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~~ posting from a nuke-powered phone ~~ i think the future for nuclear is bright, and not in the way the song implied. lots of cool tech going on. i was pleasantly surprised to see the push for smrs in canada, wasn’t sure what they were going to do about ontarios aging cadre of reactors. anyway i’m actually currently most excited for the magical fusion rock ablator geothermal project
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Jul 18, 2022 15:35
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What would you propose to do about anti-nuclear greens? From what I can tell, most anti-nuclear policy is only influenced by the moral hazard projected by people opposed to the traditional greens. Merkel is of course the ideal example, she decided to be massively anti-nuclear in extremely incompetent ways and everybody ended up blaming the greens for her decisions. Despite the greens being at the lowest amount of power they had since the 70s. All centrists worldwide have paid attention, and they know now that nobody will ever blame them for making anti-nuclear decisions. So no party, except for a green party could ever make a pro-nuclear decision because they would be in danger of being held responsible.
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Jul 18, 2022 15:44
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VictualSquid posted:What would you propose to do about anti-nuclear greens? the greens in canada are very explicitly anti-nuclear and always oppose any investment. the current interim party leader is calling for the smrs mentioned earlier to be abandoned instead for regular renewables. and frankly like a lot of green parties there’s been a number of very unscientific policy planks over the last few years. while the greens in many countries lack substantive political power, having the only organized, purportedly eco-friendly party being against such a powerful tool gives everyone else a place to point their fingers at: “see! even the environmentalists don’t think it’s good for the environment!” i’m honestly not sure what there is to be done about greens and this policy aside from dragging them along or participating more on a local level.
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Jul 18, 2022 16:13
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mediaphage posted:the greens in canada are very explicitly anti-nuclear and always oppose any investment. the current interim party leader is calling for the smrs mentioned earlier to be abandoned instead for regular renewables. and frankly like a lot of green parties there’s been a number of very unscientific policy planks over the last few years. And even then, what eventually happens is the the greens getting in coalition governments and then justifying further fossil fuel spending to get over the hump while renewables buildouts happen, and then that hump gets larger and larger or external forces (say a war in Russia) intervene and make the hump insurmountable. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 16:15
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silence_kit posted:There is a belief in this thread that nuclear power plants intrinsically are dead simple, cheap, easy to construct, intrinsically 100% safe while removing a lot of the costly safety controls, processes, etc. currently being practiced. The belief is that it is a perfect technology. It is only because of a global conspiracy against nuclear power that nuclear power plants are expensive, slow to build, often run into accidents leading to costly premature shutdowns, etc. Since it's the thread belief you should be able to quote a few instances of it.
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Jul 18, 2022 16:36
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mediaphage posted:~~ posting from a nuke-powered phone ~~ Yeah, if the plasma drilling thing works out you could convert existing coal/gas thermal (steam) plants to geothermal right on the site. It would be a good solution for millennia.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:06
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https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1549037641970114560?s=20&t=7vEjqegr-AhgKDu8kA-yqg Maybe a glimmer of hope.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:07
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cat botherer posted:For the 500th time, do you have a more realistic solution to provide baseload power? In the United States, literally anything is a more realistic solution to provide baseload power than nuclear, considering that no new plants have been successfully completed in the 21st century.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:15
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ulmont posted:In the United States, literally anything is a more realistic solution to provide baseload power than nuclear, considering that no new plants have been successfully completed in the 21st century. Votgle 3 and 4 will be coming online in the next year. The problem is that we lost a lot of institutional knowledge by going cold turkey in the 80s and 90s, so not only are we building newer Gen III and IV designs, but we're having to relearn a lot of lessons we already learned in the 60-80s. France and Japan have both recognized this issue and are restarting their nuclear industry to try to avoid losing a lot of that institutional construction knowledge. We're the object lesson for them here. South Korea is considering the same. We're actually in the middle of a possible second Nuclear boom, China is building a LOT of plants, even if some of them are delayed and breaking a lot of ground for newer designs like Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and High Temperature Gas Cooled reactors. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 17:18
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Watts Bar 2 went critical in 2016.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:25
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Kaal posted:Watts Bar 2 went critical in 2016. True, I tend not to count it because it effectively was mostly built (80%) in 1985 and then construction restarted in 2007.
