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Phanatic posted:Even as the thread's designated free-marketeer I'd vastly prefer the US government spend a billion to keep a nuclear power plant open than spend a billion to keep the House of Saud in power. At some point you have to acknowledge that money is fake and kilograms of CO2 are real. At some point you run into monetary limits but at the scale of running one nuclear power station it's whatever. The dollars are just numbers in some computer. If you make too many dollars prices go up, if you make too many kilograms of CO2 civilization collapses.
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Nov 25, 2022 05:07
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Yeah but doing something meaningful about it is socialism, which is apparently more dangerous than biosphere collapse and global coastal flooding.
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Nov 25, 2022 05:13
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Arglebargle III posted:At some point you have to acknowledge that money is fake and kilograms of CO2 are real. At some point you run into monetary limits but at the scale of running one nuclear power station it's whatever. The dollars are just numbers in some computer. If you make too many dollars prices go up, if you make too many kilograms of CO2 civilization collapses. People keep coming back to this equivalence that because money is a made up value, therefore it is not a consideration or is a minor consideration. Money is a made up value and limitless in the same way labor hours are also limitless (8 billion people on earth, must be another 4 billion or so available every hour to use!) and not to have much value ascribed to it. Of course, we can do whatever we want if we ignore the amount of labor it requires to do something. We can hand dig lithium mines for batteries for even lower carbon emissions (and therefore by the same twisted logic, be angry at any person that is taking leave, or not using their leave to work on carbon reduction). Just spend money! Is fine if you are talking about increasing the priority (less bombs, more nukes I say!) but when we are talking about re-tooling the majority of the world's electrical generation, the cost per kilowatt in dollars (and manhours) absolutely matters. I asked the previous page and I read the articles but I couldn't find out what the effective price floor per kw that the government support implied for that nuclear power station. I wonder if solar and wind projects will use that legislation as argument for a price floor on otherwise curtailed, undispatchable power.
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Nov 25, 2022 08:19
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Arglebargle III posted:At some point you have to acknowledge that money is fake and kilograms of CO2 are real. At some point you run into monetary limits but at the scale of running one nuclear power station it's whatever. The dollars are just numbers in some computer. If you make too many dollars prices go up, if you make too many kilograms of CO2 civilization collapses. I agree that concrete climate action is important, but backing a dump truck full of cash to the PG&E HQ is a specific action that, as a PG&E ratepayer... well let's just say causes my eye to twitch. I'm 110% still on the 'PG&E should be nationalized by the state' bench.
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Nov 25, 2022 18:51
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I have heard some very unofficial stuff at work that the Dresden nuclear plant was trying to get their cost average down to $25/MWh back in like 2020. That was back when the daily average wholesale market price for the PJM market was coming in at $16/MWh or $17/MWh in the spring or fall weekdays. No idea what it is at now, with inflation and supply chain issues. And I haven’t paid close enough attention recently to know what the PJM daily market averages are. But the real time PJM market prices are all publicly available on the PJM website.
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Nov 25, 2022 19:25
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Yeah the point at which to nationalize utilities is when they capture the regulatory organs that are supposed to fix the monopoly problems they cause and we are way beyond that point.
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Nov 25, 2022 19:42
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Orvin posted:I have heard some very unofficial stuff at work that the Dresden nuclear plant was trying to get their cost average down to $25/MWh back in like 2020. That was back when the daily average wholesale market price for the PJM market was coming in at $16/MWh or $17/MWh in the spring or fall weekdays. That was a fleet wide goal of Exelon at all their nuke stations.
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Nov 25, 2022 22:46
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Arglebargle III posted:Yeah the point at which to nationalize utilities is when they capture the regulatory organs that are supposed to fix the monopoly problems they cause and we are way beyond that point. It is unreal how openly buddy-buddy Southern Company is with every single authority that hypothetically provides oversight and representation for the interests of the public.
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Nov 26, 2022 15:37
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Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food Very interesting longform piece in wapo on agricultural practices/innovation in the Netherlands; it's not as promotionally framed as I'd initially been concerned, which is why I'm posting it here: at root almost all of the companies and practices being described are trading every other resource for greater energy draw.
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Nov 27, 2022 02:48
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So how real is this minerals crunch for green energy? I've seen people all over the gamut on Twitter from climate deniers to hardcore degrowth people that there isn't enough copper and lithium to do even one generation of clean energy.
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Nov 27, 2022 06:38
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Arglebargle III posted:So how real is this minerals crunch for green energy? I've seen people all over the gamut on Twitter from climate deniers to hardcore degrowth people that there isn't enough copper and lithium to do even one generation of clean energy. It's complete bullshit and makes not an iota of sense. loving not enough copper, are you kidding me?
