Is Nuclear Power in America Reviving - or Flailing? (msn.com) 209
Last week America's energy secretary cheered the startup of a fourth nuclear reactor at a Georgia power plant, calling it "the largest producer of clean energy, and the largest producer of electricity in the United States" after a third reactor was started up there in December.
From the U.S. Energy Department's transcript of the speech: Each year, Units 3 and 4 are going to produce enough clean power to power 1 million homes and businesses, enough energy to power roughly 1 in 4 homes in Georgia. Preventing 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution annually. That, by the way, is like planting more than 165 million trees every year!
And that's not to mention the historic investments that [electric utility] Southern has made on the safety front, to ensure this facility meets — and exceeds — the highest operating standards in the world....
To reach our goal of net zero by 2050, we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country. That means we've got to add 200 more gigawatts by 2050. Okay, two down, 198 to go! In building [Unit] 4, we've solved our greatest design challenges. We've stood up entire supply chains.... And so it's time to cash in on our investments by building more. More of these facilities. The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office stands ready to help, with hundreds of billions of dollars in what we call Title 17 loans... Since the President signed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, companies across the nation have announced 29 new or expanded nuclear facilities — across 16 states — representing about 1,600 potential new jobs. And the majority of those projects will expand the domestic uranium production and fuel fabrication, strengthening these critical supply chains...
Bottom line is, in short, we are determined to build a world-class nuclear industry in the United States, and we're putting our money where our mouth is.
America's Energy Secretary told the Washington Post that "Whether it happens through small modular reactors, or AP1000s, or maybe another design out there worthy of consideration, we want to see nuclear built." The Post notes the Energy department gave a $1.5 billion loan to restart a Michigan power plant which was decommissioned in 2022. "It would mark the first time a shuttered U.S. nuclear plant has been reactivated."
"But in this country with 54 nuclear plants across 28 states, restarting existing reactors and delaying their closure is a lot less complicated than building new ones." When the final [Georgia] reactor went online at the end of April, the expansion was seven years behind schedule and nearly $20 billion over budget. It ultimately cost more than twice as much as promised, with ratepayers footing much of the bill through surcharges and rate hikes...
Administration officials say the country has no choice but to make nuclear power a workable option again. The country is fast running short on electricity, demand for power is surging amid a boom in construction of data centers and manufacturing plants, and a neglected power grid is struggling to accommodate enough new wind and solar power to meet the nation's needs...
As the administration frames the narrative of the plant as one of perseverance and innovation that clears a path for restoring U.S. nuclear energy dominance, even some longtime boosters of the industry question whether this country will ever again have a vibrant nuclear energy sector. "It is hard for me to envision state energy regulators signing off on another one of these, given how badly the last ones went," said Matt Bowen, a nuclear scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was an adviser on nuclear energy issues in the Obama administration.
The article notes there are 19 AP1000 reactors (the design used at the Georgia plant) in development around the world. "None of them are being built in the United States."
From the U.S. Energy Department's transcript of the speech: Each year, Units 3 and 4 are going to produce enough clean power to power 1 million homes and businesses, enough energy to power roughly 1 in 4 homes in Georgia. Preventing 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution annually. That, by the way, is like planting more than 165 million trees every year!
And that's not to mention the historic investments that [electric utility] Southern has made on the safety front, to ensure this facility meets — and exceeds — the highest operating standards in the world....
To reach our goal of net zero by 2050, we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country. That means we've got to add 200 more gigawatts by 2050. Okay, two down, 198 to go! In building [Unit] 4, we've solved our greatest design challenges. We've stood up entire supply chains.... And so it's time to cash in on our investments by building more. More of these facilities. The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office stands ready to help, with hundreds of billions of dollars in what we call Title 17 loans... Since the President signed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, companies across the nation have announced 29 new or expanded nuclear facilities — across 16 states — representing about 1,600 potential new jobs. And the majority of those projects will expand the domestic uranium production and fuel fabrication, strengthening these critical supply chains...
Bottom line is, in short, we are determined to build a world-class nuclear industry in the United States, and we're putting our money where our mouth is.
America's Energy Secretary told the Washington Post that "Whether it happens through small modular reactors, or AP1000s, or maybe another design out there worthy of consideration, we want to see nuclear built." The Post notes the Energy department gave a $1.5 billion loan to restart a Michigan power plant which was decommissioned in 2022. "It would mark the first time a shuttered U.S. nuclear plant has been reactivated."