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Jul 18, 2022 17:32
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CommieGIR posted:Votgle 3 and 4 will be coming online in the next year. This is definitely not the first year that sentence has been written, and it may not be the last. When was the original launch date, again? Kaal posted:Watts Bar 2 went critical in 2016. What CommieGIR said re Watts Bar 2 (and also 1, although it was restarted much sooner).
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Jul 18, 2022 17:37
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ulmont posted:This is definitely not the first year that sentence has been written, and it may not be the last. When was the original launch date, again? They are both more than 98% complete, at this point its unavoidable that Vogtle 3 is expected to go critical by end of Q1 2023. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 17:40
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silence_kit posted:1) Fossil fuel energy companies, who work to sabotage nuclear electricity technology. Of course, if nuclear really were the perfect technology, it would make a lot of sense for those companies to diversify into nuclear electricity. It doesn't matter if Nuclear was cheaper or not. Fossil Fuels companies at the end of the day are fossil fuel companies because that is exactly what they are! They aren't Nuclear companies and never, ever will be! As for environmental groups - they aren't at all well intentioned but to but it bluntly just freaking performative idiots more concerned about aesthetics than making a meaningful actual difference.
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Jul 18, 2022 18:18
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VideoGameVet posted:Yeah, if the plasma drilling thing works out you could convert existing coal/gas thermal (steam) plants to geothermal right on the site. It would be a good solution for millennia. I think we will actually repurpose most of the old thermal plants if there’s any will for it. there’s a huge number of research projects going on right now looking at the creation of thermal batteries mostly using boring, well-known technologies applied in new ways. thermal batteries could let any of these thermal plants be turned into storage for renewables or strictly as peaker plants
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Jul 18, 2022 18:20
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CommieGIR posted:https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1549037641970114560?s=20&t=7vEjqegr-AhgKDu8kA-yqg Certainly looks like things are improving. Actually I do blame the rona for those changes. Germany has been massively traumatised by Chernobyl. The impact here was oc minimal compared to serious catastrophes, even local floods. But, it affected the whole country in a almost visible way that nothing else between 1945 and 2020 did. And the memories grew in retelling, making it impossible to forget. Children (like me) remember having the playgrounds locked down until the sand was replaced. Adults remember the short soft lockdown. And grandma never stopped complaining that she can no longer safely forage for mushrooms. Leading to the situation that for 30ish years the only pro-nuclear people are ageing conservatives who hadn't noticed that the SU was pro nuclear. And later anti-Schröder libertarians. And, of course as soon as mushrooms were back on the menu Fukushima happened, destroying the argument that nuclear is only bad when the sovjets do it. But, now that we have an actual major disaster to compare things to, I was hoping that the anti-nuclear stance lessens. Though, I expected things to come from the party-base with the politicians being holdouts. I suppose they are trying to attract the refugees from the pds, to go even more topical.
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Jul 18, 2022 18:20
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mediaphage posted:I think we will actually repurpose most of the old thermal plants if there’s any will for it. there’s a huge number of research projects going on right now looking at the creation of thermal batteries mostly using boring, well-known technologies applied in new ways. thermal batteries could let any of these thermal plants be turned into storage for renewables or strictly as peaker plants Yeah its going along the same ways SMRs are looking at Coal Plants as conversion to nuclear sites with in-situ replacements of the boilers/burners with an SMR reactor.