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Nov 27, 2022 06:52
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Discendo Vox posted:Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food Interesting how this is all mirrored in my parents family greenhouse farm. Though the only time they ever picked the tomatoes green was the last harvest of the season before shutting the greenhouses down for winter. quote:The company’s significant achievement is changing the reputation of Dutch tomatoes — they’ve historically been known for hard, flavorless tomatoes harvested green. In 2000, Agro Care started with lights above the tomatoes and began harvesting them on the vine fully ripe. A quarter of the tomatoes stay in the Netherlands while the rest are shipped all over Europe.
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Nov 27, 2022 08:36
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Arglebargle III posted:So how real is this minerals crunch for green energy? I've seen people all over the gamut on Twitter from climate deniers to hardcore degrowth people that there isn't enough copper and lithium to do even one generation of clean energy. It's mostly bullshit and also we can't do one more generation of non-clean energy
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Nov 27, 2022 10:52
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Arglebargle III posted:So how real is this minerals crunch for green energy? I've seen people all over the gamut on Twitter from climate deniers to hardcore degrowth people that there isn't enough copper and lithium to do even one generation of clean energy. A Quick google says to me that 1. More and More copper is produced each year 2. Copper Reserves (how much we know about and can feasibly extract) has also been increasing and right now is at roughly 43 years or so supply at current production rates. I know that: 3. Copper is a metal, you can just reuse that poo poo once you pull it from the earth, melt it back down and reuse 4. Apparently there is over 100 trillion tons of copper in the top kilometer of the earths crust, mostly just not commercially viable to extract. For Lithium 230 billion tons estimated to be in sea water alone. When they speak about limited reserves they are literally talking about "We don't have that much of the REALLY easy to access lithium." Overall we are pretty good at getting our hands on those kinds of things once there is significant demand, just for lithium there hadn't been that much.
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Nov 27, 2022 11:10
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Arglebargle III posted:So how real is this minerals crunch for green energy? I've seen people all over the gamut on Twitter from climate deniers to hardcore degrowth people that there isn't enough copper and lithium to do even one generation of clean energy. There have been so many resource scarcity hoaxes over the years. IMO, it is smart to just assume that they are false. There is something in the lizard portion of the human brain which psychologically draws people to these narratives of resource scarcity. For example, since the beginning of this thread, it has been falsely believed that the usage of rare earth elements in solar PV production dooms the technology. This is not true, nor has it ever been true (the belief probably came from CdTe/CIGS solar cell technologies, a small fraction of the solar PV market, which is dominated by silicon), but that doesn't prevent the false belief from spreading. QuarkJets posted:you just make up some accusations about other posters in the thread I often get accused of this, but the accusations are false. I'm accurately characterizing the orthodox/majority beliefs in this thread. See posts 1, 2, 3, 4 for a handful of examples. Infinite Karma posted:If it costs $200 million to run a power plant for a year (using every accounting trick known to man to inflate that cost), and they can sell the 16 TWh of electricity it generates for $1 - $6 billion a year, I'm failing to see where they can't pay for the loving power plant out of the profits. Profit margins of 80% - 95% are pretty good in the business world, and something tells me the construction costs are fully depreciated by now. If this were true, US utility companies would be lining up to build nuclear power plants. But history over past 10 years has shown the opposite trend--nuclear power plants in the US really have struggled to be competitive with wind, solar, and natural gas. The utility companies are not meaningfully building new plants, and government subsidy has been required to just to keep the old nuclear plants running. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 14:03
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silence_kit posted:I often get accused of this, but the accusations are false. I'm accurately characterizing the orthodox/majority beliefs in this thread. See posts 1, 2, 3, 4 for a handful of examples. Oh, really? Let's look at the post that I was quoting: silence_kit posted:Kind of interesting that the California nuclear power plant needs $1 billion just to keep running for another five years. According to what I've read in this thread, I thought nuclear power was essentially free once you've constructed the plant and bypassed the minefield set by the environmentalists who are in charge in the various levels of US gov't? None of those posts you're linking to suggest that nuclear power is "essentially free" once built. Stop posting like a feckless liar and you'll stop being treated like one.