"But in this country with 54 nuclear plants across 28 states, restarting existing reactors and delaying their closure is a lot less complicated than building new ones." When the final [Georgia] reactor went online at the end of April, the expansion was seven years behind schedule and nearly $20 billion over budget. It ultimately cost more than twice as much as promised, with ratepayers footing much of the bill through surcharges and rate hikes...
Administration officials say the country has no choice but to make nuclear power a workable option again. The country is fast running short on electricity, demand for power is surging amid a boom in construction of data centers and manufacturing plants, and a neglected power grid is struggling to accommodate enough new wind and solar power to meet the nation's needs...
As the administration frames the narrative of the plant as one of perseverance and innovation that clears a path for restoring U.S. nuclear energy dominance, even some longtime boosters of the industry question whether this country will ever again have a vibrant nuclear energy sector. "It is hard for me to envision state energy regulators signing off on another one of these, given how badly the last ones went," said Matt Bowen, a nuclear scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was an adviser on nuclear energy issues in the Obama administration.
The article notes there are 19 AP1000 reactors (the design used at the Georgia plant) in development around the world. "None of them are being built in the United States."
Cost of delivery too high. (Score:2, Insightful)
Solar panels continue to drop in price.
Batteries continue to drop in price.
It's likely than in less than a decade rooftop solar+batteries will be cheaper than just delivering the electricity.
All centrally generated power is doomed.
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Solar panels are dropping in price, but the installation costs are not.
The installation cost for residential rooftop solar is often more than the cost of the panels.
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In Europe, the Balcony Panel is all the rage. Just hang the panels down your balcony, plug the power into one wall outlet, and you are done. For electrical security reason, this is limited to 800 Watt, but still, you get solar power you can install yourself.
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reverse feeding outlets is obscenely dangerous and stupid. I don't believe for a second that any remotely developed country would allow that in their code.
Re: Cost of delivery too high. (Score:3, Interesting)
Every single European country has legalized reverse feeding low wattage solar into the home using regular sockets.
What are all these regulators missing! What is so dangerous and cannot be mitigated?
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Obviously. The installation cost of a fake tooth into your mouth is also more than the tooth. Even if the tooth/inlay/crown: is pure gold.
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Solar panels are dropping in price, but the installation costs are not.
Citation please.
According to https://earthtechling.com/solar-energy-costs-trends/ [earthtechling.com] Installation costs are dropping, and have been for quite awhile.
We haven't really explored what's possible in reduced installation costs yet.
Imagine a free standing solar-pergola -- basically a tent with solar panels for a roof.
Not because the parts are cheaper, but because installation is cheap, and easy enough that a home owner could do it themselves.
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Solar panels continue to drop in price. Batteries continue to drop in price. It's likely than in less than a decade rooftop solar+batteries will be cheaper than just delivering the electricity.
All centrally generated power is doomed.
I'd love to just generate my own power and not depend on a grid, but all I can say to your homily there is "highly doubtful".
Economies of scale and the need for distributed reliability don't disappear just because you want them to.
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All centrally generated power is doomed.
Not if they can lock us into long-term contracts for incredibly expensive power plants with multi-decade lifecycles. That's the future baby.
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Actual numbers from the real world suggest otherwise.
Length of December day at 47 degrees N, is 8 hours. Lose another hour due to horizon slop.
Probability of a clear day, 2 out of 31. Capacity factor of PV under normal overcast conditions, 7%. Outdoor temperature 15 F nights, 25 F days.
Worst case last January, capacity factor of PV 4.6% of nameplate, outdoor temperature -5 F. Grid power demand at the time (about 10:30 AM) 11,400 MW. Since you are on slash dot you should be able to do the math for the number
Re: Cost of delivery too high. (Score:2)
All centrally generated power is doomed.
That's great for us rich folks in the suburbs. With huge lots and expansive roofs on which to locate solar. But what about the poor people in cities, resigned to living in commie blocks? A poor ratio of roof to living square footage. And you can't mount solar on walls because, with the demise of interspersed open space (parking lots), walls are in continual shade. Oh yeah. The heat load of high rises is greater (occupied volume vs envelope surface area), so we need that roof for air conditioning equipment.