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Jul 18, 2022 18:21
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CommieGIR posted:Yeah its going along the same ways SMRs are looking at Coal Plants as conversion to nuclear sites with in-situ replacements of the boilers/burners with an SMR reactor. yeah I guess those are ideal for baseload plants while things like thermal batteries are good for peaker plants
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Jul 18, 2022 18:48
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silence_kit posted:There is a belief in this thread that nuclear power plants intrinsically are dead simple, cheap, easy to construct, intrinsically 100% safe while removing a lot of the costly safety controls, processes, etc. currently being practiced. The belief is that it is a perfect technology. It is only because of a global conspiracy against nuclear power that nuclear power plants are expensive, slow to build, often run into accidents leading to costly premature shutdowns, etc. Nobody is saying that they are simple to construct. they are terrifically complex systems, and it's a shame that we have a tendency domestically to design them in a bespoke manner. Nobody is saying that they are cheap. It's really weird that you are saying this after we just had a discussion about capital costs and ongoing costs. Nobody is saying that it is easy to construct, where the gently caress are you getting this? I don't think there is a single person in this thread that has said that a plant takes less than 10 years to construct. SMRs *may* alter how that works, but that's still in the collective imagination. Nobody is saying nuclear power is intrinsically safe? As a matter of fact people are only arguing that a lot of power generation technologies are unsafe, whether with conflict mineral mining or the toxicity of manufactured waste products or the huge amounts of CO2 and radioactivity released by fossil fuel. I think that maaaaaaaaaybe you are seeing people talking about how nuclear power seems to be uniquely responsible for cleaning up its own mess, and you took that for some kind of superlative? that's only a guess, I'm not going to clean that's what you were confused by, and unlike you I'm not going to put words in people's mouth. Who in the hell is talking about removing safety processes and controls? I keep saying this, but where on Earth are you getting this? Did you read another forum and come here mistakenly? There's a couple of energy policy and climate policy threads, for real you might be mistaken. It's also like, who was saying that nuclear technology is perfect, particularly given the conscious acknowledgment in this thread regarding its high cost, the enormity of the challenge that is working with necessary controls and quality assurance from construction through operation through disposal, proliferation management, the bottleneck of steel facilities capable of producing primary vessels.... if you had a point to make, it got buried underneath phrase after phrase of strawman, so honestly maybe put that poo poo aside for a second and see what you mean to say.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:08
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CommieGIR posted:2. US Environmentalists were directly behind the closure of multiple plants including Indian Point and received funding from Natural Gas groups to push for it. Well intentioned, sure, but the damage they've done is catastrophic. I'm going to push back on you here. It would be much more accurate to say that parts of the environmental movement was partially hijacked by very powerful, entrenched, moneyed fossil fuel interests, and those parts that were hijacked involved sites and law where fossil fuel interests stood to gain or lose money. Painting with that broad brush fosters a lot of pushback because the environmental movement bought us an enormous number of good things, continues to do good things for us, and remains a net positive simply for the fact that--take this is grim or reductive, your pick--we still have clean air to breathe, water to drink, and birds in the air. Instances where the proverbial herd of the environmental movement included wolves in sheep's clothing are probably better discussed in a specific, circumstantial manner because that's often how they panned out: specific interests going after specific things. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 19:13
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VictualSquid posted:What would you propose to do about anti-nuclear greens? [context: Germany] I don't have a clever way to say "caveat voter" but it looks like the whole of Europe stands to get soaked for their shortsightedness, so it might make sense for nations to back out of commitment to common energy marketplace as it seems to be a massive liability permitting irresponsible voters on the other side of some river to drive the cost of your own power sky high. Heaven only knows, gently caress. Real talk, the EU itself needs to be more heavily involved in energy policy. One country's fuckup cannot be allowed to so thoroughly ruin everyone's energy costs. I'm not calling for isolationism. Quite to the contrary, the opportunity to gently caress up like Germany has over and over and over and (one, two, three, yeah need a fourth) OVER in energy policy in the 21st century needs to be denied to them, in the common interest of the EU.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:27
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VideoGameVet posted:Yeah, if the plasma drilling thing works out you could convert existing coal/gas thermal (steam) plants to geothermal right on the site. It would be a good solution for millennia. This is why I don't think ITER or any such projects will ever be a bad investment even if they lead to utter failure.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:29