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Nov 27, 2022 14:37
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Owling Howl posted:
Yeah, this is an extremely important point which escapes a lot of the posters in this thread. We used to have a moderator who posted a lot in this thread who believed that the high capacity factor of nuclear electricity was a selling point of the technology and would frequently mention it in arguments. He was wrong--it is actually a drawback and a liability of the technology! The nuclear power plant HAS to run at full capacity to have a prayer of being competitive with other sources of electricity. Even when the nuclear power plant runs at full capacity, it produces 4-5x more expensive electricity than the other technologies. In the predicted future US where huge fractions of electricity are generated by intermittent wind and solar, the nuclear power plant would be forced to run at lower and lower capacity factors, which would make the already too expensive nuclear electricity even more expensive. This is the REAL reason why the US isn't rapidly building out nuclear power--no, that buildout is not being foiled by government/corporate conspirators and/or by environmentalists--nuclear electricity just isn't that good of a technology. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 14:43
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AtomikKrab posted:For Lithium AFAIK the fact that most of the lithium is in the sea is a big problem. It's recoverable in the same sense that carbon dioxide is recoverable: it's dissolved in ppm concentrations and really isn't easily recoverable in terms of thermodynamics, never mind economics. I'm sure there's more lithium reserves in fossil lake beds but seawater extraction I don't think it's promising at all. Hopefully lithium reserves become moot as battery technology moves to a more common element like aluminum. If we were having this conversation 40 years ago it would be about cadmium. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 16:02
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silence_kit posted:Yeah, this is an extremely important point which escapes a lot of the posters in this thread. We used to have a moderator who posted a lot in this thread who believed that the high capacity factor of nuclear electricity was a selling point of the technology and would frequently mention it in arguments. He was wrong--it is actually a drawback and a liability of the technology! This IAE report shows that long-term operation (LTO) nuclear power has an LCOE that's lower than any green source and states that "electricity from the long-term operation of nuclear power plants constitutes the least cost option for low-carbon generation." There's a box and whisker graph that shows Nuclear is still either on par or better than other green sources even when you remove the LTO caveat, and significantly better than natural gas. But this is in aggregate. You'll notice that most green sources have huge tails, which shouldn't be surprising. In most countries we've already built wind power in a lot of the best sites, so new wind sources in places like Japan are on the upper end of that whisker whereas they're on the lower end in India. Put another way, if we lived in a world where it was feasible for solar and wind to provide 100% of our power needs, then I'd happily give up nuclear power. The problem is that we are not choosing between nuclear power and renewables; we are choosing between nuclear power and natural gas. Capacity factor is an important but not so major factor. This chart illustrates that, even for a brand new nuclear power plant, operating at 70% capacity factor is roughly a $10/MWh cost difference compared to 90% capacity factor. This is a much bigger problem for 30% CF, but natural gas sources are more tuned for that end of the scale - peaker plants should be the primary way in which we use natural gas, rather than as a source for base load. But for nuclear extension projects, the price per MWh is already so low that you can run at 70% CF and still handily beat natural gas - this is illustrating that the biggest costs of nuclear power are up front, since a refurbishment is a lot cheaper than building a whole new facility. In other words, the more nuclear power plants that you build now, the cheaper that power source becomes in the future. It should be obvious that you shouldn't bulldoze an entire nuclear power facility to build a new one somewhere else, but rather you're able to realize substantial cost savings through the reutilization of existing facilities and infrastructure. Natural gas facilities, whose costs are primarily driven by the cost of fuel, are unable to realize these savings to the same extent. The breakdown of LCOE by source by region illustrates that cheap natural gas is a situation that's unique to the US. "In the United States, gas-fired power plants benefit from the expected low fuel prices in the region, although fuel price assumptions are, in general, uncertain." Nuclear energy in the US costs roughly the same as it does in other regions, but our abundant cheap gas makes natural gas a low-cost option for us. Even so, that story changes substantially when you try to do literally anything to mitigate the externalized costs of carbon emissions. "Coal- and gas-fired units with carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), for which only the United States and Australia submitted data, are, at a carbon price of USD 30 per tonne of CO2, currently not competitive with nuclear energy." And important to keep in mind that the LCOE is only trying to account for carbon at a pretty discounted rate - US Federal guidelines state that the cost of carbon per ton is actually 70% higher than what was used in this report ($30 in the report, vs $50 in federal guidelines), and there was a recent article in Nature concluding that the true cost is really 600% higher ($185). Furthermore, "the LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas." Together these are substantial economic factors that should eliminate natural gas from the running in the US in raw LCOE terms, but until we actually start taxing carbon (or more heavily discounting other sources) we'll continue to be ruled by natural gas power. And I think your post illustrates why it is so important that we implement such measures: because most people are incapable of grasping the fact that we continue to pay for carbon sources after they've been burned. It's also important to keep in mind that this is a purely economical discussion, not accounting for the lives lost, futures altered, homes destroyed by climate change. It's a lot easier to consider the economic impacts of lost harvests than it is to consider the people who will actually starve to death because of them. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 16:36
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silence_kit posted:Yeah, this is an extremely important point which escapes a lot of the posters in this thread. We used to have a moderator who posted a lot in this thread who believed that the high capacity factor of nuclear electricity was a selling point of the technology and would frequently mention it in arguments. He was wrong--it is actually a drawback and a liability of the technology! So gas plants are a better technology because they have lower capex so you can idle them half the time, and thr CO2 is like whatever? Interesting that externalities are suddenly not a thing when it comes to arguing against nuclear.