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There is something called "community solar", which my utility happens to offer among many others. The panels are in a solar farm, where they are cheap and easy to install vs rooftops. You lease or buy a block of panels. Whatever they produce is subtracted from your residential meter reading. This works for tenants, and also people like me who own a house, but have nice big shade trees I don't want to cut down. I live in the Atlanta area, shade trees are good. They lower the air temperature substantia
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And, to quote John Kenneth Galbraith, in the long run we're all dead. We need solutions that can will make a dent in our carbon footprint in the next two decades.
Nuclear's time was 40+ years ago (Score:2, Informative)
I'd be fine with nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
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The nuclear industry has certainly tried to pep up it's image, and it's been quite successful in the image department. Multiple people quote the "Facts" that Chernobyl "wasn't that bad a disaster". Ignoring that tens of thousands of people lost their home and an entire region of Ukraine is uninhabitable. Quoting industry nonsense that "not that many people died" when recent cancer studies clearly show it's likely easily the greatest loss of life due to an increase in cancer rates of any industrial disaster in human history by an order of magnitude: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Your link includes nothing about deaths from Chernobyl, it's a study looking at the prevalence of cancer in people previously diagnosed with thyroid cancer in areas affected by Chernobyl. It has no data at all on mortality. Not all cancer leads to death and most of the Chernobyl excess cancers are thyroid cancer (due to the bulk of the contamination being from iodine-131) which is highly treatable if detected early (>99.5% survival rate). Greatly increased screening in these areas have made it so almo
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He did not claim a ton of death, I told you about high cancer rate. Which you confirmed.
A friend of mine had toroid cancer. Which funnily - not so funny for her - got treated with radiation therapy. She lost all her big back teeth to it. The bone is to weak to make implants. Will take years until it can be done.
She does not dare to smile.
The estimate by _russian_ scientists is, that abut 2million to 4million people died to Chernobyl. Mostly because the food sourced in Ukraine was mixed into uncontaminated f
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He did not claim a ton of death, I told you about high cancer rate. Which you confirmed.
Yes he did, he said this:
"Greatest loss of life" sure sounds like a claim of "a ton of death" to me.
The estimate by _russian_ scientists is, that abut 2million to 4million people died to Chernobyl
I notice you didn't provide a citation for that, even though your sig says "Unite Behind the Science". A lot of people have really high estimates but when scientists look at ACTUAL deaths and ACTUAL cancers they never can seem
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The economics of nuclear are bad to a large degree because we've made them so by regulating the everliving hell out of it. Not just do we make the building process a nightmare to get the nod from government, it takes the west far longer than it has to.
Seeing as these projects are never paid out of pocket, there's considerable loan interest to be paid during that time, further making these projects more expensive than necessary.
On top of that, we've been pussyfooting around the concept so much that we do not
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Multiple people quote the "Facts" that Chernobyl "wasn't that bad a disaster".
What kind of bizarre alt-reality do you live in?
No one claims this. Literally no one.
What I want to know is what the fuck Chernobyl has to do with nuclear power in the west? It's never been legal to build a plant like that in the west, and the absence of nuclear power in the west won't stop another regime from building really stupid power plants.
This is one of the reasons nuclear is so expensive: apparently every power plant is n
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No one claims this. Literally no one. /. /. is full with posts explaining: it was not so bad ...
You are not long enough on
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If I'm not long enough on slashdot, then no one has made a post claiming that in 20 years.
Anyway, I think you are making it up.
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Nonsense like an earthquake so powerful it moved the entire planet and one of the largest tsunamis in history and there was STILL a single death due to radiation exposure? And that was a decades old non-failsafe reactor?
The fact is nuclear has less deaths per kwh than anything else out there and if it weren't deliberately sabotaged at every turn we would have almost eliminated fossil fuel generation many years ago. Instead we've done nothing but pour money into the bottomless pit of environmentally catastro
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But the op specifically said Chernobyl.
Anyhow there's a fair lack of realism going around.
Fact is in engineering, lives have a monetary value. It can't be otherwise because both risk and resources are finite, and money is the only way we have of trading off.
You can argue that people are less tolerant of nuclear risks than other risks. Or you can save the effort and just cite something like this https://www.onr.org.uk/media/v... [onr.org.uk]
You can argue that the cost of nuclear is too high, and the extra money spent isn
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Even if I were to accept everything you say, the fact that Fukushima is costing Japan half a trillion Euro equivalent, maybe more, and even with that spend they didn't properly compensate the victims or decontaminate and rebuild the affected areas... Japan, being the third largest economy in the world, can't really afford it, so you can see why other countries are even less keen on that risk.
