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When I looked at NRC permit data in the US in the 60s/70s my impression was they were able to build a lot of reactors because they were trying to build a lot more. There was a lot of gently caress ups, cost overruns and cancellations, but they were able to get some built because the sheer number of projects meant some were likely to make it to completion. There were also a lot more manufacturers; even Allis Chalmers built reactors.
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Oct 5, 2022 18:14
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I hear computational plasma scientists are a hot hire right now.
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Nov 4, 2022 19:48
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Ahh I see you are familiar with the PG&E business model You forgot the reckless negligence; pge never does.
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Nov 22, 2022 21:09
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Splode posted:Are those itty bitty intrinsically safe nuclear power plants getting any traction? I saw a lot of hype but I'm not sure if it's real or just hype. Here’s a recent review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032119307270 There’s a lot of unknowns (no land SMRs have been built yet) but from my reading optimistic studies show the potential for a marginally faster builds, but more expensive power than large reactors.
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Nov 28, 2022 16:07
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I don’t think NIF runs on the usual grant cycle. The hype is for public support to influence congress who cuts the checks.
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Dec 13, 2022 00:39
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Raenir Salazar posted:It isn't though? Please provide evidence to back up your claims. First google result, lol: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/more-funding-for-fusion-seattle-startup-lands-160m-and-reveals-technology-breakthrough/ https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/19/google-chevron-invest-in-fusion-startup-tae-technologies.html Etc.
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Dec 14, 2022 02:38
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Raenir Salazar posted:The problem here is slurm wrote their post in such a way as though they were implying that it was my position; hence my reasonable request that they provide evidence of the strawman that they put in quotes they wrote in response to my post. It is well documented that Shell et al do these investments as greenwashing; at Shell I know alternative energy projects come out of the PR/marketing budget instead of R&D. Shell isn’t rolling up to the NYT with a giant Publisher’s Clearing House check with “a good alternative energy 4q22” in the memo line. But you can count that zap can use Shell’s PR network’s contacts of every energy and science reporter in the country to pitch stories.
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Dec 14, 2022 03:03
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Let’s check in with France’s flagship new reactor project. https://www.barrons.com/news/new-delay-cost-overrun-for-france-s-next-gen-nuclear-plant-01671212709
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Dec 17, 2022 15:34
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devicenull posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38 Maybe? Somebody did a writeup here or in the nuclear reactor thread in the last few pages that discussed Helion. All fusion news coverage is wildly overstated so grain of salt, etc.
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Dec 17, 2022 19:05
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It was an actual plowshares project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER tldr; another unworkable idea by Edward Teller.
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Dec 31, 2022 14:25
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Infinite Karma posted:Has anyone figured out the motive for these apparently "terrorist" attacks on the power grid? It's hard to think of a reason to attack substations beyond really crazy people doing random violence or no-poo poo paramilitary attacks against civilian infrastructure. The most recent PNW ones were some dudes mission impossibling the alarm system on an cash register. No word on most of them, tho.
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Jan 10, 2023 02:25
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lol including CCS. Might as well include offsets from magic fairies.
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Mar 19, 2023 16:08
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My favorite recurring CCS PR story is when a startup has a super great atmospheric co2 capture process*, and its economically feasible**, too! It just needs to scale up!*** * Gross capture, in like single-ton quantities (like a single car’s yearly output.) ** Because they sell it to petroleum companies to extract more crude oil from permeable rock formations. *** would require the entire worlds power generation
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Mar 19, 2023 20:56
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Phanatic posted:If a private landowner doesn't want to sell his land, why should that have anything to do with the BLM, an agency which regulates and administers the use of Federal lands, issuing approval? Why would you approve a plan to use public land if the plan isn’t going to work without the private landowner’s permission?
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Apr 18, 2023 15:01
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You certainly can do conditional approvals; “this goes into effect when every party signs on” is like contract law 101. Why do you want government employees doing years of work on a project that doesn’t have the agreements needed to proceed? The west is littered with projects that never got off the board. Just off the top of my head, t boone pickens’ texas windfarm and tres amigas grid interconnect project. BLM doesn’t have the resources to expedite every project.