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Nov 27, 2022 16:45
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Arglebargle III posted:AFAIK the fact that most of the lithium is in the sea is a big problem. It's recoverable in the same sense that carbon dioxide is recoverable: it's dissolved in ppm concentrations and really isn't easily recoverable in terms of thermodynamics, never mind economics. It's just a matter of cost. Lithium is quite plentiful in the crust (and the universe overall), but some deposits are easier to exploit than others. As the easiest/cheapest sources get used up, they move up to the next cheapest, and so on. It will never run out, just get increasingly expensive. Seawater extraction would be one of the last sources. If the demand is there, they'll figure out a way to extract it - but it will be expensive. At that point it may be that non-lithium battery technologies will be the preferred way to go.
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Nov 27, 2022 18:14
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I don't know if it makes the economics better but my gut tells me that extracting lithium uranium and freshwater processes will complement each other.
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Nov 27, 2022 18:17
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I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth but it feels like the two sides of the nuclear issue are always arguing past each other. One side is arguing why nuclear is hard to build and the other is arguing why they shouldn't be hard to build.
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Nov 27, 2022 18:29
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Discendo Vox posted:Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food This is an interesting article and thanks for sharing it. When I first seen protests against nitrogen in the Netherlands, I assumed it was protesting against practices like are common in Australia, the US, etc. The ones that see algal blooms and the like and born out of; well, very agricultural practices in the agricultural industry (saying that, Aus is putting more and more tech into farming). The reality is closer to that when you are the second largest food exporter in the world (by value, to be fair), you are likely to have greater externalities on a per capita basis than the likes of Sir Lanka, which is importing its food despite being so much larger and starving its population in substandard living conditions (but quite low nitrogen fertilizer inputs ho ho ho). Norway being one of the largest hydrocarbon emitters per capita (when you include exported oil and gas in your per capita totals) is a hilariously disingenuous way of looking at hydrocarbon consumption and this is similar. This gives a different context to the protests. Now I think we get into the real reason for the protests is not reasonable demands to do better but the protests born out of the portion of the green movement that want to de-populate. They are opposed to the fact that with chemicals and economical electricity, we can feed many people with what they want to eat. Good quality lettuce, chicken, beef, vine ripened tomatoes, etc. These people loving hate that climate change is a technical solution away from being solved as far as feeding the world's population goes. They vegans amongst them hate the fact that it's quite possible (routine, even) to grow chickens economically without emissions. Hence the protests against the leaders of that technical solution Netherlands much like the biggest protests against nuclear are in France which has one of the best records for nuclear safety. The opposition is not because they are bad for safety or that France has expensive electricity compared to renewable powerhouse Germany. It is because the French are making it work too well, having had cheaper, safer and lower emissions power since the 70's. uh, this is a Wendy's right? And yes, I realise the WaPo article is a fluff piece in support of the multinationals in the Netherlands that own these farms and export products. Nestle still remain one of the worst corporate citizens in the world. I enjoy that someone is getting in there and raising sharp comments like silence_kit. I don't enjoy an echo chamber but at the same time, silance_kit often looks like manufactured opposition. Deliberately unreasonable at times because of the bald face lies, the disingenuous misrepresenting of poster's points when replying and straight up ignoring quality effort posts discussing the points they raise. spf3million posted:I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth but it feels like the two sides of the nuclear issue are always arguing past each other. One side is arguing why nuclear is hard to build and the other is arguing why they shouldn't be hard to build. One side argues that yes, they are hard to build but it can be done (and should be as one part of the overall solution). The other side is arguing that it is too hard to build and should not be attempted and that other solutions have already solved the problems that can be addressed by nuclear. Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 18:48
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spf3million posted:I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth but it feels like the two sides of the nuclear issue are always arguing past each other. One side is arguing why nuclear is hard to build and the other is arguing why they shouldn't be hard to build. Did my post mention even once that nuclear power "shouldn't be hard to build" or allude to that kind of claim in any way? No, it did not. Rather, my post acknowledged that the primary cost of nuclear power comes from how hard it is to build that kind of facility. "Nuclear power plants are difficult and expensive to build" is a point on which silence_kit and I agree. This is why LTO proposals are high-value; they take advantage of the fact that you're able to reuse most of that difficult to build infrastructure. But you're not actually building a new nuclear power plant with those proposals, you're just giving new life to a facility that would have otherwise stopped operating. But the really important point is that nuclear power, while still expensive to build, is actually cheaper than natural gas power if you bother to try and capture the real cost of natural gas. This is a point that the other side just ignores, shouting "but natural gas is so cheap!" while comically trying to throw a big tarp over a bunch of graphs showing the massive economic cost of climate change QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 18:51
