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Would it be productive to look more closely at the specific regulations which serve as obstacles to economically viable nuclear plant development?
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Jun 19, 2022 17:28
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freezepops posted:30% isn’t an exaggeration, its the capacity factor of ERCOT’s generation fleet as a whole. As for solar and wind, certainly the economics get worse with higher renewable energy penetration, they are cheaper today and cost trends show the gap between nuclear and renewables widening. And again alternative such as desal and fuel uses aren’t new possibilities on a fossil free grid. People could be doing it now, and yet we don’t because of large capital costs. However, if battery storage is economical with nuclear power, why would we use nuclear power and not cheaper solar and wind alternatives? Gonna repeat this: You are not saving humanity on the cheap. Period. End of story. Its not happening. Solar and Wind at best, meet 40% of their nameplate. They NEVER achieve 100% except for rare periods that are uncommon. CommieGIR posted:Here's a better reason why Nuclear is better overall, this is from Ontario: Demanding people hold out for renewables only and unproven storage is absurd and you might as well tell people just to wait for fusion. Expecting the same Capital that got us in this mess by being cheap to solve a crisis by being cheap is ancap nonsense. Nuclear being expensive is NOT a valid reason to count it out, let alone a good reason for closing currently operating plants which is exactly what they are doing while screaming about how cheap CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jun 19, 2022 |
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Jun 19, 2022 17:41
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Things must be affordable. Or at the least subsided by the government. Germany didn't turn it's coal plants back on just for funsies.
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Jun 19, 2022 18:24
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freezepops posted:30% isn’t an exaggeration, its the capacity factor of ERCOT’s generation fleet as a whole. ERCOT has two nuclear plants, STP and Comanche. Their combined nameplate capacity is 5 gigawatts. Last numbers I can find for Texas were for 2019, when it generated 483,000 gigawatt-hours, 8.6% of that with nuclear, or just about 42500 GWh. 5 gigawatts for a year straight is 43800 gigawatt-hours. ERCOT’s nuclear plants are sitting there are generating well north of 95% of their nameplates.
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Jun 19, 2022 18:39
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I wish you would not go on with implying nuclear is expensive CommieGIR. The whole point is to work out what is the cheapest way to provide sufficient power, externalities included. If nuclear is the expensive way to do that, then it is stupid to do that. All the polemic about not being cheap about the future is conflating the dollar cost of doing something versus the economics (triple bottom line) of doing something. Nuclear looks expensive because; ~it prices in externalities other sources don't (eg, hydro doesn't have huge funds set aside for dam breaks even though dam breaks are routine and the biggest have killed more than nuclear ever will), ~nuclear is being curtailed driving up capital cost per unit (wind and solar agreements are routinely take or pay to prevent this problem, which is a subsidy), ~routinely less subsidized than especially solar/wind, ~has worldwide popular opposition that effectively delays projects, pushes up compliance and overall operating costs, I mean just look at this rubbish https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build-cleaner-cloud/10-reasons-oppose-nuclear-energy "440 power plants supply 11% of energy so therefore the world needs 14k to go entirely nuclear and there is not enough land to have 14k generators" hurrrrrrrrr. ~is being held to a standard of safety that is not being held to other sources. Nuclear is the safest power source per MWhr delivered. The few deaths from radiation are overshadowed by the industrial deaths building the things and wind and solar have a higher industrial death rate. ~being compared to sources that are not actually doing heavy lifting - 15% wind/solar penetration is doing the easiest (read cheapest) bit and extrapolating from there. Pareto suggests that it is going to get much harder (read more expensive) from here to 80% penetration of generation and beyond. South Australia is harped on about but its still connected to a coal and hydro grid to both cover shortfalls and reduce curtailment. When you even the field, nuclear is (in proper scale terms) reliable, cheap, robust, safe and scalable (limit on pace of scale though) and is existing technology that could have been built 30 years ago. Wind and solar is still waiting on technology development (batteries) to come close. My biggest issue with the nuclear dream (outside overcoming global resistance) is that it takes a lot of institutional effort to spin up. China slowed its plans not because they believe Greenpeace but because of the rate they believed they could scale up the institutional knowledge. Literally enough operators, inspectors and regulators to maintain standards while scaling. A surprising number of plants around the world actually utilise Russian operators (South Africa and Armenia are two I know about) for lack of their own pipeline.
