- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or # to comment.
This would have been great 20 or 30 years ago but back then “nuclear bad!”. It would have been a great bridge between burning fossil fuels and wind/solar/etc. It probably would have prevented climate change from getting as bad as it is now. Oh well, here we are.
Not surprising. I would imagine the cost per kWh is more for smaller installations. I never understood the push for these aside from a giveaway to nuclear companies.
There are good guys at INL (although all the guys with MP5s walking around makes for a creepy atmosphere) but there clearly was not much of a future here.
a giveaway to nuclear companies
That’s how we roll in Canada. The best part is, the guys who own the nuke plants also own the oil pipelines! Even when they lose they win!
Can we let them lose at the oil and win at the nuclear, please?
The US Navy has probably around 100 nuclear powered vessels, both submarines and Nimitz class carriers. Each of those have miniature nuclear plants on them.
I know their use cases are different but small and portable is small and portable. Virginia class subs typically stayed within cost budgets, but newer V blocks saw cost overruns, as well as the Gerald Ford carrier, which was about 3 billion over budget if I remember.
Not sure if overruns were due to being nuclear or because of other reasons. They are high tech military items that aren’t exactly mass produced, so lots of ways to overrun. However they are more mass produced than nuclear power stations in the civilian sector. Maybe some lessons can be learned.
Edit: Also forgot an important point that modularization was a key design point of the Virginia sub.
Any botanist can explain how they managed to grow a nuclear reactor plant?
Nuclear power provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can play a significant role in helping deal with climate change.
This is a giant hoax of an argument anyway.
Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.
But in most industrialized countries, the construction of nuclear plants tends to grossly exceed their budgeted cost and run years over schedule.
LMAO I didn’t know that. So they tried to solve the problem of human stupidity? ;-)
modular nuclear reactors, which can be built in a centralized production facility and then shipped to the site of their installation.
Yea, sure… make it even better by adding an extra lot of carbon emissions for the transportation.
I have to take back my statement from above: they did NOT try to solve stupidity, but rather exploit it.
Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.
Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:
Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.
Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.
Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.
With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.
If you use lithium batteries, sure, but grid-scale solutions are definitely moving away from that, the only reason Lithium ever really showed up in the grid is because car manufacturers built up lithium capacity, it wouldn’t have happened without that. Lithium itself I think won’t be an issue for long, plenty of abundant repositories have been found and we haven’t even really started recycling, cobalt now that’s a completely different topic.
Main difference is that you really don’t need energy density if you don’t lob the batteries around all the time so flow batteries, sodium-ion, molten salt, whatnot, are very enticing options. For spikes and frequency regulation there’s good ole flywheels (which came for free with all those glorified steam engines burning fossil fuels and uranium). Also around here we’re using Scandinavian hydrodams as storage for our wind, granted not everyone has them as neighbours.
A bit further down the line power-to-X will also be an important factor in backup and seasonal storage: We’ll need various hydrogen/hydrocarbon compounds anyway as feed stock, for steel smelting etc. so production capacity to soak up renewable overproduction will be available. Which side note is also the reason people should stop with the “hydrogen is dirty” argument: What the fuck else are you going to smelt steel with. Right now hydrogen smelters are going to use fossil hydrogen, yes, but that’s pretty much the only way to build up enough demand so that green hydrogen production gets investment.
Solar plus batteries are already cheaper than nuclear, and only going down. Nuclear has always gotten more expensive over time. For the cost of the most recently completed nuclear plant in the US they could have built 12 times the nameplate capacity worth of solar with 24 hours of battery backup. (A totally unnecessary amount of dispatchability.)
Solar and batteries easily “pay” for their manufacturing carbon emissions within 1-2 years max (as does nuclear). This payback period only goes down as the grid gets greener.
‘Interesting’ analysis. Now do the same for an equivalent-power thermal power plant, over its lifetime.
thermal power plant
But why? Nobody has tried to promote these, or even claimed that they would save emissions…
deleted by creator
What does the abbreviation mean? ;-)
