Well if you walk the walk, who am I to criticize.
The plant has already saved thousands of lives in the form of deaths from fossil fuels that did not happen. Even if it exploded tomorrow, it would be a massive net win.
I’m also in California, but I was very opposed to the shutdown of a (very) nearby nuclear plant, so I have no objection in principle.
This is the power plant whose closing I am strongly opposed to.
You can put it by our farm in NM. Already doing it for weapons waste. Sorry, used fuel. The clients scold me when I call it waste.
Total amount produced in the US is only like 100k tons.
This sounds very south-centric. In northern places where I am, the biggest problem is the large gap between summer and winter output. The second biggest problem is that our electricity peaks happen from 6-9 AM and from 4-8 PM. For a good chunk of the winter, it’s dark during these times. More solar does us no good at all.
Yesterday our 3PM power was $50/MW. An hour later it was $750.
Nuclear plants can load-follow, including participating in frequency control systems. France does it . Using a nuclear plant in load following mode costs about 1.2% in efficiency, but that’s not bad.
Batteries have a role for peaking power for sure. Nuclear can do baseload and longer-term load following. Solar is fine for daytime in summer, and for about 25% of daytime power in the winter where I am. Wind and hydro have a role. Basically, ‘all of the above’. But nuclear needs to be about where France has it - 60-75% of total generation, unless a location has substantial other resources like hydro. Places closer to the equator can get by with less nuclear, or maybe even go wind/solar/hydro with natural gas doing the load following and some battery for instant peaking loads.
What batteries can’t do is store significant power for any real length of time. For example, Alberta’s power demand ranges from about 8,000 to 10,000 MW. To store an hour of production, you’d need 10,000 MWh of battery. The largest grid battery in the world is 600MW. You’d need 15 of them to store one hour of Alberta’s energy. That’s not going to happen. And considering that wind and solar can go almost completely offline for weeks on end, an hour of storage is useless.
The same problem exists for other schemes for storing energy. The scale is just too big. Pumped hydro is probably the closest to a feasible technology, but you need very specific geographic features to make it work. 95% of all storage is pumped hydro.
The largest pumped hydro system is in Bath County, Virginia. Two huge reservoirs close to each other with 1,260 feet of elevation between them makes it work. About 1,000 acres of land were required. You can see how such locations are not going to be easy to find.
Globally, there are 1.8 TWh of pumped hydro in operation. In 2019, the last year I have data for, total energy consumption was 22,848 TWh, or about 2.6 TW every hour.
That means all the pumped hydro in the world could store the world’s energy demands for about 41 minutes. All the world’s batteries and pumped hydro won’t even get you an hour’s worth of power. And pumped hydro has been built out over about 40 years now, and relies on unique locations, mostly in mountains, that environmentalists will fight tooth and nail for.
Also, pumped hydro is somewhere around 75-80% efficient. You’re better off just using nukes in load following mode.
Well, yes–the phrase “duck curve” was invented in California, but would apply to any place of similar latitude. Not Alberta.
I don’t know what “efficiency” means here, but it’s not capital efficiency. Running the plant at less than 100% load means you are leaving money on the table. Why run at 50% load at night when you can charge batteries (or some other storage system), run at 100%, and discharge at times of higher demand?
Why not? Batteries are getting cheaper every year. Sodium-ion batteries are looking promising, but even chemistries like LFP are constantly getting cheaper.
Note that I didn’t say anything about storing power for weeks on end. I gave three examples: peaking (say, minutes), the duck curve (a few hours), and daily (24 hours). I think all of these are achievable with batteries, but it will take time for the longer durations to be practical in all cases. We’re about at the point now of duck-curve storage in favorable locations.
Ok. So? Spherical Earth theory implies that solar power is available somewhere 24 hours a day, though I realize that’s controversial…
To be fair, solar power installations and dams are generally more environmentally disruptive than a nuclear plant.
And that had nothing to do with it being a nuclear plant. The technician fell from a crane during the earthquake.
Meanwhile, at the nearby gas refinery the earthquake killed a whole bunch of workers. (I remember seeing it at the time, but I’m having trouble finding a cite now.
And can be better. I’m all for blocking building more 1950’s technology nuclear plants. We should be building better, safer, and more efficient designs and retiring our fleet of the old ones as new comes online.