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Jun 19, 2022 18:53
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Things must be affordable. Or at the least subsided by the government. Germany didn't turn it's coal plants back on just for funsies. They turned them back on because they are ideologically opposed to keeping their zero emissions nuclear plants opened.
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Jun 19, 2022 19:08
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Things must be affordable. Or at the least subsided by the government. Germany didn't turn it's coal plants back on just for funsies. Saying "nuclear wouldn't be affordable! people's energy costs would skyrocket!" is burying your head in the sand because people's food and necessary consumer goods will skyrocket in price when the world's production centers become massively less productive (to put it lightly) as India and South/Southeast Asia in general are going to get the worst effects of climate change out of just about any part of the world. We can spend extra on purpose to mitigate climate change, or we can spend extra out of necessity when goods and services become scarcer, but there's no world where we can keep kicking the can and keep the cheap status quo.
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Jun 19, 2022 19:22
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Phanatic posted:ERCOT has two nuclear plants, STP and Comanche. Their combined nameplate capacity is 5 gigawatts. Last numbers I can find for Texas were for 2019, when it generated 483,000 gigawatt-hours, 8.6% of that with nuclear, or just about 42500 GWh. 5 gigawatts for a year straight is 43800 gigawatt-hours. ERCOT’s nuclear plants are sitting there are generating well north of 95% of their nameplates. Ok, Im not sure what your point is. The current capacity factor of the nuclear plants was never in dispute.
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Jun 19, 2022 19:31
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Crosby B is a natgasbara shill who has been propagandizing against nuclear in this thread for nearly a decade now. Just so you know that going in. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 19, 2022 19:32
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Harold Fjord posted:Crosby B is a natgasbara shill who has been propagandizing against nuclear in this thread for nearly a decade now. Just so you know that going in.  Are you capable of comprehending this discussion especially the part where I wrote that Nuclear needs to be affordable or even subsidized? I'm perfectly fine with Nuclear but I'm not delusional either. Things cost money. Developing countries are using coal because they literally cannot afford the alternatives.
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Jun 19, 2022 19:45
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Infinite Karma posted:Saying "nuclear wouldn't be affordable! people's energy costs would skyrocket!" is burying your head in the sand because people's food and necessary consumer goods will skyrocket in price when the world's production centers become massively less productive (to put it lightly) as India and South/Southeast Asia in general are going to get the worst effects of climate change out of just about any part of the world. The Nuclear Plants in India and China have enormous government support and are strongly subsidized along more realistic regulations which have brought costs down along with the lack of a ridiculous anti-nuclear movement. Until that happens in other Countries, costs will remain high. Governments will be deterred and their citizen won't accept the costs.
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Jun 19, 2022 19:52
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freezepops posted:Ok, Im not sure what your point is. The current capacity factor of the nuclear plants was never in dispute. But your quoting Ercots cap factor for wind/solar (what I could work out) really doesn't have much to do with utilisation rates of nuclear in a nuclear only grid. I can get why he quoted an actual power utilised when capacity factor is usually the actually providable power (assume no curtailment) divided by the installed power (ie, the size of the alternator). Someone saying you can only use 30% of installed nuclear power is neatly countered by pointing out that last year 90% of installed capacity was actually used. The confusion is terminology I think. It wouldn't be hard to estimate utilisation actually, it would be the area below the line of the demand curve divided by the area of the line drawn across the page at the maximum power demand (plus whatever factor of safety). The area between the demand curve and the supplyability curve would be the curtailed power. For pure wind and solar, you would have the demand being the same but the supplyability line would be more difficult as it would be the line drawn by the wind&solar infrastructure and modeled generator output (taking into account time of day, wind, etc) required to never have a minimum supply power lower than any demand power at any point in time. Both get easier with storage but that is a further complication and like fusion, grid scale storage that is not hydro is just around the corner. VVV actually all grid side suppliers handle over generation far better than rooftop solar, they turn off! It's a big problem that a lot of early rooftop installs assumed never any curtailment VVV Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jun 19, 2022 |
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Jun 19, 2022 19:58
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freezepops posted:
Couple it with a subsidized system that pays them just to waste excess energy on something useful such as carbon capture or nitrogen fixing or whatever else that one can think of. We subsidize oil and gas in dumber and more expensive ways.
