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Kesper North posted:does it get rid of waste heat via cooling finns While I'm 100% certain the facility has a sauna somewhere I'm not sure it is driven by waste heat nor that the personnel can rotate through the sauna at a fast enough pace to provide a consistent heat dissipation.
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Mar 14, 2022 08:22
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Kesper North posted:does it get rid of waste heat via cooling finns Sadly the heat is just wasted. There have been talks and plans about using the heat from plants for district heating but there are several issues. The plants are far away from cities so the piping would have to be long. Also the water is only about 40C so it would have to be heated further to be of use. So lots of inefficiencies. Also, of course, the opposition of anything nuclear so it has political issues as well.
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Mar 14, 2022 09:13
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they should make district heating be closer by and see if they can get animals that evolve to appreciate hot springs just like those japanese primates. they then can turn this into revenue from tourists getting pics of animals using hot pipes to warm they private parts.
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Mar 14, 2022 09:32
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PhazonLink posted:they should make district heating be closer by and see if they can get animals that evolve to appreciate hot springs just like those japanese primates. In Sweden we apparently have exotic non native marine life in the sea around our nuclear reactors since the water temperature is higher there.
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Mar 14, 2022 10:06
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bad_fmr posted:Sadly the heat is just wasted. There have been talks and plans about using the heat from plants for district heating but there are several issues. The plants are far away from cities so the piping would have to be long. Also the water is only about 40C so it would have to be heated further to be of use. So lots of inefficiencies.
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Mar 14, 2022 15:33
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So there's been a lot of conversation about European reliance on Russian fossil fuels, and Germany specifically due to their anti-nuclear stance. And I know that this can sometimes be a cause célèbre for me, since I just find it to be appalling public policy. Unfortunately, Germany remains committed to deactivating all of its nuclear power plants by the end of the year, and replacing them with fossil fuels (mostly gas, oil, and coal, each predominantly imported from Russia). Though after the invasion there was some initial interest in the more environmental option, Habeck and the Green Party reasserted their opposition to it and have maintained their course of destroying nuclear power in Germany while they have the chance. The alternative to Russian gas will be fossil fuels from other countries, and an increase in biomass energy production that has plenty of spare capacity. This will increase their reliance on thermal power to be about 85% of their primary energy consumption. I've been curious about figuring out some of the numbers about this, which is difficult because Germany does not publish many of the critical statistics. But some napkin calculations showcase the broad strokes of the policy: In 2020, despite decades of cuts, German nuclear plants still provided 60 TWh of energy, which was basically equivalent to the 59 TWh provided by German gas plants. In 2021 the nuclear power supply was cut in half, and they intend to shutter the remaining plants at the end of 2022. These plants have the support of local governments and are active or could be reactivated fairly quickly, but opposition by a national government means they are unlikely to do so. If past behavior is continued, the plants will be intentionally poisoned in order to prevent policy reversals by future administrations. Now in terms of German reliance on Russian fossil fuels, these nuclear power plants could entirely replace the gas plants that have been slowly built in their stead. To contextualize that, German gas power requires about a quarter of their overall domestic gas consumption, which is estimated to be around 100 bcm. Germany imports about 56 bcm from Russia, and the EU as a whole imports about 168 bcm. The IEA separately has come up with a 10 point plan to accelerate their existing energy plans and reduce EU imports by 80 bcm by the end of the year (a plan that includes continuing the operation of the three German nuclear power plants scheduled to be shuttered this year). In it they estimate that European gas plants produce about 5.5 TWh of power per billion cubic meters of gas - this is somewhat higher than the American estimate of 4.55 TWh / bcm (and quite a bit more efficient than the 2.5 TWh / bcm that overall German power sector gas consumption would indicate, so I'm sure there's a fair amount of leeway here). But regardless, this would basically mean that replacing these nuclear power plants with gas will require around 13 bcm or almost 25% of German-Russian gas imports. So what does this mean in dollar terms? In 2020, Russia exported $14.2B in trade to Germany. The main products that Russia exported to Germany were Crude Petroleum ($6.38B), Refined Petroleum ($2.22B), and Coal Briquettes ($864M). Russian gas is effectively synonymous with refined petroleum in this context, so shuttering those nuclear plants effectively means sending at least $500 million USD to Putin annually. And I say at least because coal and oil plants are even more expensive and environmentally destructive to run than gas is, and if I were to make these sorts of comparisons against some of the specific old and inefficient power plants that are being kept open, then they'd be all the more damning. Since 2000, Germany has slowly closed nearly 175 TWh of nuclear power plants (roughly the equivalent of 40 bcm worth of gas power, or nearly a quarter of the Russian gas imports into the European Union), and canceled plans for construction of more both in Germany and elsewhere in the world (including Russia). In its place they've touted the construction of about 100 TWh of wind power. That missing middle has been filled with a wide variety of thermal power sources - coal, oil, gas, and biomass - in what can best be described as 20 years of greenwashing. At the beginning of this century, Germany and the United States relied on fossil fuels for about 85% of their primary energy source. After two decades of investment, Germany has reduced this reliance to 80% - which is what the United States achieved without any particular effort. It was a glaring missed environmental, economic, and political opportunity that could have easily seen that reliance drop to 65-70% if German coal plants were closed instead of nuclear power. If we talk more broadly about carbon-emitting thermal power (i.e. including biofuel and biomass with fossil fuel burning), then by the end of this year Germany may well have been greener before Energiewende. