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While we are on the topic of Russian gas, today has once more shown their reliability as a partner:frumpykvetchbot posted:Both of the Nord Stream pipelines have apparently suffered unspecified damage, and large quantities of methane has been reported bubbling to the surface and creating hazards to fishing, shipping and even aviation traffic in the area just East of the Danish island of Bornholm. fish and chips and dip posted:Image of the gas leak outside of Denmark. Picture taken from a Danish F16 fighter. RBA-Wintrow fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Sep 27, 2022 |
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Sep 27, 2022 16:03
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Glah posted:Whose saying that? His Divine Shadow posted:liberals Many useless people are saying this.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:06
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Guavanaut posted:Many useless people are saying this. Was Clegg saying that: "We should have built nuclear plants years ago, but we shouldn't build them now."? Because for me it seems a very strange position to hold, to be some one who supported nuclear power before but doesn't now. Usually the thinking goes from opposing it to supporting it, haven't heard many people going backwards in this sense....
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Sep 27, 2022 16:13
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Glah posted:Was Clegg saying that: "We should have built nuclear plants years ago, but we shouldn't build them now."? Because for me it seems a very strange position to hold, to be some one who supported nuclear power before but doesn't now. Usually the thinking goes from opposing it to supporting it, haven't heard many people going backwards in this sense.... I have heard people say it literally like that. Granted it seems to be fake lamenting hiding a more not in my back yard stance. It's just annoying because it's never tied to a different 'solution' or like...a better way of dealing with energy crises or climate catastrophe.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:18
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Torrannor posted:EU officials are busy to not criticize Azerbaijan's "border incursions" into Armenia, because the Azeris have a ton of natural gas to sell. So I can see this is still going really well. Azerbaijan doesn't have nuclear weapons, at least. So worst case scenario it can be invaded - beg your pardon, "liberated". I'm not being quite serious, it would be a lovely thing for everyone involved, but with Russia even doing an Iraq 2 is off the table entirely.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:23
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An insane mind posted:I have heard people say it literally like that. Granted it seems to be fake lamenting hiding a more not in my back yard stance. It's just annoying because it's never tied to a different 'solution' or like...a better way of dealing with energy crises or climate catastrophe. It's especially striking with the Clegg one, being him saying "well there's no point in building them now because they won't be on stream until 2022" and we can all look around and say "yeah that would be pretty useful right about now" but to be any kind of useful position it'd have to hold for 1998 Clegg saying no because they won't be on stream until 2010 and so on. It's just nimbyism masquerading as short termism without any reflection on why that is also ridiculous.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:24
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Ten years ago the costs were much more favorable for nuclear and the opposition was almost entirely ~atoms~. Now that renewables are cheaper (when it's sunny & windy), the "sensible" solution is of course renewables + storage (tbd). The French managed managed to build 56 reactors in 15 years in the 70s-80s. The first plants took 6-7 years. Literally half the time it took the Swiss to build one pumped storage facility.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Station). That we somehow can't do it as fast nowadays, despite enormous advances in material science, computing and sensors, is purely a result of long-term choices and policy.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:28
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RBA-Wintrow posted:While we are on the topic of Russian gas, today has once more shown their reliability as a partner: Why would Russia blow up a pipeline they will use whenever the war in Ukraine ends, be that in 6 months or 10 years? One day Russia will sell oil/gas to Europe again. And if they want all they have to so that turn off the valve. Don't really see why Russia gain from this attack.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:33
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mobby_6kl posted:Ten years ago the costs were much more favorable for nuclear and the opposition was almost entirely ~atoms~. Now that renewables are cheaper (when it's sunny & windy), the "sensible" solution is of course renewables + storage (tbd). I hear that one of the major hurdles currently is that all the guys who built the old ones went decades without building them or passing them on, leading to a regression in terms of number of skill nuclear plant makers. Not like we'd have to reinvent the wheel just we'd need to mass train a bunch of new engineers. Hey that sounds like it could create employment! Which means it must never happen.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:35
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The problem is that, currently, construction times being equal, investing in nuclear right now means most likely burning fossils for another 30 years, aka business as usual. The problems being that 1. resources to sink into overhauling our power generation are not infinite, so that eschews more investment into renewables 2. That nuclear power serves to maintain current modes of production and consumption, which are plainly unsustainable. We are rapidly reaching deadlines with the climate in that the time to stop emitting is now, not in 30 years. Either we overhaul the grid to work on renewables while nuclear gets finalized, and rationalize and reduce consumption, or we burn fossils that we can't and couldn't afford to burn since 50 years ago. I think the discussions are interlinked. What the liberals are doing in Italy at least wrt nuclear is exactly this sort of delinking the discourse of power generation from our pattern of consumption. Which, to me, exposes their project for expansion of nuclear as wholly unserious.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:35