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Jun 19, 2022 19:58
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Electric Wrigglies posted:But your quoting Ercots cap factor for wind/solar (what I could work out) really doesn't have much to do with utilisation rates of nuclear in a nuclear only grid. I can get why he quoted an actual power utilised when capacity factor is usually the actually providable power (assume no curtailment) divided by the installed power (ie, the size of the alternator). Someone saying you can only use 30% of installed nuclear power is neatly countered by pointing out that last year 90% of installed capacity was actually used. When did I quote a capacity factor for wind and solar? That capacity factor was for the overall total installed capacity for ERCOT, a mostly fossil fuel grid. That number, about 0.3 is the capacity factor you will achieve because of the shape of the load curve. There isn’t a need to estimate it because the two values needed, kWh generated, and installed capacity are available to the public. An all nuclear grid would have a similar capacity factor because without load controls that currently do not exist at a significant level, the load curve is going to look similar to today. The confusion is mixing up availability factor (how much a plant could have produced because it is available for dispatch) with capacity factor (how much is actually generated). People in this thread routinely conflate the too, which is incorrect and leads to conclusions like “an all nuclear grid will have a large capacity factor.” or “current nuclear capacity factor will not change with higher penetration of nuclear energy.” which is also wrong. This will make it look like an all nuclear grid would be a lot cheaper than renewables plus storage, which isn’t necessarily true. As an example, ERCOTs nuclear generation achieves greater than 90% depending on refueling schedules for a year, while the French fleet has plants that only achieves around 70% capacity factor. And that’s with the advantage of having a much larger grid. If an all nuclear buildout was attempted, the CF would be pushed towards the lower limit of around 0.3-0.4 with current electrical systems and load. Maybe with time of day metering, and EVs that number could be brought up, but that also isn’t free.
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Jun 19, 2022 20:28
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freezepops posted:Ok, Im not sure what your point is. The current capacity factor of the nuclear plants was never in dispute. First you claimed " If you have an all nuclear fleet capacity factors of around 0.3 could be expected, which triples the price of nuclear energy.." Then Electric Wrigglies said "I think 30% utilisation of nuclear is an exaggeration even in a pure nuclear fleet." Then *you* said "30% isn’t an exaggeration, its the capacity factor of ERCOT’s generation fleet as a whole." So at this point I admit, you've run rhetorical rings around me: you seem to be arguing that ERCOT's mix where nuclear provides less than 9% of the electricity and runs at 97% capacity day in and day out is somehow...evidence...that if we did a thing which literally nobody says we should do and power civilization exclusively via nuclear power that nuclear capacity would drop to less than a third of what nuclear shows in Texas. Do I have that right?
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Jun 19, 2022 21:02
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Infinite Karma posted:Saying "nuclear wouldn't be affordable! people's energy costs would skyrocket!" is burying your head in the sand because people's food and necessary consumer goods will skyrocket in price when the world's production centers become massively less productive (to put it lightly) as India and South/Southeast Asia in general are going to get the worst effects of climate change out of just about any part of the world. You are confusing the terms "cheap" and "affordable". If we didn't care about environment and wanted cheap energy we could endlessly burn coal or whatever else with zero filtration. It'd cost next to nothing but an environmental disaster. The problem with Nuclear is that is even in perfect world is going to expensive simply due to it's very nature but through new technological development, appropriate policies and subsidizes you could get it to the point where it's affordable. That is what we should do. I am not against Nuclear. It's a perfect candidate to replace the baseload for coal or natural gas but you have to able to actually fund the solution. If you can't well no one is going go without electricity in the 21st Century. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jun 19, 2022 |
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Jun 19, 2022 21:03
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Phanatic posted:First you claimed " If you have an all nuclear fleet capacity factors of around 0.3 could be expected, which triples the price of nuclear energy.." Then Electric Wrigglies said "I think 30% utilisation of nuclear is an exaggeration even in a pure nuclear fleet." Then *you* said "30% isn’t an exaggeration, its the capacity factor of ERCOT’s generation fleet as a whole." No you don’t as you seem to be misunderstanding what capacity factor is or how the power grid functions. A grid needs dispatchable power to meet peak loads, if this isn’t fossil fuels it pretty much has to be nuclear or battery storage. This would dictate the amount of power that has to be installed. However, load is variable so this installed generation capacity would sit available to produce produce (AF for nuclear being >0.9) but unused (CF for the grid being around 0.3-0.4).