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-rules-out-prolonging-its-nuclear-power-plants/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/germany-gas-deal-qatar-end-energy-dependency-on-russia https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-dependent-is-germany-russian-gas-2022-03-08/ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependence-imported-fossil-fuels https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/DEU https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/rus/partner/deu https://www.iea.org/reports/a-10-point-plan-to-reduce-the-european-unions-reliance-on-russian-natural-gas https://www.iea.org/countries/germany https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=6 https://apps.cer-rec.gc.ca/Conversion/conversion-tables.aspx https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-region?country=~DEU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211028 https://spectrum.ieee.org/germanys-energiewende-20-years-later Kaal fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Mar 25, 2022 |
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Mar 25, 2022 16:48
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Unfortunately the greenhouses are not near the nuke plants in Finland. Närpes is the main greenhouse area of the country. It's actually the area where there's a massive expansion of wind power going on though. In my home municipality which neighbors Närpes to the north they plan to build a 1.3 GW off shore wind farm. It'll be pretty great for my municipality which is a tiny rural place, more jobs during construction and then a shitload of tax income. I don't particularly care for wind and how most people think it can actually work without providing nuclear backup, but at least it's gonna be good for the place I grew up in.
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Mar 26, 2022 09:47
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Looks good, but it is Yglessias, so I feel it must be wrong and I just don't know enough about the topic to understand why. Enlighten me fellow goons. https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance?s=w
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Apr 4, 2022 09:18
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He's not completely wrong but I think he's misunderstanding the main problem with this line of thought now. Right now, using more energy generally requires fossil fuels to be burned at some point, since the grid is interconnected. Also this is just wrong "Jet fuel, as we know, can melt steel beams. But electrical coils cannot. The best way to do certain things in the industrial space, by far, is to set something on fire. " Induction furnaces are totally a thing that we use. It's weird that he specifically calls out copper coils. Does he know about the concept but think they don't work?
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Apr 4, 2022 09:36
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It's a yes-and-no sort of thing. Bear in mind as well that his ideals ignore all environmental costs except for carbon emissions; but making solar panels, wind farms, etc., have costs in terms of land use, water use, and material use (especially for solar.) That said, he's saying essentially what nuclear proponents in the 70s and 80s were saying, and it's not untrue either. If we had a completely nuclear/renewable grid, then yes there are a lot of theoretical problems which can be solved by simply throwing electricity at them because they are now economical, and not emitting carbon. The problem is that making a grid of renewables and nuclear is very expensive (it shouldn't be/doesn't have to be, but it is) so... his solution for problems that could be solved with cheap electricity is to spend a lot of money.
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Apr 4, 2022 09:43
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Adenoid Dan posted:He's not completely wrong but I think he's misunderstanding the main problem with this line of thought now. Right now, using more energy generally requires fossil fuels to be burned at some point, since the grid is interconnected. Induction Furnaces are also very common now, alongside Arc furances. And Arc Furnaces have been a thing for....what, like 50 years now? They are really, really good at melting scrap and making raw materials. aniviron posted:It's a yes-and-no sort of thing. Bear in mind as well that his ideals ignore all environmental costs except for carbon emissions; but making solar panels, wind farms, etc., have costs in terms of land use, water use, and material use (especially for solar.) That said, he's saying essentially what nuclear proponents in the 70s and 80s were saying, and it's not untrue either. If we had a completely nuclear/renewable grid, then yes there are a lot of theoretical problems which can be solved by simply throwing electricity at them because they are now economical, and not emitting carbon. The problem is that making a grid of renewables and nuclear is very expensive (it shouldn't be/doesn't have to be, but it is) so... his solution for problems that could be solved with cheap electricity is to spend a lot of money. The problem remains that anybody arguing "Its too expensive" needs to be called out: Either climate change is a crisis we need to address or its not. If its really a crisis, price shouldn't be even a concern. How much is the planet and our children's future worth? If its only at the cheapest market rates, then we're hosed as a species.