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mobby_6kl posted:Ten years ago the costs were much more favorable for nuclear and the opposition was almost entirely ~atoms~. Now that renewables are cheaper (when it's sunny & windy), the "sensible" solution is of course renewables + storage (tbd). The cost issue is more about the next generation plants being more powerful and thus more complex and that is reflected in costs and build times. I'm sure we could build similar plants as in Gravelines comparatively fast and cheap but then we come to issue of efficiency. Is it smarter for long term to build costlier and more complex plants that are more powerful and efficient or go with fast, cheap and less powerful choice? Like the boondoggle of Olkiluoto 3 plant has been a stuff of legends. But when it is online (hopefully by this winter), it generates 1 600 MW whereas those Graveline reactors generate 900 MW each.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:35
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forkboy84 posted:Why would Russia blow up a pipeline they will use whenever the war in Ukraine ends, be that in 6 months or 10 years? One day Russia will sell oil/gas to Europe again. And if they want all they have to so that turn off the valve. Don't really see why Russia gain from this attack. Well the theory is they're relatively easy to fix in the short term but able to show "nice pipeline you have here, would be a shame if something happened to it" Not that I believe it's deliberate per se, but can see the argument.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:36
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Glah posted:Rationalizing/planning the economy more is inconceivable for liberals in power and the idea of consuming less is preposterous for vast masses of Europeans. Most of the energy consumption in Europe doesn't come from individuals and families but from companies, though. While often well-intended, I hate the avalanche of lazy articles that hand out obvious "tips" to save on energy. The problem isn't the consumption and the problem is only partially one of availability, the problem is regarding energy as an abstract resource that's fine to use for all kinds of speculative stock market derivatives. On top of the pricing system that makes all energy as expensive as the most expensive type.
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Sep 27, 2022 17:24
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Tesseraction posted:I hear that one of the major hurdles currently is that all the guys who built the old ones went decades without building them or passing them on, leading to a regression in terms of number of skill nuclear plant makers. mortons stork posted:The problem is that, currently, construction times being equal, investing in nuclear right now means most likely burning fossils for another 30 years, aka business as usual. 2) What production/consumption do you think we should cut? Other than personal transportation I don't really see many low-hanging fruit. I'm certainly not against renewables, to be clear. Glah posted:The cost issue is more about the next generation plants being more powerful and thus more complex and that is reflected in costs and build times. I'm sure we could build similar plants as in Gravelines comparatively fast and cheap but then we come to issue of efficiency. Is it smarter for long term to build costlier and more complex plants that are more powerful and efficient or go with fast, cheap and less powerful choice? Like the boondoggle of Olkiluoto 3 plant has been a stuff of legends. But when it is online (hopefully by this winter), it generates 1 600 MW whereas those Graveline reactors generate 900 MW each. I don't have any calculations behind this, but I think losing a but of thermal efficiency would be preferable to spending 10 extra years on construction while capital costs are going through the roof. Pope Hilarius II posted:Most of the energy consumption in Europe doesn't come from individuals and families but from companies, though.  https://www.iea.org/regions/europe
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Sep 27, 2022 17:47
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Pope Hilarius II posted:Most of the energy consumption in Europe doesn't come from individuals and families but from companies, though. Yeah but I meant more that European people's living standards and consumption are very much tied together in most peoples minds, and those depend much on European energy consumption on a wider societal level. So even if individuals consume less energy than companies and industries, it is those companies and industries that enable Europeans to live above their means energy wise. We all benefit from cheap goods, foodstuff, employment, export industries etc. So any kind of policy that is meant to curtail the energy consumption of industries will reflect on people's living standards and ability to consume. And I fear that inflation and recession will be reflected in different elections because now the far-right have an easy culprit to point at as the cause: "The unelected political elite in Brussels caused all of this by antagonizing innocent Russia and supporting Ukraine" or somesuch bullshit. You can already see this in recent statements by Viktor Orban in Hungary. We need to consume less as a society. Not only because of the current crisis and ability to oppose Russian imperialism, but on a longer term for the planet. But we also have to admit that this will be deeply unpopular with large sections of our society, be they liberals who want to see profits go up, or regular people who are used to current levels of consumption.