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Jun 19, 2022 21:10
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Phanatic posted:First you claimed " If you have an all nuclear fleet capacity factors of around 0.3 could be expected, which triples the price of nuclear energy.." Then Electric Wrigglies said "I think 30% utilisation of nuclear is an exaggeration even in a pure nuclear fleet." Then *you* said "30% isn’t an exaggeration, its the capacity factor of ERCOT’s generation fleet as a whole."  In the summer, peak demand is on average roughly 650 million kWh per hour, while in the spring the lowest power demand is only 320 million kWh per hour. Nuclear power currently has a very high capacity factor, because it is (by design) used to mostly cover the minimum power demand. If the power grid were to be mostly powered by nuclear power, then it would - by necessity - result in a lower capacity factor for nuclear power.
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Jun 19, 2022 21:39
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:The Nuclear Plants in India and China have enormous government support and are strongly subsidized along more realistic regulations which have brought costs down along with the lack of a ridiculous anti-nuclear movement. So what you're saying is that for nuclear to be viable, we need to have some amount of political will, and for a renewable grid to be viable, we need to invent a storage solution that is an engineering challenge on the scale of fusion power (and would probably be more expensive to build than just building nuclear installations, even with the current regulations in place) so therefore renewables are the way forward?
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Jun 19, 2022 22:12
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aniviron posted:So what you're saying is that for nuclear to be viable, we need to have some amount of political will, and for a renewable grid to be viable, we need to invent a storage solution that is an engineering challenge on the scale of fusion power (and would probably be more expensive to build than just building nuclear installations, even with the current regulations in place) so therefore renewables are the way forward? No. Good lord. How on earth did you interrupt that from my post?
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Jun 19, 2022 22:22
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My understanding is that capacity factor is the difference between straight line multiplication of installed power versus actual deliverable power assuming 100% consumption of all available power. Eg, For a wind turbine, they have a 3MW alternator installed so over 10 hours that suggests 30 MWhr of electrical generation but due the variance of wind, it is routine for them to put out 30-60% of that so between 10 and 20 MWhr. For a nuclear plant, they don't have variation in wind but do have maintenance downtime*. Assume 10% of the calendar time is downtime so 90% or 27 MWhr over the same 10 hrs as for the wind turbine. For ensuring that you have a certain level of service, there are asset management and reliability calcs that tell you how much excess and how to deploy that excess (eg, unit processes in parallel add redundancy/availability, unit processes in series reduce redundancy/availability). I don't think three times requirement (ie to use only 30% of installed capacity by design) of 90% reliable power sources (ie nuclear as opposed to wind/solar) is anything but a misreading of why ERCOT has the abundance of installed power it has. I am involved with islanded power plants across multiple countries and each of our stations are achieving 99.97 overall power delivery (ie, 0.03% of the time we cannot meet the full demand requirement) since commissioning and we are certainly not operating only a third of the generators (actually at least half but two thirds more often and 5/6ths is routine).** *And some French reactors do have derating for high temperature river water restrictions during summer months which would be calculated here as well. **incidentally, I posted years ago about trying to use batteries for some edge case annoyance and events have overtaken me and have been meaning to write up where we are now - includes grid connection to a hydro plant, statcoms, batteries, 100-200 MW of solar farms, the budget (100+ million) to do all that and the government generator (and hence government regulator) resistance to most of that.