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silence_kit posted:Yeah, this is an extremely important point which escapes a lot of the posters in this thread. We used to have a moderator who posted a lot in this thread who believed that the high capacity factor of nuclear electricity was a selling point of the technology and would frequently mention it in arguments. He was wrong--it is actually a drawback and a liability of the technology! Renewable electricity is so cheap only because they have externalized the costs of stable production and grid stability, like fossil fuel has externalized emission costs. Whenever a renewable power plant fails to generate the electricity they are supposed to be capable some coal or natgas plant. If we required renewable power plants to produce their name plate capacity 24/7, as we should, they would be hideously expensive. France's eCO2mix website is a good illustration of the problem. For the past month their nuclear plants have been producing between 22.7 GW to 32.8 GW of electricity, with only few shorter dips below 28 GW. During the same period their solar plants of course drop to zero during night time, but every day the production peaks at at least 2.0 GW to 7.4 GW. And the graphs look very uniform, you can trust that solar produces at least certain amount at known times of day and you could allocate suitable amount of storage to augment. Their wind power production on the other hand is all over the place. At the minimum it has produced 1.2 GW and at maximum 15.1 GW, but most of the time it is below 10 GW and there isn't much predictability. And around the minimum production spot there is a longer duration of low production. For a period of five days from midday 9.11. to midday 14.11. the production has only a single short peak above 5 GW and most of the time it has trouble getting past 3 GW. Covering that shortfall would require an immense amount of electricity storage. So have to solve this problem. The simple solution is battery storage, whenever you build a wind turbine just build a battery next to it. But how big a battery? Based on that graph four days could be a good measure, so 100 GWh battery for every 1 GW turbine. Google suggests as as rule of thumb $1 million per 1 GW on wind turbines, and that 100 GWh Tesla battery in Australia cost $100 million. So the storage would cost 100 times as much as the production, clearly that is not a practical solution. How about the second option, overbuild and decentralize. To be able to reliably produce 1 GW of electricity just build five 1 GW turbines in different areas of the country, with the assumption that there will always be wind somewhere if far enough. But that graph clearly indicates that France isn't big enough region, you would need to locate the turbines all over Europe at least. And that would also require hellishly long transmission cables. Another issue is that to achieve stable production, overproduction would also be forbidden. When the wind is strong you would allowed to sell the 1 GW in your quota to the grid. The remaining 4 GW you need to throw away, or hopefully sell it to some other customer who doesn't use grid electricity. Of course our best electricity storage method is hydro power. Dams have immense capacity and if we dedicate them to cover the shortfall from renewable production they could solve much of the problem. But they may not be a long term solution, sooner or later we may want to restore large portion of our rivers. Right after we get rid of fossil plants the next project will be large scale dam removal.  
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Nov 27, 2022 18:57
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Is there actually any debate here that the real cost of carbon burning is far, far higher in reality than it is on paper because only nuclear is expected to budget for the future and deal with its waste? I think it's worth separating that from the realpolitik stuff like lobbying and NIMBYism, or if someone genuinely believes it to not be the case they should just come out with it. Unless we're tapping into the core of the Earth only hydro can wear the big boy pants of base load when it comes to renewables, and I don't know how much more blood is left in that stone, to say nothing of climate change's impacts on it. Barring a material science revolution in batteries and especially if agriculture goes even harder on turning electricity into calories, there is only the atom or a K-shaped divergence in living standards in our future.
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Nov 27, 2022 19:08
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While only nuclear is expected to budget for the future and deal with its waste, only renewables are expected to budget for outages and deal with transmission. Having only nuclear needs almost as much storage and long distance transmission because the load is also massively variable. A solar heavy mix would need to buy power from China to Europe during the European night because the panels are off. A nuclear heavy mix would have to sell power from Europe to China during the night because the power isn't needed here. The only solution that lowers the need for network technologies would be for people to match their consumption to the available power. Like only charging EVs/mining bitcoin during high power availability hours. And it doesn't change much if they match to the constant nuclear output or to the weather report. End even that society would gain from having lots of redundant long distance lines available in order to react to disasters.
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Nov 27, 2022 21:11
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VictualSquid posted:A nuclear heavy mix would have to sell power from Europe to China during the night because the power isn't needed here. Or do something with the power during the night. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/
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Nov 27, 2022 21:19
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Phanatic posted:Or do something with the power during the night. Yes, exactly the same way a renewables heavy grid would handle power surplus during the day.