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Apr 4, 2022 13:28
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CommieGIR posted:The problem remains that anybody arguing "Its too expensive" needs to be called out: Either climate change is a crisis we need to address or its not. If its really a crisis, price shouldn't be even a concern. "Economic conditions favor solar. We should focus on that rather than nuclear." "What about the myriad technical limitations including storage, distribution from generating locations, and capacity factor?" *Waves hands vaguely about those not being big deals*
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Apr 4, 2022 15:52
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I encountered some moron on Twitter arguing that Moore's law is inviolable and applies to solar costs. It's poo poo like this that convinces me that we are doomed in the short term
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Apr 4, 2022 16:26
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ok ignoring he's applying a computer spec thing to a energy gen thing , which seems like not even fruit VS fruit. Moores Law is reaching its limits and slowing down? We're at transistor sizes that are close to atom sizes and now subatomic effects are noisey enough to actually be a problem.
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Apr 4, 2022 16:32
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Yeah OG Moore's law has been dead for a few years now lol
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Apr 5, 2022 21:02
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah OG Moore's law has been dead for a few years now lol Yeah, dead and very buried. Pander posted:It's really amusing how some people are such economic realists and technological dreamers. Especially when the IPCC and others are going "Actually, Fission is great as a way to fight emissions AND enable growth and reflects well on countries cutting their emissions" Its like: Guys, we have the technology. Yes its expensive. Yes, it requires strong regulation, but its here. And combined with renewables it could make a major impact. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Apr 5, 2022 |
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Apr 5, 2022 21:24
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CommieGIR posted:Yeah, dead and very buried. Yes but have you considered the fortunes of coal barons who have family as members of Congress?
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Apr 5, 2022 22:05
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It's telling that in Germany buying more Russian coal is preferable to restarting to some of their nuclear plants. That's how batshit the political opposition to fission is. Putin's coal is still preferable to fission. It's incredibly depressing.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:09
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golden bubble posted:It's telling that in Germany buying more Russian coal is preferable to restarting to some of their nuclear plants. That's how batshit the political opposition to fission is. Putin's coal is still preferable to fission. It's incredibly depressing. Also them taking over Gazprom in Germany and discovering there's no back supply because Just In Time logistics applies to fuels as well. At this point, Germany knows they've hosed up and they are just going to keep doing what they are doing even after Gazprom lying to them and having to bail out their coal industry.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:11
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golden bubble posted:It's telling that in Germany buying more Russian coal is preferable to restarting to some of their nuclear plants. That's how That's a bit more accurate.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:44
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Pander posted:That's a bit more accurate. That and Gazprom helping fund Green groups objection to Nuclear and pushing Natural Gas in the EU as a "transition fuel" despite no transition really ever going to happen.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:45
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CommieGIR posted:That and Gazprom helping fund Green groups objection to Nuclear and pushing Natural Gas in the EU as a "transition fuel" despite no transition really ever going to happen. Yeah that's exactly what I was inferring. Though those were french greens that were explicitly cited, I have little doubt the German greens are also on the Russian payroll.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:56
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Pander posted:Yeah that's exactly what I was inferring. Though those were french greens that were explicitly cited, I have little doubt the German greens are also on the Russian payroll. Yeah wouldn't surprise me on the least, the same applies to US Greens and a lot of Environmental groups like Natural Resources Defense Council, etc, but in our case its a lot of US Natural Gas orgs funding them.
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Apr 7, 2022 17:02
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CommieGIR posted:Yeah wouldn't surprise me on the least, the same applies to US Greens and a lot of Environmental groups like Natural Resources Defense Council, etc, but in our case its a lot of US Natural Gas orgs funding them. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/366126-jill-stein-2015-russia-dinner-with-putin-was-a-nonevent/
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Apr 8, 2022 02:22
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Kesper North posted:https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/366126-jill-stein-2015-russia-dinner-with-putin-was-a-nonevent/ Yup, there's that too.