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Jun 20, 2022 08:40
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Since all the nuclear shutdowns in europe, electricity prices for consumers have risen a lot, particularly in Sweden which has done a lot of wind power expansion and nuclear shut downs since the 2000s. Just the testing output of Olkiluoto 3 kept the market quieter here in Finland and consumer prices down this spring, also thanks to lacking export cables so surplus couldnt be sent to more expensive locations. So to me, particularly after the winter of 2021-22 where people in sweden started up fuel oil boilers again due to electricity prices and record breaking prices. My lived experience tells me that wind power and it's intermittency issues (that it's owners do not have to give two fucks about) equals on average higher consumer prices and particularly in winter time, you can occasionally have really cheap power in summer, when power is not needed as much anyway. This is not a good trade off for the consumer to me. I think it would only be fair that wind power plant owners had to provide backup-power and factor in that in the price of wind power generated electricity. If your wind turbine is rated for 10 megawatts you should be held to producing that a minimum amount of the time, 80% perhaps. If you cannot fulfill this you will have to buy power elsewhere and factor that cost into the power sold from your power plants. I dunno just spitballing, I jusy think there needs to be some economic incentives so that wind power producers have to cover their own externalities, namely that of grid & price instability. This should incentivize them to finally start doing something about that storage they always keep talking about but never end up doing, it's like they expect someone else to build that for them while they just rake in the cash.
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Jun 20, 2022 09:12
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His Divine Shadow posted:I think it would only be fair that wind power plant owners had to provide backup-power and factor in that in the price of wind power generated electricity. If your wind turbine is rated for 10 megawatts you should be held to producing that a minimum amount of the time, 80% perhaps. If you cannot fulfill this you will have to buy power elsewhere and factor that cost into the power sold from your power plants.
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Jun 20, 2022 09:38
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Discendo Vox posted:Would it be productive to look more closely at the specific regulations which serve as obstacles to economically viable nuclear plant development? this is a really good point and an interesting if dry topic of discussion. I did not miss the post but requires a lot of thought to not fall into the easy "gotchyas!" of the perception of meaningfully reducing safety replies that just shooting out and saying; ~ "formal and regulatory recognition of safe levels of radiation discharge (eg, Japan is going to spend 30 years at great expense slowly releasing the amount of tritium radiation that France releases every couple of months)" ~ The USN overman their nuclear plant, there is absolutely no need to have men in the loop on every little thing. Automation in the 2020s is better than 1970. ~Nuclear high level waste is a non-event, its only issue of substance is perception so education campaigns reflecting that through all levels of education. Don't make the nuclear industry develop and fund this. It is a government job. ~strengthen vexatious litigant legislation with respect to nuclear projects. Anti-nuclear (and other) groups often raise genuine issues that deserve consultation and court time. A lot of the time; however, it is a META for delaying or pushing up the cost of a project - ie they don't actually have a legitimate complaint re legislation but raise vexatious claims for the sole purpose of utilising the mechanisms for consultation and challenging issues solely to delay. The start would be judges option to award legal and project delay costs against the claimant if a challenge is found to have no substance. The intent is not to smother genuine challenges but to reduce filibuster resistance. and the list goes on. I will try and think of more.