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Nov 27, 2022 21:33
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Saukkis posted:Renewable electricity is so cheap only because they have externalized the costs of stable production and grid stability, like fossil fuel has externalized emission costs. Whenever a renewable power plant fails to generate the electricity they are supposed to be capable some coal or natgas plant. If we required renewable power plants to produce their name plate capacity 24/7, as we should, they would be hideously expensive. Renewable energy and nuclear power both have issues with regard to grid size and storage. Whenever a nuclear power plant fails to generate electricity it is capable of producing, because the load does not exist, the average cost of energy increases. This means that similar to renewable energy requiring a large interconnected power system with generation diversity to meet reliability needs, nuclear power requires a large interconnected power system with load diversity to be economical in comparison to renewables with storage. While it is true that France is not big enough to achieve the reliability needed to rely solely on wind, the same is true for their nuclear power plants economical operation. If France did not export nuclear power to help increase load diversity, an all nuclear generation fleet would only see a capacity factor of around 0.4-0.6. This means that for both renewable energy and nuclear energy, large interconnected grids and battery storage would be a required part of an economic solution. I do think that your statement 'the simple solution...' does hint at the larger issue here, which is a lack of understanding of how complex and big the issue is and how big and complex the solution will be. It is very easy to argue that nuclear energy is a solved simple problem, drop a reactor wherever you have steam generator and you have a technical solution to converting the electrical energy grid to a carbon free source. Likewise, it is easy to calculate how much energy storage is required for a couple weeks* if batteries were deployed like power plants. Both of these are far too expensive to be considered real solutions, at least where I live which is in the US, and fail to consider where we are at right now with regards to reducing green house gas emissions and the rate of reduction required. The US has to replace approximately 700GW of nameplate coal and natural gas power plants for the US to convert only electrical energy use to non-carbon sources. The US currently has about 100GW of nameplate nuclear power, meaning that to only decarbonize the electricity sector would require building about 200 nuclear power plants with a nameplate rating of 3GW each and that is just for electrical energy use. To decarbonize total energy use would required adding about 50 quads/year of energy use to the electrical grid, which is around 1900 GW of additional capacity using a CF of 0.9 (hopefully this CF would be achievable due to an increase of load diversity and significant transmission/distribution system upgrades required to meet such a demand). This would require building an additional 600 nuclear power plants for a total of about 800 new nuclear power plants. The US has plans to build around 4 power plants and has only built 6 reactors (not power plants) since 1990. Approximately $4-6 trillion is needed to manage the electrical upgrades described above and even a fast paced nuclear power plant project in the US seems to take 20 years from concept to production, so we would see little to no benefit from this build out for decades, I am not even sure if the US could complete this level of construction in the nuclear sector in a timescale measured less than centuries. Meanwhile, we are likely going to hit 1.5C by 2030, and have emitted enough carbon to hit 2C+ even if we stopped all emissions today. We do not have decades to wait while emitting carbon. I do think we should continue nuclear power development, but I do not see any reasonable way that it will be a significant contributor to reducing the US's reliance on fossil fuels, at least on a time frame that is relevant for the continued existence of society. The renewable energy case doesn't look any better as far as costs are concerned. $4-10 trillion in generation and electrical system upgrades using solar, wind, and battery storage solutions would be required. But renewable energy is significantly easier to deploy and at much faster timelines. A 250MW photovoltaic project can go from concept to producing power in less than 2 years, which means it will start offsetting carbon emissions in less than 2 years instead of a couple decades, and wind turbine projects have similar time frames. Yes, the industry does require MASSIVE expansion on the order of 600%-1000% faster build out over currently projected rates, but that seems a lot easier to achieve than the required 20,000%+ increase in nuclear power plant construction to decarbonize the US by 2050. An argument against renewables as an option for decarbonization that only looks at a couple GW or GWh is honestly very trite, and misses the main point. We should be focused on reducing emissions as fast as possible based on the situation we find ourselves today, in the US that is a mostly fossil fuel grid. Nothing in that simple analysis looks at the real issue (emissions) and its scale is so far off what is needed to decarbonize that it isn't at all relevant, any reliability or grid storage requirements such an analysis calculates cannot be extended to a grid size solution. Once emissions and the true scale of the issue are considered, an all or mostly renewable energy solution really starts to show major benefits over nuclear power due to the much faster rate of deployment here in the US. The numbers I used above also do not include any additional loads we will need to add to the electrical grid to capture already emitted carbon, a requirement to keep the climate stable, a rather big unknown, that again favors fast rapid deployment of carbon free generation. This is a very US centric analysis, obviously not all grids are the same. A place with ample hydro storage and good renewable sources should build renewables. If France has maintained a competent nuclear industry, it may make sense to build their decarbonization around nuclear power as long as their neighbors can support their exports or France can build enough storage. However, I doubt that even France has the capability to produce nuclear power plants at the rate required to meet emissions goals. *Any real estimate requires a look at many years worth of weather data and energy supply mixture to account for seasonal variation and determination of a true worst case load/generation imbalance, with NREL estimating 120GW of storage needed for the US (maybe multiple that by 5 if you want to decarbonize the US). BESS also provides many additional benefits that traditional power plants cannot provide as they can be located near load centers to reduce transmission losses, reduce distribution losses, provide voltage control, and increase reliability through the use of microgrids which could be used to offset reduced reliability of the overall grid which may offset how much traditional energy needs to be replaced. There is also a question of just how reliable we need the grid to be with an all renewable grid. I would personally accept reduced grid reliability to meet climate change goals.