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Why not say what you mean up front?
You are not going to sway me with emotive arguments.
Do you know how many people have died from coal related deaths? Thing is or never gets reported because it's background noise, live traffic deaths despite being huge. Nuclear has large, rare incidents, and is one of the few industries which is made to amount for much more of outs problems.
So why coal? Well, how do you make steel without it? And guess which generating tech needs least of it.
No one will ever be compensated
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Be that as it may, annual deaths in Europe due to air pollution by industry and transportation is estimated at around half a million people. Sure, that's not due to an industrial disaster, but one number results in a higher death and reduced health count than the other. Chernobyl sucked and sucks, but so do other things.
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Show us where you got this 500 billion number from. Or stop spamming us with your lies.
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This cost is over the entire lifetime of Germany as far as I can see. In the meantime, they will have also spent a very large amount of cash (probably 500 billion) on lignite and associated infrastructure, which is why they have a high CO2 production value. It is that expenditure that is a failure.
Examples of countries decarbonizing their electricity grid with wind and solar: the South Australia grid and Scotland. The latter is now at >95% renewable, and should become a net exporter soon. And this is lar
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In 2023, Germany was emitting 380 g of CO2 per kWh electricity, while France was emitting 65 g per kWh electricity. It's still not good, but Germany started out from 750 g of CO2 per kWh in 1990 and ended all nuclear power generation during that time. Germany managed to offset all nuclear power generation, and halving the amount of CO2 per kWh at the same time.
If you want to use Germany as a counterexample, you have to argue more carefully.
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But apparently, where you are from, everything is static, and nothing ever moves.
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Re:Nuclear's time was 40+ years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Chernobyl wasn't that bad?
We had to check that our sheep were not radioactive for many years after. And this was in the UK. It's not next door.
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And were the sheep radioactive? We could have any number of irrational fears about nuclear energy that increase the costs of the technology, but that doesn't make nuclear energy less safe. Yes, there is / was uncertainty around the impacts of Chernobyl, but by and large, the fears were much worse than the outcomes that transpired.
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Switzerland refrained from eating mushrooms for a few years. That's about it.
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In south Germany wild boar and mushrooms from the forests are in general not considered safe to eat.
In other words: their radiation levels are above the limits that are legal to sell in a shop or restaurant.
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"Subsidize" them by taking away all the bullshit hoops that the FUD people keep insisting on.
Do note: this isn't the cost of ACTUAL safety systems put in place, this is all the extra crap the people building have to do, that doesn't have any impact on the actual building of the plant. I'm talking about the useless shit that the FUD believers cram into every step of building a plant that just drives up the cost to 2-3X what building a safe generation plant should cost.
You then get :
1: plants that actually ge
Flailing (Score:5, Informative)
$40B comes out to a capital LCOE of $0.16/kWh. In rough terms that means the total wholesale operating cost of energy is in the $0.35-0.40/kWh range. (That assumes that decommissioning cost is equal in dollar terms to the construction cost today, 30 years from now.)
If you want to make nuclear viable you need to get that capital LCOE down by about 75%. You can save about half that with extremely streamlined permitting process, but the balance of the delta needs to come from construction efficiency improvements. The only way to do that is with less material (less total mass) and tremendous simplification of systems.
Then you are going to need to improve operations and fuel cost to get them down as well, likely by about 50%.
This isn't an easy problem to solve, and it is not something that is magically going to happen building another 12 of them. (Using the same construction requirements and assuming that materials and labor rates remain constant you might gain 10-15% efficiency after 12.)
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We can also try building more than say 2 every 40 years, you have to continue doing something to refine a process. I actually don't think it is a hard process, as you mentioned this is more of an issue of political will and we're only starting getting some of that recently
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If you are lucky that will reduce construction cost by 10%. You need more fundamental changes. You are plagued by mega-project syndrome with any reactor today-- a Bechtel or whomever cannot pull off 10 at the same time because of the capital risk and duration. You really need modular prefabrication of major components, so that things can be automated more, but radiation poses a few challenges there.
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But that's what you need to learn by doing, everything is great on paper until you start building it. Your exact scenario though is why I really think we should just accept that these things are going to be large public projects, pretty much what TVA does. You correctly mention the private capital just isn't there especially today when renewables give such a faster ROI so let the market do that and the public can do nuclear. I think the French whose system is not perfect but they have the right idea. Jus
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Yeah I was really buoyed by the strong words from the Energy Secretary and I think it was refreshing to say, effectively "yeah this one was a rough go but it's done and it'll be here for decades, let's get better and make more" and then announcement of funding right after.