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Jun 20, 2022 10:06
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Electric Wrigglies posted:My understanding is that capacity factor is the difference between straight line multiplication of installed power versus actual deliverable power assuming 100% consumption of all available power. If you have enough generation to meet peak load with a reserve, plus some contingencies for forced outages and regulator maintenance, you do end up with a capacity factor like ERCOT at around 0.3 when using dispatchable generation resources. In fact, judging by the grids failure recently, it probably does not have enough spare capacity and variety in generation source to meet reliability expectations people demand of their electricity. quote:I am involved with islanded power plants across multiple countries and each of our stations are achieving 99.97 overall power delivery (ie, 0.03% of the time we cannot meet the full demand requirement) since commissioning and we are certainly not operating only a third of the generators (actually at least half but two thirds more often and 5/6ths is routine).** That calculation is not a calculation of a capacity factor, but an availability factor. Your generators are available 99.97% of the time, but they are not at 0.9997 capacity factor unless you have a very specific case that is not in any way similar to a larger power grid. If your load is a constant, then yes that is achievable but I do not use electricity at the same level constantly nor do most people. The issue here is that with a very capital expensive asset must maintain a high capacity factor to be economical with today's grid. Generally, being available to generate power is not a service paid for by today's ISOs, at least at a level that justifies the expense of a nuclear power plant.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:36
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freezepops posted:If you have enough generation to meet peak load with a reserve, plus some contingencies for forced outages and regulator maintenance, you do end up with a capacity factor like ERCOT at around 0.3 when using dispatchable generation resources. In fact, judging by the grids failure recently, it probably does not have enough spare capacity and variety in generation source to meet reliability expectations people demand of their electricity. The problem remains that Solar and Wind are so prone to droughts that it makes it difficult to say "Yes, this should be our main source". They are, to be honest, more of the backups than things like Nuclear or Hydro. And Hydro, as both storage and energy source, is under direct threat from Global Warming and future Water demands for potable water. Renewables are good. We should use them anywhere we can. But pointing just at renewables pricing and saying they can carry the load is cutting off your nose to spite your face. They generally can't.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:48
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All those backup gas peaker plants sure don't come into play when calculating the capacity.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:06
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CommieGIR posted:The problem remains that Solar and Wind are so prone to droughts that it makes it difficult to say "Yes, this should be our main source". They are, to be honest, more of the backups than things like Nuclear or Hydro. And Hydro, as both storage and energy source, is under direct threat from Global Warming and future Water demands for potable water. Yeah aiming for 100% nuclear is as silly as aiming for 100% wind/solar. The intermittent nature of wind/solar would make that incredibly expensive and the capital costs of nuclear would make that incredibly expensive. It's not clear if vastly overbuilding renewables to compensate for intermittency is worse than utilizing a $10-15bn nuclear power plant as a peaker for 2 hours a day but neither is economical or efficient.
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Jun 21, 2022 07:38
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Owling Howl posted:Yeah aiming for 100% nuclear is as silly as aiming for 100% wind/solar. The intermittent nature of wind/solar would make that incredibly expensive and the capital costs of nuclear would make that incredibly expensive. It's not clear if vastly overbuilding renewables to compensate for intermittency is worse than utilizing a $10-15bn nuclear power plant as a peaker for 2 hours a day but neither is economical or efficient. It depends on the nature of the demand. If there is seasonal variation, than you schedule major maintenance in the quiet season and even during the day, you will do short term power derating maintenance in the quiet part of the day. Point is, installed power is not always (in fact it never is) available and you can tune de-rating around predictable load variation. There are plenty of grids that are/were entirely/predominately thermal coal. Nuclear is the same, except with a different heat source. Big spinning steam turbine driven driven electrical grid is very well understood and changing from coal sourced heating to nuclear sourced heating is probably the most straight forward swap out. Renewables is far more technically challenging (hydro/geothermal aside) to the point that no-one has been able to come close yet. 100% nuclear grid could likely be value engineered (especially with hydro and solar reliably lining up with peak load daily is also likely a nice fit) but saying that 100% thermal is as silly as 100% wind/solar is vastly overstating how hard nuclear is and how easy wind/solar beyond supplying a little bit of power when you feel like it is. freezepops posted:If you have enough generation to meet peak load with a reserve, plus some contingencies for forced outages and regulator maintenance, you do end up with a capacity factor like ERCOT at around 0.3 when using dispatchable generation resources. In fact, judging by the grids failure recently, it probably does not have enough spare capacity and variety in generation source to meet reliability expectations people demand of their electricity. The 99.97% was establishing we had a reliable circuit. Our capacity factor (once you take into account downtime and maintenance) was nearly always over 50% (i.e. 6x6 MW generators (36MW nameplate), one offline for major rebuild (so 30MW available), sometimes another offline for routine maintenance (now at 24MW), 18-20 MW load during the night (so we run three generators), 21-23 MW during the day). According to you, we needed to have a 69MW powerstation to fulfil the requirement. I think that 0.3 ERCOT number includes accounting for intermittent energy sources such as wind which then implies gas peaker plants which all multiply up the installed power that would not be required in a pure reliable dispatchable power grid.