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Apr 18, 2023 16:08
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It didn’t take seventeen years for BLM to approve it. The BLM right of way grant has been approved since 2016. Last week’s announcement was that they’ve got everything else they need and can start building. https://www.transwestexpress.net/about/timeline.shtml I thought BOR’s approval did a good job laying out all the decisions that went into approving it. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g2000/envdocs/Transwest_ROD_Vol_1_6-19-17.pdf (the maps at the end are useful) Reading through that, there’s nothing that they considered that’s frivolous. It’s not 1952, dropping a thousand miles of infrastructure across the west should require some thought.
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Apr 18, 2023 20:09
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Electric Wrigglies posted:I think a lot of "what is possible" is being done by China. It does have the safety considerations of nuclear but no-where near the same level of NIMBYism or effective green resistance to nuclear. China had great ambitions of building out nuclear but tempered them over the last decade or so (but always in parallel with massive buildout of wind, hydro and solar and transition coal, gas, etc). China is approving new nuclear stations at a rate that can be supported by the scale up in heavy industrial capacity but also operators, supplier and regulator institutional knowledge. The problem with China nuclear enthusiasm is China still building coal; a few years ago they approved more new gw in coal plants in one year than their all entire current and planned nuclear generation. It’s that same generation boom we were talking about in the west in the 60s-80s. Even without having to deal with many of the anti-nuclear boogeymen it’s still taking China like eight years to build modern nuclear plants, which is only marginally better than the world average.
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Jun 15, 2023 13:46
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M_Gargantua posted:Desalination and Aluminum Refining are two big ones. “The first commercial Gen IV plants are not expected before 2040–2050” Fission has finally caught up to fusion’s “20 years away” capability.
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Jun 20, 2023 14:57
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cat botherer posted:Yeah, this should not be about "cheap." Nuclear plants can be built fast. We've built them fast in the past, and China is building them fast now. We know it's possible. They’re really not, though. Their current average is only a few years faster than global average for new nuclear.
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Jun 21, 2023 18:22
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cat botherer posted:That's not correct. China builds plants much faster than we do. The median construction time for new reactors in 2021 was 88 months. Worldwide average is only 8 years, tho. “Faster than the US” is more about US industrial incompetence than imagined structural issues.
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Jun 21, 2023 18:46
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Electric Wrigglies posted:I don't think investing into nuclear will cause inflation on its own (as long as cutbacks are made elsewhere, of course), there is no magic labor tree waiting to be shaken, if you want more nuclear plant operators, then those people need to stop what they are doing now, train up and get put in the service of the nuclear industry. You can pay everyone a billion dollars a day each, knock yourself out, it don't change that there is 8 billion people and most of them are doing something other than running or building a nuke plant or maintaining electrical powerlines. China approved 100 GW of new coal plants last year. All of their total current and new nuclear is only 100 GW. They might get go 150 by like 2035, but that isn’t going to do poo poo for their current terawatt+ of coal generation.
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Jun 22, 2023 19:05
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Mid-Life Crisis posted:The folks who say nuclear power costs too much or takes too long to build are the ones adding the red tape and delays to fulfill their own prophecy. Democrats with a super majority are not building nuclear power plants- they are paid off just as much as the other guys. It’s 100% a politics problem, where 10% is the NIMBY problem and 90% is corruption. They really don’t care about you. Did Al Gore teach you nothing? GHG wasn’t political until it was monetized. Energy doesn’t attract the talent, it’s all a good old boys club and bullying and corruption is their cup of tea. Democrats don’t even control both houses now, let alone a super majority. The last time they were was like 13 years ago: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/obama-administration-announces-loan-guarantees-construct-new-nuclear-power-reactors . You’ll note westinghouse finally got one built at Vogtle and none of those delays had anything to do with nimbys or fossil. W streamlined a lot of the fed process and every administration has put hundreds of millions per year into subsidized designs and support for the industry. Nuclear power plants are frequently described as the most complex machines ever built. Nucear engineers and techs are not fungible and the design criteria of sub nukes are not the same, as is always explained when someone proposes xeroxing naval designs as SMRs. Aside from the handful of naval, chucking untrained and inexperienced engineers on these projects are one of many reasons why vogtle and summer had order of magnitude budget overruns. Also, the number of human operators you need on nuke are much higher than coal/gas; let alone renewables. It’s not cheap to hire them, either. The fact is that the US nuclear power industry has been dead for forty years and no amount of dreaming about shoveling more perfectly spherical engineers into westinghouse’s infinite maw of incompetence and MBA brain that completely ate poo poo on all these projects. BTW, they’re now owned by private equity; lol, lmao. Other gen3+ manufacturers? You have GE Hitachi who had to pay a multimillion dollar fine for lying about the safety modeling of their design, CANDU, who is owned by SNC-Lavalin now (lol, again), AREVA, who have similar timelines and problems on their 2006-2007 plants as Westinghouse. BTW, Biden-subsidized prices for the first wave of SMRs are already higher than Vogtle, and are guaranteed to go even higher.