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Nov 27, 2022 23:02
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VictualSquid posted:While only nuclear is expected to budget for the future and deal with its waste, only renewables are expected to budget for outages and deal with transmission. Nuclear power and renewables are not at odds. They are complimentary. An ideal grid would use a lot of nuclear power for base load, a lot of renewables to supplement base load and deal with the natural ebbs and flows of demand, and a minimum amount of natural gas to fill in any remaining demand gaps. Literally no one in this thread is proposing an "only nuclear" grid, nor am I aware of any real proposals to do that. There are some real proposals to use 100% renewables (or close to it); they always over-promise, and by design they under-deliver. The fossil fuel industry uses this pipe dream to push for a reduction in nuclear power capacity because fossil fuel executives understand this cold hard truth: renewables are not a replacement for nuclear power, natural gas is. VictualSquid posted:The only solution that lowers the need for network technologies would be for people to match their consumption to the available power. Like only charging EVs/mining bitcoin during high power availability hours. 
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Nov 27, 2022 23:29
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You can dial down your reactors at night, your daily costs don't change. You just have to do the math for what your revenue is if you operate at 60% for 1/4 of the day. Going from 100% to 90% of your potential daily revenue doesn't suddenly make it unprofitable over the course of years.
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Nov 27, 2022 23:34
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QuarkJets posted:Nuclear power and renewables are not at odds. They are complimentary. An ideal grid would use a lot of nuclear power for base load, a lot of renewables to supplement base load and deal with the natural ebbs and flows of demand, and a minimum amount of natural gas to fill in any remaining demand gaps. Literally no one in this thread is proposing an "only nuclear" grid, nor am I aware of any real proposals to do that. I am saying that the unfairly assumes that without renewables we won't need a power distribution net. Just like it is unfair to assume that without nuclear power we have no cost of decommissioning and waste handling. And it of course the scenario also implies that the current load behaviour should exist unchanged, including the dumb usages. I would prefer a network that has more renewables then the current one, and more nuclear then the current one. But, I do believe that the greatest problem to grid stability and to our lack of ability to build a lower carbon grid has more to do with underinvestment in transmission and storage then with any investments in generation.
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Nov 27, 2022 23:45
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VictualSquid posted:Then why does the post I respond to imply that in their ideal solution there would be no need for long distance transmission and storage tech as long as there are no/low renewables in the mix? Renewables need more distribution infrastructure in the hypothetical where you're trying to meet demand solely with renewables 100% of the time. Alternatively, they need a lot of over-capacity and local storage to carry regional demand until the next high-output day. These are facts. This problem can be mitigated or even eliminated by using a mixed grid. In other words, nuclear power and renewables are not at odds; they're complimentary. If you have other sources to compensate for the variance in renewable generation then the unexpected loss of renewable generation is not something you have to worry about as much. e: I haven't seen any posts itt demanding no/low renewables in the mix, and I suspect that's a misinterpretation. Can you quote the post? You didn't quote anything, so it's hard to pinpoint the post to which you're referring. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Nov 28, 2022 |
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Nov 28, 2022 00:01
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QuarkJets posted:Renewables need more distribution infrastructure in the hypothetical where you're trying to meet demand solely with renewables 100% of the time. Alternatively, they need a lot of over-capacity and local storage to carry regional demand until the next high-output day. These are facts. This problem can be mitigated or even eliminated by using a mixed grid. In other words, nuclear power and renewables are not at odds; they're complimentary. If you have other sources to compensate for the variance in renewable generation then the unexpected loss of renewable generation is not something you have to worry about as much. Saukkis posted:Renewable electricity is so cheap only because they have externalized the costs of stable production and grid stability, like fossil fuel has externalized emission costs. Whenever a renewable power plant fails to generate the electricity they are supposed to be capable some coal or natgas plant. If we required renewable power plants to produce their name plate capacity 24/7, as we should, they would be hideously expensive. It is entirely plausible that I am misinterpreting the long rant there. But, to me it certainly implies that as long as we don't add more renewables to the grid we never have to do any infrastructure investments. Which also agrees with the attitudes of the "pro-nuclear" politicians in my area. Also, you are reacting to a post that calls for more investment in net infrastructure with an interpretation that it is implicitly anti-nuclear. Implying that you believe that a grid containing nuclear power will have an essentially free transmission grid. e: quoted the wrong post. Because there was one with a similar message right after my initial post.
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Nov 28, 2022 00:14
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freezepops posted:Renewable energy and nuclear power both have issues with regard to grid size and storage. Whenever a nuclear power plant fails to generate electricity it is capable of producing, because the load does not exist, the average cost of energy increases. This means that similar to renewable energy requiring a large interconnected power system with generation diversity to meet reliability needs, nuclear power requires a large interconnected power system with load diversity to be economical in comparison to renewables with storage. While it is true that France is not big enough to achieve the reliability needed to rely solely on wind, the same is true for their nuclear power plants economical operation. If France did not export nuclear power to help increase load diversity, an all nuclear generation fleet would only see a capacity factor of around 0.4-0.6. This means that for both renewable energy and nuclear energy, large interconnected grids and battery storage would be a required part of an economic solution. I think it's disingenuous to frame "nuclear power plants don't make up their costs as fast if they're not being used at 100%" as the same problem as "renewables don't output a predictable fixed amount of power". One is a financial problem and one is an engineering problem.