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Sep 27, 2022 17:50
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mobby_6kl posted:How much efficiency would we be really losing? Because it seems to me like having two (or 4!) 900 MW reactors in 6 years would be better than one 1600MW reactor in 17 years. Well we have to take into account that the lifetime of nuclear reactors can be over 50 years. So that's a lot of time for a more powerful reactor to catch up to the less powerful reactor that went online a decade earlier. At the end of their lifetimes, the more powerful reactor will have put more energy to the grid. Then we have the question of developing new technologies and skills to implement them. Next generation reactors are harder to make than the older, but when the knowhow to do them and technologies are refined, it will become easier and easier to build them. Biggest reason OL3 was such an boondoggle is that it was the first of its kind. I think that first EPR to come online was in China but OL3 was the first EPR to start construction. Wouldn't surprise me if Chinese were taking notes of OL3 construction difficulties. It's always hardest being the pioneer. To progress technologically, we need need to take risks and make bigger investments. I don't know the figures about thermal efficiency either so I don't know how much more efficient fuel consumption the newer generation of Nuclear plants have. EDIT: oh I misread, sorry. So I guess building two older reactors could be smarter (if building two old ones is cheaper than building one new). But there's still the second point. Glah fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Sep 27, 2022 |
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Sep 27, 2022 18:09
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mobby_6kl posted:How much efficiency would we be really losing? Because it seems to me like having two (or 4!) 900 MW reactors in 6 years would be better than one 1600MW reactor in 17 years.
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Sep 27, 2022 18:10
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A Buttery Pastry posted:That said, it's apparently also the case that a rapid expansion of nuclear isn't really possible, due to there being production bottlenecks in reactor pressure vessels, meaning you'd have to first build factories that can make those before you can start really boosting the construction of plants. mobby_6kl posted:How much efficiency would we be really losing? Because it seems to me like having two (or 4!) 900 MW reactors in 6 years would be better than one 1600MW reactor in 17 years.
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Sep 27, 2022 18:14
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Most of those are gonna need water for cooling though, sucks to be a landlocked country during climate change.
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Sep 27, 2022 18:44
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mobby_6kl posted:"Technically correct" I suppose? It's still a significant chunk of total consumption and reducing it by e.g. not having all the lights on in the whole drat house could help without actually reducing the quality of life in any meaningful way. There is an absolutely incredible amount of devices that get left in standby/"pretend-to-be-off" compared with back in the 80s, which I wouldn't be surprised to discover amount for more than half the residential energy consumption.
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Sep 27, 2022 20:00
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mortons stork posted:We had to start 30 years ago to have nuclear capacity ready right now. If we have to decarbonize by a 2050 deadline then going for the kind of power plants that take 30 years each to build right now is most likely a no-go, or a side-project. It's only about 15 even with some delays, not 30. But it would cost a boatload of money.
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Sep 27, 2022 20:00
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:There is an absolutely incredible amount of devices that get left in standby/"pretend-to-be-off" compared with back in the 80s, which I wouldn't be surprised to discover amount for more than half the residential energy consumption. is there any basis to that? do cell phones left plugged in at 100% use more electricity than an air conditioner?
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Sep 27, 2022 20:10
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Everything I have heard about the subject suggests that unplugging standby devices became unpopular because of a law that demanded that manufacturers reduce their the standby power consumption to insignificant levels.