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Jul 17, 2023 03:57
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Potato Salad posted:I couldn't help myself. I know you think this sincerely, but I actually started openly laughing. Please explain how a decade of design, production and project management fuckups (similar to those at overseas ap1000s and other gen3+ plants) are the fault of NIMBYs and the perfidious renewable/hydrocarbon cartel)
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Jul 17, 2023 15:12
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Potato Salad posted:You're asking this after I laid that out for you above? Timestamps? It’s entirely possible to post something without seeing the reply, but you didn’t answer in that anyway. Potato Salad posted:bolded the part I think you need to have a good “Whoops! Completely hosed up our containment building design. Whoops! Used the wrong steel. Whoops! Had to do some redesign we lied about using unqualified engineers. Whoops! Our contractor couldn’t stop loving up and we weren’t tracking them.” Again, explain how nimbys are responsible for any of this.
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Jul 17, 2023 16:13
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about and also research what exactly those fuckups were
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Potato Salad posted:Nice deflection from fossil interests in industry and politics to NIMBYs. Ok. Let’s assume corporate Southern Power cut their own throats intentionally. Same for state owned Santee Cooper in SC. And the same cabal sabotaged the Chinese nuclear power companies that built AP1000s. And the same for the handful of long delayed EPRs in France, UK, and Finland. How do you build reactors if no one can be trusted to build them?
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Jul 17, 2023 17:45
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Potato Salad posted:C'mon, how much of a child do you want to be about deliberately misinterpreting an example about American power structures. You're like Joe Rogan and Elon last week pretending the left was equating "fitness=nazis" You literally accused me of being in favor of racist cops a few posts ago.
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Jul 17, 2023 17:56
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Potato Salad posted:What are Votgle reactors 3 and 4 doing right now? Are we ahead of or behind that 15 year rule of thumb that climate researchers and, oddly, nuclear skeptics alike toss around for nuclear groundbreaking to generation? It was over 17 years from the start of the Vogtle 3/4 project to generation. No project today is where you’re counting the start of Vogtle. There have been long delays and cost overruns at every nuclear project in the last twenty years. Regardless of manufacturer, builder, country, government type, or utility type.
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Jul 17, 2023 18:04
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Potato Salad posted:*notices your deflection from groundbreaking to wherever Southern Fossil decided to start tossing the ball in the air* You mean where I literally said generation? And 4 still isn’t done? Again, please tell me how you would build nuclear given the widespread, entrenched opposition you have identified.
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Jul 17, 2023 18:12
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aniviron posted:This is always the crux of the issue for me. We literally already know that it is possible to build nuclear reactors on time and in a reasonable budget, so it's not a question of if but how. It's crazy to say that nuclear is inherently expensive, which is the constant mantra not just outside of this thread but here too. In the 70s new reactors were getting built rapidly because it was actually cheaper per khw than coal! So the question is not, "Can we build reactors cheaply enough to complete," but "What went wrong that we no longer can build cheap reactors, and how do we fix it?" I suspect that most posters here who believe that there is outside political influence are correct because it seems the most likely assumption, but it's hard to prove. They were promised to be very cheap, but if you look at all those 70s reactor projects, many, many were cancelled due to massive cost and schedule overruns, and the track record on the ones that got built were not great. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_reactors_in_the_United_States
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Jul 18, 2023 01:47
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Carrying around the weight of solar panels doesn’t make any sense (a theoretical maximum of ~1 KW/m^2 vs a 80KW motor on a Nissan Leaf); the extra weight costs you more energy to cart around than it generates, even in the Sonora. Their claim of 1000 miles of range would mean they’re carrying way more batteries than they need. It is as fantasy driven as a gas Hummer; a different market but an appeal to image over function.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:24
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There is no scenario where you are going to get a meaningful amount of electricity from the quantity of solar panels you can haul around, barring some eco mad max scenario where you drive across the desert 40 miles per day but can’t plug into the grid or home panels. It is probably theoretically possible to get 40 miles from your office in Phoenix to your house in the suburbs of Phoenix assuming you can park in the optimal angle and have full sun exposure sunrise to sunset, have no hills on your commute, you travel at the optimal speed (below freeway) and don’t have to stop and start much, and you don’t turn on air conditioning. It is a wish fulfillment imagineering on the scale of the Taylor Aerocar and a complete waste of the resources to build them and the capital investment to manufacture them.