Also something got me thinking with that, and this is just like my pocket theory here, that for a portion of the turnaround in recent years was, in a quite ironic sense, the Chernobyl miniseries because while not perfect in it's science wa
Re: Flailing (Score:2)
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The steam side is a solved problem though. It has a thermodynamic ceiling on efficiency, but with a cheap source of high temperature heat that is not a problem. The issue though comes down to module size; a 1GW block is much harder to work with... until you find a way to solve the underlying construction issues.
Fusion will replace fission (Score:2)
But not before renewables + batteries have already fully deployed.
So, possibly, even if fusion is everything it's hoped to be, it won't see commercial success due to renewables arriving first.
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Do you think solar could see mass adoption. by the 2050s? I doubt it. Solar cell production has peaked and that's a rate in terms of annual GWh nowhere near enough to replace all the coal plants until about 100 years. IF funding isn't pulled .. as it always has happened to fusion .. then it could be viable by the 2050s. (2030 - ITER proves fusion is viable as an energy source, 2040s DEMO proves fusion is viable economically, 2050s for-profit commercial reactors start being built). This is all based on fundi
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World solar production capacity is nearing terawatt per year (mostly China obviously). Whether it's peaked depends on whether demand has peaked. Low hanging fruit is gone (ie. saving on gas and to a lesser extent coal when the sun shines) and western nations are balking at investing in the necessary TWh scale storage ... but if they want to get to net zero they have to commit, full nuclear or full renewable with massive storage. They aren't complementary and both require massive investments.
At 1 TW installe
Go all-in on fusion instead (Score:2)
Perspective? (Score:2)
I have followed nuclear power with interest ever since high school (long story). I always thought that if used responsibly, it could have been (and still may be) a source of energy that under certain circumstances can be a good (though not really long-term) element of energy policy. Of course, there is a lot of dumb-assery and criminal behavior all over the world. Humans do not do "responsible" really well, do we?
Why do I say "perspective"? Right now around 7 million people a year are estimated to die from
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BTW, when I remember how Germany pulled the plug on nuclear in a panic after Fukushima
Then you remember wrong. You could google it though.
and then compensated by burning a lot more lignite
Then you remember double wrong.
Germany is probably on the lowest lignite burning level, it ever was.
Flailing (Score:3)
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene... [eia.gov].
1-2 new plants coming online since the 90s isn't a hugely growing industry.
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https://www.eia.gov/todayinene... [eia.gov].
1-2 new plants coming online since the 90s isn't a hugely growing industry.
This is like inventing a new thing and calling it the "fastest growing thing". Yeah1-2 plants coming online in the past few years is HUGE GROWTH, ... compared to the preceding 30 years ;-)
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Lol, true, I suppose. It's all a matter of perspective!
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Of course they are and there are reasons for that.
- the cost of everything has gone up
- materials
- labor
- land
- regulations are stronger now, adds cost
- lawsuits
- environmental requirements
It just is what it is. No opinion offered on whether any of those are good or bad.
Nuclear or renewable, take a pick (Score:2)
Net zero in 2050 requires central planning and renewable and nuclear aren't complementary, just commit ... a TW of nuclear or a couple TW of solar with a PWh of seasonal hydrogen storage and a TW of hydrogen generators/electrolyzers.
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"central planning" ? No it doesn't need central planning. Not unless you want it to fail and benefit a select few.
Portable Nuclear (Score:2)
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Since the primary consumer of time and money with nuclear construction is the repeated lawsuits trying to stop it,
You want to tell us, a law suit hindering a 30billion construction of a plant costs more than 15billion? Aka is more than half the cost?
Hm ...
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People would rather have a simple intuitive explanation than one supported by actual data.
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Litmus test (Score:2)
No? Then it's flailing hopelessly because the above is the absolute bar-is-a-bump-in-the-floor minimum for any sort of large building project like this to not be flailing horribly.
Desantis & Florida (Score:2)
If Desantis wants to do something useful for a change, he should push to get nuclear power plants built near Clewiston, Palatka, Cedar Key, and EPCOT.