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Sep 27, 2022 20:16
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Just buy APR-1400's from South Korea. They're modern reactors that have a fairly consistent track record of taking less than ten years from construction start to commercial power generation. The Koreans themselves have pulled a Germany and aren't building any more for themselves right now, so there should be production capacity to spare. The UAE paid $25 billion USD for a four reactor plant that's almost complete now; Olkiluoto 3 alone cost well over 10 billion €. SMR is probably a good idea for the future but the Korean third generation PWR's is proven technology that works right now. A friend who works in the nuclear energy industry described APR-1400 as "really boring", and when I went "isn't that a good thing though", he was like, yeah absolutely, but it's no fun to work with as an engineer. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Sep 27, 2022 |
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Sep 27, 2022 20:20
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TheFluff posted:SMR is probably a good idea for the future but the Korean third generation PWR's is proven technology that works right now. A friend who works in the nuclear energy described APR-1400 as "really boring", and when I went "isn't that a good thing though", he was like, yeah absolutely, but it's no fun to work with as an engineer. lol does he want to be doc brown at the clocktower VictualSquid posted:Everything I have heard about the subject suggests that unplugging standby devices became unpopular because of a law that demanded that manufacturers reduce their the standby power consumption to insignificant levels. this is also my understanding
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Sep 27, 2022 20:47
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i say swears online posted:lol does he want to be doc brown at the clocktower
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Sep 27, 2022 21:05
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i say swears online posted:is there any basis to that? do cell phones left plugged in at 100% use more electricity than an air conditioner? I'm not sure air conditioners were as prevalent in the 80s in Europe as your question implies, but while there's a lot of cellphones they're not what I was thinking about. Think about all the TVs, TV boxes, computer monitors, computers, smart appliances, and everything else that's constantly running in standby - and that standby power is still a lot more than the trickle-charge that a typical phone needs when it isn't actively recharging. That's what lead me to suspect that a lot of people tend to underestimate how much standby power consumption contributes to power usage. EDIT: This paper mentions values between 14-169W and an average of 67W standby power consumption for the whole house in 2000, which represents 5-26% of the whole-house annual power consumption - so now I just have to find something more current. EDIT2: EDIT3: In continuation of the first edit, this study looks at the global standby power use in 2001, and it's average is surprisingly close to that of California in the first study. EDIT4: I also found a thesis from 2022 that I'll be reading. EDIT5: Meanwhile, this and this from Belgium and Turkey adds more average percentages, and at least one of those studies is a decade newer than the others so far while the percentage of household power consumption doesn't seem to have gone down significantly. EDIT6: One final study and this thesis from New Zealand and South Africa respectively also seems in-line with the other studies. So with all that being said, I think it's safe to say that my initial assumption above, about the power consumption of standby devices, is much higher than people (including me) naively assume. VictualSquid posted:Everything I have heard about the subject suggests that unplugging standby devices became unpopular because of a law that demanded that manufacturers reduce their the standby power consumption to insignificant levels. And even if everyone did, there's an absolutely incredible amount of them. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Sep 27, 2022 |
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Sep 27, 2022 22:05
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The OL3 debacle was predicted ahead of time and seems to be a problem of organization: https://twitter.com/BurggrabenH/status/1567929458551672832 I think Finland would do well in building several more of the exact same design, while the knowledge and experience from OL3 is fresh. Anyway in 2023 germany will most likely go from a net exporter to a net importer and more and more nuclear plants will go off line during the 2020s in europe. With reliable baseload power disappearing we can expect the current problems to keep getting worse. If we start building now like the french are planning, and stop decommissioning working plants, maybe we can reach a level where our energy is provided by a mix of nuclear and renewables by 2050. The alternative is renewables and natural gas.
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Sep 28, 2022 09:02
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I want a nuclear reactor in my backyard and I want it yesterday. Or start building it now, just make it and stop hand wringing. (My neighbors vehemently don't want a reactor in my backyard though  )E: less jokingly I am actively wondering where in the Netherlands we could build powerplants without insane pushback like we're threatening to house migrants in a humane way. An insane mind fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Sep 28, 2022 |
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Sep 28, 2022 09:10
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Friesland and Groningen have plenty empty space along the coast. Buy out some farms. The farmers are already livid, what are they gonna do, protest more?
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Sep 28, 2022 13:17
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Out in the north sea is much better, off-shore wind has alot better capacity so it would actually do something to address intermittency issues if more of that was built. Some local news says they're gonna build a hydrogen electrolysis plant a bith south of me, in Kristinestad. 200MW effect but zero mention of what kind of storage capacity it will have, which IMO is the interesting bit. How long can this plan run at 200MW?
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Sep 28, 2022 13:27
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RBA-Wintrow posted:Friesland and Groningen have plenty empty space along the coast. Buy out some farms. The farmers are already livid, what are they gonna do, protest more? They're going to wave more upside down flags at me. Which I still don't get, what's the upside down flag telling me? I didn't know we had a flag code in the Netherlands, I assume it means they're not happy, but it seems so coordinated.
