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Badger of Basra posted:it's cool how germany, because they're so concerned about public safety, shut down all their nuclear plants and replaced them with coal  ??
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Apr 25, 2017 21:54
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 03:39 |
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Nevvy Z posted:Does anyone find that when they say good things about nuclear power, people into renewables get really agitated? Like they know that this cool new technology could save us all from climate change and they know they are utterly failing to pull it off and it's killing them. renewables are experiencing massive growth while westinghouse goes bankrupt trying to build 4 reactors. i'm pretty sure renewables are ahead here even existing nuclear plants are increasingly economically uncompetitive. exelon is getting 2.4 billion in subsidies from the state of illinois to keep its unprofitable reactors open. new york is paying 7.6 billion to prevents its reactors from closing. Concerned Citizen has issued a correction as of 01:54 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 27, 2017 01:44
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the issue with nuclear power is not its safety, but rather the fact that despite two pro-nuclear administrations in a row investing billions of dollars in subsidies to support the industry, we have not come close to making it economically viable. private investors will not even get involved with a nuclear reactor unless the government will guarantee the loan. the poo poo about how it'd totally be cheap if we'd just cut some of those darn safety regulations is absolutely absurd. it's expensive because the projects are incredibly hard to build, and expensive to maintain and repair once they reach a mature age.
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Apr 28, 2017 17:26
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Condiv posted:Hmm well it's a market failure if you assume none of the reactors will be expensive boondoggles that never meet projections. which has not been the case for any nuclear reactors we've tried to build even china's huge nuclear expansion, which is of course state funded, is looking at $100b~ between new reactors and safety upgrades over the next few years even prior to the inevitable cost overruns.
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Apr 28, 2017 17:36
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Condiv posted:And how much do the spills and environmental damage from other power generation techs add to their overall cost? no one is selecting coal. it's a dying industry, and coal plants are shutting down like whoa. they're selecting natural gas and (to a much lesser extent) renewables. while natural gas isn't exactly an environmental plus vs. nuclear, it's far cleaner than coal. while nuclear certainly has a place in our energy mix, and it's preferable to fossil fuel sources, it still has less potential than renewables for the same money we'd have to invest.
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Apr 28, 2017 17:58
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Coolguye posted:it requires almost five dozen extra certifications and permits to receive clearance that a nuclear power plant proposal is safe vs a gas or coal plant, which is required before the proposal can even be brought to politicians, who then must be convinced all over again and will frequently demand that the site be moved a couple of miles in one direction or another to make it more palatable to their constituents, which then triggers recertification procedures. not a huge deal for the moderately regulated fossil fuel plants (which might lose a couple ten or a hundred thousand dollars and be delayed a couple of months), a huge setback for nuclear projects (which can lose hundreds of thousands and be delayed up to a year). the us has not "regulated nuclear out of viability." the policy of the last nearly 2 decades has been to actively encourage the building of new nuclear plants. the cost of regulation is the tiniest fraction of the overall cost. westinghouse's issues have been entirely technical - they have been unable to fabricate and build at the pace & cost they were meant to. and every single reactor being built has faced that exact problem.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:08
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Coolguye posted:it's really, really difficult to imagine a context of 'potential' where this is true. could you elaborate? wind/solar are developing technologies that are still declining in cost, and in general are now competitive with coal (or at least wind is) while still lagging behind crazy cheap natural gas. their share in the energy mix has grown bigly over the past 8 years, and it's projected by most energy companies to continue to do so. investing in renewables makes sense. we should invest enough in nuclear to maintain its place in the energy mix (since so many reactors will soon be going offline) but a france-like future isn't going to happen.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:18
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Coolguye posted:westinghouse is promising gen IV reactors for the projects you're mentioning which are subject to less regulation by not using a lot of the hot-topic fuels that trigger so many of the regulations, despite the fact that we have poured so much work into securing and handling gen III reactors that they have fewer deaths per kW/h, less environmental impact, and lower operating costs than equivalent fossil fuel stations. regulation is forcing people to spend profligately on technologies that are not ready for prime time and not ready to be out of the skunkworks, per attestations of dozens upon dozens of nuclear engineers paid lots and lots of money to make high end breeders and pebble beds a real thing. westinghouse's reactors are gen III+, not gen IV. it's a PWR so it's hardly skunk works. and talking about operating costs, if their operating costs were really that low, half of us nuclear reactors wouldn't be unprofitable. the operating costs are only low on paper, but in reality they significantly increase as the reactors age. and, of course, most of the cost is in building the things in the first place.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:26
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Coolguye posted:Renewables currently generate more value in subsidy than they do in actual electricity produced. Oklahoma is discontinuing its wind program this year for exactly this reason; the subsidy fund they were using to incentivize the program ended, and the state's GDP actually shrank from the operation because the wind farms displaced so many farms and ranches that were actually profitable. The idea was that renewables would have lower operating costs once put up, because they don't require a full time staff, but the reality of the situation is that power storage with batteries and such is still such an expensive problem that it costs at least as much to scale as a power station of any stripe. There's also the cost of the land that you must buy up en-masse to support renewables. It tends to be farmland, which is HELLA expensive. Again, people do not usually count these costs because tons of the land comes from subsidized purchases or land grants taken by eminent domain to make way for critical infrastructure. yes, renewables still require subsidies. no type of energy can currently compete with natural gas on cost alone. but a state like iowa, for example, generates like 40% of its energy from wind alone. and texas is investing enormous amounts of money into renewables. nuclear receives "almost no subsidy?" every single part of the nuclear industry is subsidized, from uranium mining, to financing, to maintenance & ongoing operation, to tax credits for just existing. there is no world where nuclear is even remotely economically viable without the massive number of state and federal subsidies. even with these subsidies, many plants are closing in the face of cost pressures by natural gas.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:37
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 03:39 |
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Coolguye posted:you seem as though you're comparing subsidy for existing infrastructure to subsidy for new construction? that's the definition of apples and oranges and not remotely what i said. every part of nuclear is subsidized, both new constructions and existing infrastucture. it's apples-to-apples because neither industry can survive without enormous government subsidies, and nuclear will require more over the lifetime of a plant until such time that we develop more economical reactors.
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Apr 28, 2017 18:47
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