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silence_kit posted:There is a belief in this thread that nuclear power plants intrinsically are dead simple, cheap, easy to construct, intrinsically 100% safe while removing a lot of the costly safety controls, processes, etc. currently being practiced. The belief is that it is a perfect technology. It is only because of a global conspiracy against nuclear power that nuclear power plants are expensive, slow to build, often run into accidents leading to costly premature shutdowns, etc. this all seems to be missing the most important point: we might have run down the clock on preventing biosphere collapse because we didn't push forward with nuclear. And we're not even trying to mitigate the damage we've done anymore. Renewable energy is not advancing in efficiency fast enough nor being built on big enough scales. Worrying about nuclear being 'difficult' seems rather short sighted when the alternative might just be the annihilation of all complex life on earth.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:57
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:It doesn't matter if Nuclear was cheaper or not. Fossil Fuels companies at the end of the day are fossil fuel companies because that is exactly what they are! They aren't Nuclear companies and never, ever will be! Also they kinda can't? A fossil fuel company is not going to naturally come about to investing in a technology that competes with their existing profit model. They might dip their toes into it in a region they have no foothold in, but that's about it. No matter how good nuclear is, it is capital intensive and doesn't have sky high variable profit margins so why make "some" money when they could make all the money by sticking to fossil fuels? The difference is low-medium capital investment with medium-high profits vs high capital investment and low profit margins. To get corporations to make the switch you need to make it attractive to them, by making it painful to stick to fossil fuels. The free market is not a rational actor.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:58
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ulmont posted:In the United States, literally anything is a more realistic solution to provide baseload power than nuclear, considering that no new plants have been successfully completed in the 21st century. For these reasons, there is no other realistic option for base load that is not fossil fuels. Can any of you guys supply a better, more realistic way to decarbonize our electricity supply? None of the anti-nuclear FUD people in this thread have offered any other realistic ideas. Yes, its not easy. However, continuing with fossil fuels will lead to the fall of industrial civilization. We need another solution fast. I'd love if you have a better idea, and I'd encourage you to actually reply with that idea rather than these stupid snipes. You all expect to have an easy solution to this hole that capitalism has dug for humanity. There isn't one. cat botherer fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 20:15
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Potato Salad posted:I'm going to push back on you here. It would be much more accurate to say that parts of the environmental movement was partially hijacked by very powerful, entrenched, moneyed fossil fuel interests, and those parts that were hijacked involved sites and law where fossil fuel interests stood to gain or lose money. The problem is a large amount of even the ones that made significant impacts have their funding coming from sketchy sources, and so far as I know only the Sierra Club has done something to address it. I'm not criticizing the work of Environmental groups, I'm criticizing the damage they've done when fighting good things in their desire to achieve what they believe will achieve a better future. Especially National Resources Defense Council and Riverkeepers, who attacked Indian Point till its closure and were key to the closure, then rolled over and ignored the natural gas that replaced it. Unfortunately quite a few of these groups see environmentalism's ultimate goal as the end to Industrialization rather than making them responsible for their messes, and that really messes up their work. Greenpeace is especially bad at this.
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Jul 18, 2022 22:18
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Potato Salad posted:I'm going to push back on you here. It would be much more accurate to say that parts of the environmental movement was partially hijacked by very powerful, entrenched, moneyed fossil fuel interests, and those parts that were hijacked involved sites and law where fossil fuel interests stood to gain or lose money. What? They weren't hi-jacked at all. It's all attached to 1970s new wave environmentalism that's all anti-nuclear, pro single family housing and anti-GMO crops.
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Jul 19, 2022 02:38
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Will battery based storage ever become realistic? I feel like we're going to be stuck with Natural Gas because everyone's paranoid of Nuclear and the regulatory environment for it sucks.
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Jul 19, 2022 02:51
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Will battery based storage ever become realistic? Realistic in what sense? California has a 300MW/1200MWh grid battery installation in Monterey. Australia's Hornsdale Reserve has been significantly useful. Various power plant have large lead-acid grid batteries going back for probably like a hundred years, but that's for dealing with brief outages and smoothing fluctuations, not for time-shifting large amounts of power.
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Jul 19, 2022 03:08
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Potato Salad posted:I'm going to push back on you here. It would be much more accurate to say that parts of the environmental movement was partially hijacked by very powerful, entrenched, moneyed fossil fuel interests, and those parts that were hijacked involved sites and law where fossil fuel interests stood to gain or lose money. I understood that large parts of the Green / Anti-Nuclear movement originated in the "Ban The Bomb" Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement, at least in UK and Australia. Hence the Australian Green's opposition to anything nuclear, including medical uses.