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Sep 28, 2022 13:39
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The Netherlands flag code says that if you see the flag flying sideways you may be in France.
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Sep 28, 2022 13:56
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An insane mind posted:They're going to wave more upside down flags at me. Which I still don't get, what's the upside down flag telling me? I didn't know we had a flag code in the Netherlands, I assume it means they're not happy, but it seems so coordinated. Not sure if you're joking but an upside-down flag usually indicates distress / SOS.
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Sep 28, 2022 14:09
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His Divine Shadow posted:The OL3 debacle was predicted ahead of time and seems to be a problem of organization: Yeah the OL3 construction has really been a combination of numerous issues creating a perfect shitstorm. There's the organizational problems where Areva started building the plant with the typical mindset of outsourcing the construction to cheapest subcontractors. So for example there rose huge issues with qualified welders. Thinking went 'what can go wrong with hiring cheap welders, we'll give them two weeks of training OH poo poo now we need to redo everything, who could have seen this coming?'. At the beginning there really was no organizational leadership for welding work, no standard instructions for it and that was one reason they hosed up the concrete work because of mistakes in rebaring. Then there's the engineering challenges with pioneering technology added to lovely organizational procedures. There were huge problems with the complicated automation system, where Areva didn't provide sufficient documentation to address them. And there were similar problems with the turbines and primary circuit piping. There were more problems too, but these come to mind off the top of my head. And add to these piling problems the big brother Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority supervising the work with an iron fist (which is ofc a good thing!) demanding Areva to address the problems and change the already done subpar work, the end result became one of the most expensive building projects in human history.
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Sep 28, 2022 15:10
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His Divine Shadow posted:Out in the north sea is much better, off-shore wind has alot better capacity so it would actually do something to address intermittency issues if more of that was built. The storage is the hydrogen? Im assuming its a hydrogen plant that generates hydrogen through water electrolysis, hopefully using wind or solar.
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Sep 28, 2022 15:30
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That plan relies on the grid having any surplus to store. Which in a few years wont be the case anymore. I dont know what the answer is precisly but somehow we have to massivly expand or power generation and improve our grid which has often not been built up in tandem with new power generation. And we have to do it fast. Perhaps this all very doable but troughout my life all attempts at making substantial improvements trough public efforts have mostly run into the sand and failed so i am not very hopeful. Maybe everyone buying a Tesla was not the solution to climate change after all?
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Sep 28, 2022 20:09
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His Divine Shadow posted:Some local news says they're gonna build a hydrogen electrolysis plant a bith south of me, in Kristinestad. 200MW effect but zero mention of what kind of storage capacity it will have, which IMO is the interesting bit. How long can this plan run at 200MW? You can assume almost indefinitely. Gas storage is really cheap compared to the capex of the electrolysis plant and whatever generator it's being fed into. And storage is fast enough to build that if you don't have enough of it, you can almost build it as it fills up. It's a good assumption that if someone is building a 200MW lysis plant, they are also buying or leasing enough storage that it practically never fills up, just because that maximises the return on the very expensive capital cost of the plant. Batteries have great round-trip efficiency and relatively low cost per watt, but very high cost per watt-hour. Electrolysis has poo poo round-trip efficiency and very high cost per watt, but very low cost per watt-hour. Baudolino posted:That plan relies on the grid having any surplus to store. Which in a few years wont be the case anymore. No, over time the surpluses will rise. Wind and solar are by far the cheapest ways to produce electricity. The only problem is that they produce it on their own schedule, not when it's needed. (And, they are both heavily self-correlated over all of Europe.) As more is built up so that it can serve the grid when output is low, the peak outputs will necessarily far outstrip demand.
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Sep 29, 2022 01:39
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Yeah thats the thing with hydrogen and electrolysis, as it stands now its main advantages are long term storage and maybe replacing some fossil fuel usage, its only really competitive because it can soak up excess production from renewables, which in turn makes renewables a little more atractive. Maybe decentralized electrolysers like exolum is using in madrid catch on and everyone as a mini electroliser at home in the future, that would be neat.
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Sep 29, 2022 03:08
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gently caress, double post
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Sep 29, 2022 03:09
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