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Nuclear power
- Thread starter eledille
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- Energy Environment Policy
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
What I meant by 'Thermal' is the use of heat as an intermediate step to produce electricity. We need to stop wasting time & $$$ on that type of antiquated power generation.
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
'The Nuclear Option' airs Jan 11 on PBS NOVA. They had a brief preview on The News Hour tonight. Looks like they'll explore some of the new fission options like Terra Power and LFTR.
I'm really tired of listening to people promote 'More abundant fuel' as a reason XYZ technology is better than our current fleet of light water reactors. The cost of the fuel for a light water reactor... mining, refining, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication is <$0.005/kWh.... it's essentially free. The average cost overrun of a fission plant is ~2x what that plant will spend on fuel over a 60 year life. The cost or abundance of enriched uranium is not an issue. Claiming it as a benefit is a HUGE red flag that the promoter of XYZ technology can't find any benefit over current nuclear tech.
The nuclear industry focusing on anything other than cutting CAPITAL costs by ~70% is like having an intervention with your meth addled cousin about eating too much processed food and not enough fruit and vegetables..... sure, a balanced diet is important... but first things first.
I'm really tired of listening to people promote 'More abundant fuel' as a reason XYZ technology is better than our current fleet of light water reactors. The cost of the fuel for a light water reactor... mining, refining, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication is <$0.005/kWh.... it's essentially free. The average cost overrun of a fission plant is ~2x what that plant will spend on fuel over a 60 year life. The cost or abundance of enriched uranium is not an issue. Claiming it as a benefit is a HUGE red flag that the promoter of XYZ technology can't find any benefit over current nuclear tech.
The nuclear industry focusing on anything other than cutting CAPITAL costs by ~70% is like having an intervention with your meth addled cousin about eating too much processed food and not enough fruit and vegetables..... sure, a balanced diet is important... but first things first.
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mspohr
Well-Known Member
Also,we need to remind people that the cost of solar and wind fuel is zero.
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
None of the Canadian NUC plants have ever paid back. They need to be rebuilt every 20 years or so and we are still paying the debt form 40 years ago. Plus, despite being one of the safest designs in the world, we still have no idea what to do with all the waste, tons of which are sitting in pools of heavy water under the plants. w don't need more baseload, we need wind, solar, tidal, energy storage, and then we need peaking plants and NUC cannot do that.
SmartElectric
Active Member
Summary: a regulation change requiring the nuclear plant to withstand an aircraft crash/assault led to years of additional design and complexity for construction.
Seems like a sensible regulation for a nuclear facility. But what appears to be simple for nuclear power never seems to end up simple.
There's no need to plan for such in a solar field or wind farm....
This is rather old news (10 months) but I came across it while reading a story about the explosion a couple days ago at the Flamanville nuclear complex. This is about a problem with material strength in the containment vessel.
Flamanville EPR vessel tests extended
And a later June 24th 2016 update:
Material testing continues on French steam generators
And a good summary article in the Guardian:
Flamanville: France's beleaguered forerunner to Hinkley Point C
Costs have tripled and they are 6 years behind schedule. It is the first EPR reactor built in the world. In Finland, the Olkiluoto reactor is 10 years behind schedule and 3x over budget.
My takeaway is that building anything that is so large and complex, especially the first time, is going to be much more expensive than initially forecast. And you will always be wondering whether some component produced 10, 20 or 30 years prior has some inherent manufacturing defect that could cause even more issues down the road. Just like the steel vessel bottom in question.
Given the dramatic ongoing drop in the cost of renewables, it's hard to see how these large nuclear plants will do anything more than live out their lives (hopefully) generating power, with many fewer being started over time. Once storage cost starts ramping down as fast as PV prices, you have to think the game is over.
Maybe much smaller plants with less complex designs could enter the market, but by the time they get approved, PV electricity could be "too cheap to meter", to use an old phrase
RT
Flamanville EPR vessel tests extended
And a later June 24th 2016 update:
Material testing continues on French steam generators
And a good summary article in the Guardian:
Flamanville: France's beleaguered forerunner to Hinkley Point C
Costs have tripled and they are 6 years behind schedule. It is the first EPR reactor built in the world. In Finland, the Olkiluoto reactor is 10 years behind schedule and 3x over budget.
My takeaway is that building anything that is so large and complex, especially the first time, is going to be much more expensive than initially forecast. And you will always be wondering whether some component produced 10, 20 or 30 years prior has some inherent manufacturing defect that could cause even more issues down the road. Just like the steel vessel bottom in question.
Given the dramatic ongoing drop in the cost of renewables, it's hard to see how these large nuclear plants will do anything more than live out their lives (hopefully) generating power, with many fewer being started over time. Once storage cost starts ramping down as fast as PV prices, you have to think the game is over.
Maybe much smaller plants with less complex designs could enter the market, but by the time they get approved, PV electricity could be "too cheap to meter", to use an old phrase
RT
mspohr
Well-Known Member
NY Times article today on the future of nuclear power (not good):
The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States
"
The reasons are wide-ranging. Against expectations, demand for electricity has slowed. Natural-gas prices have tumbled, eroding nuclear power’s economic rationale. Alternative-energy sources like wind and solar power have come into their own.
And, perhaps most significantly, attempts to square two often-conflicting forces — the desire for greater safety, and the need to contain costs — while bringing to life complex new designs have blocked or delayed nearly all of the projects planned in the United States.