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Apr 8, 2022 03:06
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This won't help ease British dependance on Russian fossil fuels immediately, but it's at least going in the right direction: https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/boris-johnson-goes-nuclear-on-britain-s-energy-needs-pledges-eight-new-plants-20220408-p5abuy.html
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Apr 8, 2022 04:12
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The next goal post move will be russian biofuel/wood pellets, after russian coal gets cancelled. lol at irrational fear about atoms. (also never mind that coal releases more radioactive stuff AND toxic chemicals just from normal operation)
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Apr 8, 2022 04:34
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Capt.Whorebags posted:This won't help ease British dependance on Russian fossil fuels immediately, but it's at least going in the right direction: Lol is this in addition to the dozen+ hospitals he promised to build
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Apr 8, 2022 14:15
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Potato Salad posted:Lol is this in addition to the dozen+ hospitals he promised to build He'll do it any day now with the 350m/week they're getting back
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Apr 8, 2022 14:16
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Capt.Whorebags posted:This won't help ease British dependance on Russian fossil fuels immediately, but it's at least going in the right direction: Unfortunately none of these are likely to materialise soon, even with the commitment to get to FID on two additional (i.e. as well as Sizewell C) plants in the next Parliament. I expect the next Government to opt for two 500MW SMRs and say they've met the commitment.
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Apr 8, 2022 14:56
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Great news, a transition to a hydrogen economy is actually a really bad idea. https://newatlas.com/environment/hydrogen-greenhouse-gas/
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Apr 13, 2022 00:32
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Ionicpsycho posted:Great news, a transition to a hydrogen economy is actually a really bad idea. That's not what the study says. If all you did was add hydrogen emissions onto the stuff we already emit, then that would be bad. But "transition to a hydrogen economy" means you stop emitting so much CO2 and methane and that considerably more than offsets the hydrogen emissions.
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Apr 13, 2022 00:40
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Ionicpsycho posted:Great news, a transition to a hydrogen economy is actually a really bad idea. to quote the final paragraph of the article you linked: quote:Does this mean "green hydrogen" should be avoided in the race to zero emissions? Which directly contradicts your description of it. Going to the underlying UK government report, the only thing that actually matters is that oxidation of methane will be slowed if there's also hydrogen around. Everything else makes no difference at all. So if we reduce methane usage while increasing hydrogen, we'll be fine.
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Apr 13, 2022 00:45
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The study discusses the leakage rates of hydrogen as well as the atmospheric impacts, later stating: "Meanwhile, operating under different assumptions, the first report linked expects somewhere between 1 percent and 10 percent of all hydrogen in its global scenario will be emitted into the atmosphere," That's a pretty large band of uncertainty for something that is 11x worse than CO2.
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Apr 13, 2022 00:46
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Hydrogen has bigger issues than this that make it a difficult solution to implement.
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Apr 13, 2022 00:52
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Deteriorata posted:to quote the final paragraph of the article you linked: I don't want to seem snide, but that's a big if statement in terms of methane Additionally, this is for a product that can be very cheaply sourced from pre-existing fossil fuel sources. To say that implementing hydrogen would get rid of those other sources of emission doesn't mesh with standard capitalism.
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Apr 13, 2022 00:55
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Ionicpsycho posted:I don't want to seem snide, but that's a big if statement in terms of methane That's a different argument from the one that's made in the article you linked, though. The UK study assumes green hydrogen, which is not made from methane.
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Apr 13, 2022 01:00
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Deteriorata posted:That's a different argument from the one that's made in the article you linked, though. The UK study assumes green hydrogen, which is not made from methane. That's kind of the point I'm making though. The study assumes a best-case scenario with respect to how the hydrogen is sourced. If the hydrogen is not all green hydrogen, then the atmospheric effects are pretty rough. And as it is right now, green hydrogen is step 3 in a hydrogen economy, while strong financial incentives exist for anyone who wants to make it to step 2, blue hydrogen.
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Apr 13, 2022 01:17
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Ionicpsycho posted:That's kind of the point I'm making though. The study assumes a best-case scenario with respect to how the hydrogen is sourced. If the hydrogen is not all green hydrogen, then the atmospheric effects are pretty rough. And as it is right now, green hydrogen is step 3 in a hydrogen economy, while strong financial incentives exist for anyone who wants to make it to step 2, blue hydrogen. A stat: 98% of the hydrogen used in USA fuel cell cars is coming from fracked natural gas. It sure looks like Greenwashing.
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Apr 13, 2022 01:29
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VideoGameVet posted:A stat: 98% of the hydrogen used in USA fuel cell cars is coming from fracked natural gas. Yes, but there are like three USA fuel cell cars so that's a bit misleading.
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Apr 13, 2022 01:53
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