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Nov 28, 2022 00:14
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freezepops posted:This means that similar to renewable energy requiring a large interconnected power system with generation diversity to meet reliability needs, nuclear power requires a large interconnected power system with load diversity to be economical in comparison to renewables with storage. I don't have any issues with most of your post, but I'm dismayed that this incorrect conventional wisdom keeps popping up. The opposite is true: as baseload generation is capable of running much higher duty cycle than solar and wind, transmission infrastructure need only be as large as is necessary to transmit that very baseload. As the fraction wind and solar increases - solar in particular - higher capacity transmission and storage infrastructure becomes necessary to provide higher peak transmission load and storage arbitrage. For citation that gets into the weeds on the cost saving power of baseload and particularly nuclear baseload, refer to California/Stanford projections on the comparative cost and complexity energy portfolios from this post from three months ago when this very subject came up. The second chart is particularly illustrative of the situation where reduced baseload places disproportionately greater demand on solar generation to capture and store much more power than what was saved on baseload, dramatically raising overall costs. Potato Salad posted:
More details plus the primary source are available on the page this quote is from. A little baseload guys a long way, even in a renewables-first energy portfolios. It is remarkable just how quickly transmission and storage infrastructure doubles, triples, quadruples as the % of baseload slowly cranks down through the teens and especially into single digits. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Nov 28, 2022 |
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Nov 28, 2022 00:35
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Potato Salad posted:I largely don't disagree with most of your post, but I'm dismayed that this incorrect conventional wisdom keeps popping up. The opposite is true: as baseload generation is capable of running much higher duty cycle than solar and wind, transmission infrastructure need only be as large as is necessary to transmit that very baseload. As the fraction wind and solar increases - solar in particular - higher capacity transmission and storage infrastructure becomes necessary to provide higher peak transmission load and storage arbitrage. Yes, that is a very good study. IIrc it also implies 35% nuclear power as ideal powermix with 65% renewables. Which means that if you live in a place with less then 65% renewables in the power mix, adding more renewables moves you closer to their recommendation just like adding more nuclear.
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Nov 28, 2022 01:08
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VictualSquid posted:It is entirely plausible that I am misinterpreting the long rant there. I don't think that post is advocating for no/low renewable mixtures; I read it as addressing the "all renewables" proposal, which is a common plan that lobbying groups like to put forward. Under such a plan, if your wind power turbines are only generating 1 GW right now, but you need 10 GW, how do you make up that difference of 9 GW? 1. Build a continent-spanning transmission grid that connects to a more geographically diverse array of wind turbines. This is the "needs more distribution" concept. 2. Over-build the turbines and have local battery storage. This is limited by site availability and battery technology; ideally you're already building a shitload of wind turbines at all of the best sites, so over-building is actually pretty challenging; to get twice as much power generated you actually need more than twice as many turbines. And then to store a week (or however many days) of median energy generation is a huge infrastructure undertaking. 3. Use some other power source. Realistically, your choices are <various carbon power generation types> or nuclear power. You can use any combination of these 3 options, but if you let carbon's cost remain externalized then you'll just wind up with natural gas via option 3 because that's the cheapest option. If we internalize the cost of carbon then I think a combination of options 2 and 3, with 3 coming mostly from nuclear power, will be cheapest/best in the long run. You're right that in the US we under-invest in transmission infrastructure, and that's because transmission infrastructure is expensive and difficult, so much so that efforts to scale up transmission between North Africa and Europe have repeatedly failed. VictualSquid posted:Also, you are reacting to a post that calls for more investment in net infrastructure with an interpretation that it is implicitly anti-nuclear. Implying that you believe that a grid containing nuclear power will have an essentially free transmission grid. I made no such interpretations or implications. Please read my posts again, especially this part: QuarkJets posted:Renewables need more distribution infrastructure in the hypothetical where you're trying to meet demand solely with renewables 100% of the time. Alternatively, they need a lot of over-capacity and local storage to carry regional demand until the next high-output day. These are facts. No one has said or even implied that transmission grids are free for nuclear power or for any other power source. You're putting words in other posters' mouths. Furthermore, I clearly stated my point several times, and it is that renewable energy and nuclear energy are complimentary. An energy grid proposal that is 100% renewable is explicitly anti-nuclear, just as a 100% nuclear grid (which no one is proposing) would be anti-renewable, but that's not the case in a mixed grid even if you choose to expand transmission infrastructure.
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Nov 28, 2022 01:11
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