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Aug 8, 2023 21:27
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Farm irrigation canals are not a protected ecosystem, and the entire system in the southwest loses an insane amount of water from evaporation from uncovered canals. Might as well complain about solar farms on parking lots interfering with the native ecosystems and blocking free car heating.
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Aug 15, 2023 00:40
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BTW NIF is only useful for weapons research. There is no path to power generation with the tech, even if a fairy gifted you an unlimited supply of tritium. Every few years they drop a ‘net energy positive!’ hype. And it is always bullshit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Scientific_breakeven_at_NIF
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Aug 15, 2023 03:52
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mobby_6kl posted:Electricity people just loving love duck analogies for ao e reason I’ve mentioned this before but NREL has done some work on this and one trick in the us would be to build out east west HVDC transmission lines. West coast solar covers east coast evenings and plains wind picks up west coast in the evening.
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Aug 27, 2023 02:26
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Flappy Bert posted:https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin quote:50 GW of coal power capacity started construction in China in 2022, a more than 50% increase from 2021. Many of these projects had their permits fast-tracked and moved to construction in a matter of months. A total of 106 GW of new coal power projects were permitted, the equivalent of two large coal power plants per week 1. The amount of capacity permitted more than quadrupled from 23 GW in 2021. Worth remembering whenever this thread talks about China’s amazing investments in nuclear, for example, from three days ago: Dante80 posted:How China became the king of new nuclear power, and how the U.S. is trying to stage a comeback
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Sep 3, 2023 12:52
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GlassEye-Boy posted:This stupid point is brought up every time, yes they are permitting new coal, but at the same time they are shutting down the same amount if not more, replacing older smaller and dirtier plants with larger cleaner ones.  Wow, look at all the coal shutting off.
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Sep 3, 2023 18:20
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celewign posted:I was flying on a plane, and a medical doctor sitting next to me said he was a proponent of wind turbines because they could be used to create strong winds that would push away the clouds. Flip the switch on the side from suck to blow.
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Sep 4, 2023 14:43
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Groda posted:ICF is more about reducing demand than providing supply. heh
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Nov 16, 2023 15:59
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:We might (might) have some hope in this area thanks to fusion research. Still a long way off but possibly much less long than it seemed. NIF’s net-positive remains incredibly dishonest turd-polishing (they play all kinds of games with the definition.) NIF is a nuclear weapons research fig-leaf. It is a cool machine and a great jobs program for physics PhDs, but worse than useless for energy production research. There’s interesting things happening in fusion energy but NIF isn’t it.
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Dec 21, 2023 16:14
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm not exactly sure what the success metric the article is claiming but it sounds like maybe the yield has been increasing with each experiment? It may be a very inefficient means of doing the research as that facility as I understand it is decades old now and a new clean sheet design might be better for fusion research but experimental data is still data no? No, data from nanosecond high intensity bursts of neutrons are not useful for understanding the fusion you are trying to do in a power reactor; it is data that is useful if you’re trying to validate the neutron output for the fusion stage of your weapons simulation code without violating the CTBT. JET in the UK did an order of magnitude more energy from fusion on timescales much more useful for power generation. (Both NIF and JET rely on tritium, the only source of which is fission reactors.)
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Dec 23, 2023 05:04
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