With current nuclear, it is so expensive in capital costs that you are losing money when the reactor is running, and losing even more when it’s not. Baseload following makes no sense there, you need as close to 100% up time as possible to just avoid going bankrupt.
Newer modular designs should bring those capital costs down substantially, to where there will be a balance between adding more storage and more load following capacity. The cheaper nuclear power is compared to storage, the more following, the more expensive, the less.
And part of that day the Sun is mainly over the Pacific. We need a much more robust and efficient energy grid before we start moving power from the light side of the planet to the dark side.
There was some discussion of grid energy storage a few posts back. I caution anyone who isn’t steeped in this field against posting numbers and conclusions without first checking they have up to date information. It’s a fast-moving area. E.g., 600 MWh may have been the largest battery installation a few years ago, but Moss Landing is 1.6 GWh and has been operating since mid-2021. Not that the individual size is all that important.
The amount of run if the mill lithium ion grid storage in the US has nearly doubled annually for several years as the LCOE of battery storage has cratered. I expect both those trends to level off. It’s true that this is best suited for ancillary services or time-shifting in ~four hour chunks. But there are other up-and-coming technologies. Form Energy has multiple 1 GWh facilities under contract. And those run for 100 hours. That’s still not seasonal, but at least good for riding out most dunkelflauten if the cost of all that capital is palatable.
Not just the atmosphere. By volume, fly ash is orders of magnitude greater than nuclear waste
Westinghouse announced the launch of a small version of its flagship AP1000 nuclear reactor on Thursday. The new reactor, called the AP300, aims to be available in 2027, and will generate about a third of the power as the flagship AP1000 reactor, enough to power about 300,000 homes. It’s expected to cost about $1 billion to set up each plant, a small fraction of the expense of the full AP1000.
Bill Gates:
Scheduled to open in 2030.
A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the site, where two earlier reactors have been generating electricity for decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday said radioactive fuel could be loaded into Unit 4, a step expected to take place before the end of September. Unit 4 is scheduled to enter commercial operation by March.
The third and fourth reactors were originally supposed to cost $14 billion, but are now on track to cost their owners $31 billion. That doesn’t include $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners to walk away from the project. That brings total spending to almost $35 billion.
The third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016 when construction began in 2009.
Same story about Vogtyl opening, from Financial Times (gifted article) Subscribe to the Financial Times
The Georgia project was supposed to be the first among dozens of new reactors built across the country. But the renaissance floundered amid safety concerns after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan coupled with plunging prices for natural gas, a competing generation fuel. In the end only four reactors moved ahead and two, Vogtle units 3 and 4, have been built. Unit 4 is scheduled to come online by early 2024.
Soaring costs at Vogtle, along with new reactors at the VC Summer nuclear project in South Carolina, forced engineering contractor Westinghouse into bankruptcy in 2017. While South Carolina utilities pulled the plug on their project, Georgia ploughed ahead.
“The only reason there’s a nuclear renaissance is because the federal government is throwing tens of billions of dollars at nuclear,” said David Schlissel at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Investors aren’t interested.”
Nuclear power -which I support to some degree- is a creature of big government. The largest nuclear power program in the world is conducted by communist China. No Gen I, II, or III plant was ever built without massive governmental intervention, and no such plant will ever be built.
Fukushima starts dump the radioactive water into the sea.
Thursday.
And so, it begins.
(LINK)History shows, again and again…
For context:
The new release of water is 1 PBq total, to be released at about 0.02 PBq/year. It’s utterly minuscule.
Unfortunately, the chart above is itself a bit misleading, since the 15,000,000 PBq of K-40 should make every other circle a tiny dot, but it still gives some idea of the difference between natural sources and those from Fukushima.
The funny thing is that for radioactives, the solution to pollution really is dilution. And time.
The stuff is totally self-cleaning over long enough timescales. K-40 is a very, very long timescale, such that “self-cleaning” really isn’t realistic.
But that extremely long half-life is another way of saying the actual pollution it creates, the flux of energetic particles and rays, is really really small per unit volume or unit mass of K-40.
Right. Ultimately, any pollution is going to have local and global effects. The local effects are fixed with dilution. The global effects depend on the rate of release. CO2 causes few problems locally, but is produced so prodigiously that it has global consequences. Radioactive materials can certainly have local effects, but the production rate is infinitesimal compared to natural sources. So dilution is very effective there.
So what begins? And by “history”, do you mean cinema history?