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Jul 19, 2022 03:23
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Phanatic posted:Realistic in what sense? California has a 300MW/1200MWh grid battery installation in Monterey. Australia's Hornsdale Reserve has been significantly useful. Various power plant have large lead-acid grid batteries going back for probably like a hundred years, but that's for dealing with brief outages and smoothing fluctuations, not for time-shifting large amounts of power. Replace Nuclear or Natural Gas as a baseload.
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Jul 19, 2022 03:33
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Will battery based storage ever become realistic? I feel like we're going to be stuck with Natural Gas because everyone's paranoid of Nuclear and the regulatory environment for it sucks. There's been some interesting advances with thermal batteries recently, and smart grid operations are increasingly tying in electric car charging with the overall grid to encourage a degree of demand management. One of the issues though is that the material needs for developing appreciable storage is just really high right now. We need significant improvement in the efficiency and endurance of battery systems, as well as advancements in the recycling of such systems. Right now a national battery / wind / solar grid would require massive amounts of material and regular replacement - it's not a sustainable vision at all. And frankly all the batteries we are building are already critically needed for replacing fossil fuel vehicles with electric ones. It's one of the reasons that environmentalists have been openly calling for a kitchen sink approach where each type of green tech is supported and implemented in cooperation, rather than competing with each other. Countries should pursue multiple avenues at once, seeking out the best opportunities they have and developing a resilient and efficient grid. Kaal fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 03:35
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cat botherer posted:Nuclear plants have been build before. Wide-scale grid storage has not. Renewables have not been used anywhere to provide reliable *base* load. Well there’s South Australia as an example of doing renewables right.
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Jul 19, 2022 03:39
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VideoGameVet posted:Well there’s South Australia as an example of doing renewables right. Aren't they not actually a good example because they're still attached to the grid and relatively low in power demand? Or is this 
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Jul 19, 2022 03:55
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VideoGameVet posted:Well there’s South Australia as an example of doing renewables right. Its not. Because South Australia only works because its the least populated and lowest demand of all of Australia. What they are doing there will not work in any of the more populated regions of Australia. Its like saying Renewables for Hawaii will meet the demand for New York. Two very different demands, not comparable. And regardless of South Australia's success, the rest of the entire country is burning fossil fuels like there's no climate change. And go back to the chart I shared a couple pages back: It works....except when it doesn't, and then they burn natural gas. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 03:57
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SA is a good example of a battery that protects the grid from sudden outages and changes in load. It only has relatively short duration but very very fast response. It does not replace base load and isn’t intended to. Storage to cover base load for renewable intermittency is very much in the research and development phase. There are lots of interesting ideas but none is available commercially at scale. The most advanced is pumped hydro which has been around forever but is dependent on specific geography so isn’t widespread. Battery options tend to be flow batteries but these seem to be very slow to deployment given all the years of hype. Solar thermal also seems to be going nowhere. There are lots of others but nothing really sticks out. One technology that I think is interesting is liquefaction of air which has a round trip efficiency of 60%, is easily scalable (just add more flasks) and uses technology that’s a century old. The economics are not published which makes me skeptical, but it has lots of things to like. There are large pilot plants going online this year in the UK and China.
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Jul 19, 2022 04:06
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Raenir Salazar posted:Aren't they not actually a good example because they're still attached to the grid and relatively low in power demand? Or is this How much of their power (%) over the year is coming from outside the state?
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Jul 19, 2022 04:50
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VideoGameVet posted:How much of their power (%) over the year is coming from outside the state? How much of the year do they make up with natural gas or coal, and how many kw/HR per person do they generate compared to their neighbors. It doesnt scale.
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Jul 19, 2022 04:53
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CommieGIR posted:How much of the year do they make up with natural gas or coal, and how many kw/HR per person do they generate compared to their neighbors. So what’s that %? Here’s the published data. https://imgur.com/8qlVhQh
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Jul 19, 2022 05:05
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VideoGameVet posted:So what’s that %? It's still tied to the Eastern Australian grid so shifts power in time that way (ie sends excess renewable to the grid and withdraws shortfalls from the grid). It is a low power state so the other states are able to provide this fairly readily. The amounts moved are hidden in that chart by the netting out effect.
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Jul 19, 2022 08:24
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