The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States
"
The reasons are wide-ranging. Against expectations, demand for electricity has slowed. Natural-gas prices have tumbled, eroding nuclear power’s economic rationale. Alternative-energy sources like wind and solar power have come into their own.
And, perhaps most significantly, attempts to square two often-conflicting forces — the desire for greater safety, and the need to contain costs — while bringing to life complex new designs have blocked or delayed nearly all of the projects planned in the United States.
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
And the hits keep coming...
If Vogtle and Summer are canceled at this stage... I don't see how any rational person could pursue another fission plant... sadly the world is full of irrational people in positions of power....
If Vogtle and Summer are canceled at this stage... I don't see how any rational person could pursue another fission plant... sadly the world is full of irrational people in positions of power....
Westinghouse: We are not considering bankruptcy at this time.
Last half of the article discusses where the money to finish the reactors would come from if Westinghouse does declare bankruptcy. That is barring no further construction delays and cost escalation. And I'm sure whomever is on the hook for the $921,000,000 mentioned as backup capital will just write one huge check upon being asked. No chance of any litigation there
RT
When those plants are finally up and running, someone needs to analyze the money spent over time to see how plowing those $$$ into PV and battery storage would compare. Then we can see whether the PV+battery "baseload" output is more than the nuclear plant. Is so, it's the end of fission. Unless someone can convince investors that the next units won't be 3x over budget for some reason.
RT
RT
I'm with @nwdiver above. Power generation that uses non-renewable heat to drive turbines is inherently on the way out. Geothermal is the only sensible mature thermal power generation system while solar thermal like molten salt looks promising but only appears to have one utility scale plant in operation.
Zapped
Model S - PURE EV
Sad to say but looks like we have quite a ways to go to replace base load power.
List of nuclear power stations - Wikipedia
List of photovoltaic power stations - Wikipedia
List of nuclear power stations - Wikipedia
List of photovoltaic power stations - Wikipedia
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
'Base load' Power is a Myth used for defending the fossil fuel (and nuclear) Industries.
It's actually somewhat obvious if you stop and think about it... there are plenty of grids in the world that operate just fine without large thermal generators.
California gets almost all of it's 'on-demand' electricity from gas fired turbines. Diablo Canyon is one of the last 'base-load' plants left and it's scheduled to be shut down in 2025 without being replaced by another thermal plant.
A MW is a MW wether it's coming from 10 50MW battery inverters scattered about or a 500MW nuclear steam generator.
“The only hurdle to overcome is ‘mindset’,” “There’s no technical challenge at all.” - Chairman of the China State Grid
LFTR please.
800 degree liquid molten salt. No xenon gas, no massive containment vessel, no massive high pressure go boom pieces, no pools with tons of radioactive water, and waste that ends up being a usable biproduct in the medical industry.
Google Kirk Sorensen for one explanation.
Power doesn't have to be difficult, or expensive. Once you give an abundance of cheap energy to the world you'll make everyone richer, and free us from the 19th century mentality we all have towards work. It's a dream to free the slaves.
And yeah, my license plate reads "THORIUM".
800 degree liquid molten salt. No xenon gas, no massive containment vessel, no massive high pressure go boom pieces, no pools with tons of radioactive water, and waste that ends up being a usable biproduct in the medical industry.
Google Kirk Sorensen for one explanation.
Power doesn't have to be difficult, or expensive. Once you give an abundance of cheap energy to the world you'll make everyone richer, and free us from the 19th century mentality we all have towards work. It's a dream to free the slaves.
And yeah, my license plate reads "THORIUM".
I'm sure that everybody's hoping that it works out. Unfortunately it's looking like 2035 at the earliest before commercialization is possible.
In the meantime we have to cross our fingers that battery costs can indeed get down to $100/kWh (2025?) and that solar and wind drop another 15% to 20% over the next 5 years as commonly projected.
I'm in a constant state of nervous excitement. EVs, batteries, PV, wind, geothermal, autonomous vehicles, reusable rockets, thorium.
Maybe a possibility for my kid but according to actuarial tables I will be six feet under. Therefore I am investing in commercially viable technologies like PV solar, Lithium batteris and my EVs.
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
LFTR is like a lottery ticket... and not one of the really high powerball ones that'll really eliminate all your financial woes... one of the state level $2-3M lotteries. Yeah... it'll be nice... but can you really quit work and retire? Maybe.
PV, Wind, Storage and Demand Response are your 401k. We know it works. We know it scales. We know we can build them cost effectively.
The lottery is fun but you don't buy tickets at the expense of your 401k. There's a lot of unknowns with LFTR. I can tell you from experience that fluorine is an extremely reactive, toxic and difficult element to work with. I work with UF6 at work; it degrades chemically creating free fluorine gas which is difficult to cope with. One of our sister facilities experienced an explosion due to a fluorine reaction.
Then LFTR is still a thermal plant. As I've posted before... we need to stop building thermal power plants. They're slow, expensive and inefficient. Most thermal plants have an efficiency of ~40%. It's not so much the low efficiency that's the issue if the fuel is clean, cheap and abundant but the waste heat. That's not always easy to eliminate and limits where plants can be sited. Higher temperature will give you a better efficiency but that means special alloys which means it's more expensive. Higher temperatures also mean it's less dynamic. We need plants that can be cost effectively idled for weeks or months at a time when there's plentiful wind and sun then ramped up quickly if there's a deficit.
IMO our effects would be far more effective finding cost effective ways of converting electricity into fuels. Manufacture CH4 when the sun and wind are abundant then burn it in turbines when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Cheaper and easier.
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