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Jun 21, 2022 12:07
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 Current status in Southern Norway. 100 øre = 10c (eur/usd) They're now saying that energy prices will probably increase further.  E: I'm not saying I condone anyone shooting up the transformer stations feeding the cables to Germany and the UK, but I will buy them a beer 
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Jun 21, 2022 18:13
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Yeah I got a letter too that I got another 30% increase on my power so I now pay 10 cents / kWh + transfer fees. loving Olkiluoto get online we need you.
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Jun 21, 2022 18:35
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The problem with nuclear in America is the American Nuclear Industry and how Utilities operate. The cost overruns and delays were well outlined in this piece: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ The utilities with their baked-in profit margins don’t care if a plant works etc. Finally shutting down operating plants (or breaking them, I’m looking at you PG&E) is incredibly shortsighted and bad climate policy. To make nuclear work in the USA we would need to federalize it and have standardized designs.
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Jun 22, 2022 20:38
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Maybe I missed it but it would have been nice if they linked the actual paper - even if it is behind a paywall. I am always very suspicious of articles talking about what a resource implies/concludes without giving access to that resource for my own read. Also, it would undoubtedly be very interesting reading for me.
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Jun 22, 2022 23:29
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Maybe I missed it but it would have been nice if they linked the actual paper - even if it is behind a paywall. I am always very suspicious of articles talking about what a resource implies/concludes without giving access to that resource for my own read. Sources of Cost Overrun in Nuclear Power Plant Construction Call for a New Approach to Engineering Design: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext...Fshowall%3Dtrue PDF (if direct link works): https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2542-4351%2820%2930458-X
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Jun 22, 2022 23:55
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mobby_6kl posted:Yes they do link it under the article and it's accessible without scihub Aces! Love your work.
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Jun 23, 2022 09:03
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mobby_6kl posted:Yes they do link it under the article and it's accessible without scihub Whew, this is absolutely brutal. They not only showed that the majority of the cost rises weren't directly tied to increased regulations, they showed that costs were significantly rising on sequential constructions of the same standardised design. It seems like the increasing complexity of plant design required to meet new safety regulations pushed nuclear project complexity past the ability of the local industry to execute efficiently. It seems like they entered a death spiral at that point, as you get cost blowouts and project failures, which reduce the number of plants under construction, which reduces ability to construct new plants through loss of skilled staff and resources, which leads to further cost blowouts and project failures. At that point standardisation might actually be making things worse as the standard is going to address issues that won't be present at all sites when what you really need is the simplest design at the easiest site possible.
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Jun 23, 2022 09:30
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slorb posted:Whew, this is absolutely brutal. They not only showed that the majority of the cost rises weren't directly tied to increased regulations, they showed that costs were significantly rising on sequential constructions of the same standardised design. That's part of it, however one of the biggest parts isn't so much standardization broke it, its that we stopped building them. The knowledge and hands on talent moved on to new fields, retired, or died. So there's a lot of relearning what was done previously as well as dealing with the fact that you are now building Gen III designs rather than the maybe better known Gen II.
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Jun 23, 2022 13:32
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I thought this was interesting, a spin-off of fusion technology might make geothermal a lot more viable: https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-millimeter-wave-drill/ Basically that laser tech they've used to start fusion reactions can be repurposed as a hella good drill that also won't need to shove down pipe for support, since it glasses the surrounding and the hole supports itself. The articles have got that typical breakthrough that won't lead anywhere feel though. But the concept sounds pretty down to earth. Here's hoping, we need something else.
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Jun 23, 2022 13:40
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How much impact would the EPA getting restricted by the supreme court create for lowering emissions in the states? Are there other effective ways of bringing them down? Would it be worse than when Trump's lackey ran the EPA in 2017?
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Jun 26, 2022 04:22
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Grouchio posted:How much impact would the EPA getting restricted by the supreme court create for lowering emissions in the states? Are there other effective ways of bringing them down? Would it be worse than when Trump's lackey ran the EPA in 2017? There's not any way to answer that until there is some notion of just what they would be restricting and in what way. Stick with reality, there are an infinite number of abstract hypotheticals you can spin up to worry about.
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Jun 26, 2022 04:30
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