. Inevitably, it was a craptastic failure as a power reactor and was set to bankrupt its operator even if political interference and human errors in operation hadn't led to outages and a premature shutdown. In terms of reactor engineering, it didn't manage to get rid of hot spots in the core and found even more ways of loving up fuel handling (friction in helium is higher than in air, leading to fuel pellets not only abrading rapidly again, but also getting stuck and shattering instead of sliding out of the way of control rods all the time). In terms of overall planning, the best summary for the whole project is probably that it got sited into the middle of a bunch of fields with a dry cooling tower. Dust and aerosolised pig poo poo built up on every exposed surface and the reactor couldn't last the planned maintenance interval without having to reduce power in line with the reduced effectiveness of the cooling tower. The Siemens HTR was a more reasonably sized and less overcomplicated improved AVR derivative at 200MWth that was intended to be built and bought somewhat like a proto-SMR. Nobody in the West ended up buying it, and sales to Russia also fell through, allegedly the German power companies already operating LWRs particularly hated it because they wanted to avoid restructuring their business or losing market share to municipal scale reactors. The design got sold to China and South Africa when it became clear that further pebble bed reactor construction wasn't going to happen in Germany. On the whole, ye olde Cold War pebble bed reactors have turned out about as craptacular as fast breeders of the era, but given that newer materials science and iterative development allowed the Russians finally end the chain of failures with the BN-600 and BN-800 who is to say the Chinese can't manage to do the same for pebble bed reactors. So far we know that fuel handling and dust buildup in the HTR-10 are much improved, so I guess we can be cautiously optimistic about the HTR-PM not running into the same technical problems. The HTR-PM's operating temperature is also set to about 150K below that of the AVR, suggesting Chinese nuclear engineers are leaving some extra safety margin in case of hotspots in the core. *funnily enough the guy is actually against the German nuclear exit and while he thinks the HTR-PM isn't sufficiently improved in terms of preventing dust egress during leaks he thinks the design is better than the German attempts and that pebble bed reactors should absolutely be developed to a point where they're mass deployed. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Nov 15, 2021 |
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Nov 15, 2021 20:12
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Cross-posting this but China seems like they've been making incremental steps towards fusion: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3155546/chinese-scientists-strike-early-gold-race-nuclear-fusion-power e: Apparently MIT made a pretty big breakthrough as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KEwkWjADEA Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Nov 16, 2021 |
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Nov 16, 2021 17:59
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I haven't had time to follow random energy things but I hadn't heard of this coming online until just now: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/net-power-delivers-electricity-to-grid-in-major-technological-breakthrough-301425894.html quote:NET Power's technology combusts natural gas with oxygen, instead of air, and uses supercritical carbon dioxide as a working fluid to drive a turbine instead of steam. NET Power does not produce any nitrogen oxides (NOX), sulfur oxides (SOX) or particulate pollution, and the remaining CO2 is pipeline-quality to either be safely stored in underground geologic formations or utilized for industrial processes. NET Power produces only electricity, liquid water, and pipeline-ready CO2, while operating at high-efficiency, comparable to conventional power plants. Toshiba supplied the combustor and turbine for the La Porte test facility and was a key partner in the demonstration of NET Power's technology. No idea if it's a good idea or not but I like seeing new approaches being tested out.
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Nov 17, 2021 07:08
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MomJeans420 posted:I haven't had time to follow random energy things but I hadn't heard of this coming online until just now: The La Porte plant here is genuinely revolutionary, inasmuch as it's a wholly new generation cycle that uses CO2 as the working fluid. It's great for CCS, but this test plant isn't actually connected to a carbon store it's part of the problem, alas.
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Nov 17, 2021 08:49
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Some movement in Small Modular Reactors (SMR). On nov 4 an agreement was signed for NuScale to build their first SMR in... Romania. The 6-module 462 MWe power plant may be completed by 2028. There's an overview of the amusing geopolitics that led to this - the US is apparently keenly interested in Romanian energy security. The BBC published an article about some other SMRs yesterday. The small nuclear power plants billed as an energy fix posted:"We'll likely have more accidents than existing reactors because it's a new technology, but these will be accidents and not disasters," says Troels Schonfeldt, co-founder of Denmark's Seaborg Technologies.
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Nov 21, 2021 01:37
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Owling Howl posted:Some movement in Small Modular Reactors (SMR). On nov 4 an agreement was signed for NuScale to build their first SMR in... Romania. The 6-module 462 MWe power plant may be completed by 2028. There's an overview of the amusing geopolitics that led to this - the US is apparently keenly interested in Romanian energy security. I want to highlight one quote quote:However, anti-nuclear campaigners are not persuaded or reassured by safety claims coming from new entrants to the nuclear power market. This is pretty stupid take: There has yet to have been a successful attempt on a nuclear power station by terrorists, proliferation risks are true of any nuclear power solution, which is why strong global agreements and inspections are critical, and the alternative is continued fossil fuel use. Not to mention even counting Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear accidents have accounts for very little in the way of deaths.
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Nov 21, 2021 03:22
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