Afaik, Cedar Key is already approved as a site... Florida just needs to convince FPL's nuclear-plant subsidiary to go through with it. Cedar Key was *supposed* to be the replacement for the damaged Crystal River reactor.
EPCOT's nuclear plant was promised ~50 years ago. Hold Disney to it.
Palatka was originally approved as a site, then they gave in to the NIMBYs
Is that economical? (Score:3)
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“ Our energy and ecological future involves nuclear power” , as well as “our industrial and strategic future (), says Mr. Macron. Without civil nuclear power, no military nuclear power, without military nuclear power, no civil nuclear power ,” whether in research or production.
I don't see that as a controversial statement, are you just talking about the headline? Also I don't think it's any mystery why the president of a European nation might be thinking about their military capabil
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France has currently probably the worst power-grid in Europe. They frequently need to buy electricity at peak-hours, which drives prices up all over Europe. They also narrowly avoided blackouts in the last two winters. Apparently, the US media is systematically lying about that or not reporting it at all.
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narrowly avoided blackout
Another way to say that is "didn't have blackouts"
I don't know what CNN reports on France's but these are the things i've seen but I am happy to read the ones you have.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/2... [www.rfi.fr]
https://www.reuters.com/market... [reuters.com]
https://www.euronews.com/busin... [euronews.com]
Everybodies got problems but co/2 per capita is a metric to consider for as wealthy as France is they are doing great.
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narrowly avoided blackout
Another way to say that is "didn't have blackouts"
Only for somebody terminally stupid.
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A blackout is a binary thing, did they happen or not? This bit is like 30 years old! [youtube.com]
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The promise of cheap energy never materialized with France's nuclear fleet. While energy costs to consumers are kept low, it's done through subsidy, not through the generation being cheap.
Now those reactors are reaching EOL and can't cope with climate change, their choice is to either build more or them, or switch to renewables. The French nationalized energy company which operates its nuclear plants, EDF, is a basket case. Nearly went bankrupt trying to build new nuclear plants in other countries, only to
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Is CO2 per capita a measurement we care about is the question. If the answer is yes then France ahs to be looked at as some sort of success. I don't know what the promises of cheap energy were or who made them but that's sortof irrelvant, fact of the matter is per capita France has about 3x less then the US in CO2 and a large nuclear fleet is a big part of that (not all) and their electricyt costs are competitive.
Also saying the EDF had to be "bailed out" is a bit normatively loaded, that's like saying we
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I suppose the question is, is the French model an affordable way to get to net zero? I would say it isn't.
As for needing a bailout, EDF was part nationalized, but was supposed to be a going concern as a business, not a burden on the French taxpayer. It ran out of money due to the ballooning cost of building those nuclear plants, and the French government had to buy it do that it didn't default on what it owed.
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Only that this is the literal, well documented truth. Obviously somebody as dumb as you are cannot see that and instead clings to his hallucinations. Pathetic.
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Relying on insults is a clear sign that your argument doesn't hold. You know it, but the cognitive dissonance is too great. Which is why you are mad. Poor thing.
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Nope. "Dumb" in your case is not an insult. It is just an accurate description. You are in deep denial about reality.
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France has been the top net electricity in Europe for the past 50 years. Except 2022, as I know you like to point it out; and even then, it was only to cover 4% of its demand. One of the best track record in Europe, and with one of the lowest CO2 emitting grid in Europe (minus the few countries that have enough hydro to cover their needs).
They also have cheaper rates than Germany, and better reliability. And did I mention they don't have to burn coal or lignite?
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So you are now going for just blatantly pusing extreme lies? Figures. You should maybe have a look at who invented and refined the "Big Lie" approach you are currently using.
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Yes yes, we know. It's all a big conspiracy. The data is lying, the truth is elsewhere.
Seriously, if you have data to show, do it.
At least, you live by your sign.
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You are the one making false claims here. You got any proof? Nope? Well.
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What gave France the choice of nuclear in the 1970s was its African colonies, Niger in particular. They've diversified since then, mostly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. [lemonde.fr] I'm sure you can see the incoming problem: Russia continues to loom over the economies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and recently became Niger's new best friend. [pbs.org] Maybe Canada and Australia can make up the difference?
Of course there's also the problem that if everything in the world was switched to nuclear we'd run out of economical sourc
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Resources are mined where they are available and economically. If France is stupid they'll piss off the locals more then have already historically, if they are smart this relationship is good for both countries. And yes places like Canada, Australia and the United States should all invest in their domestic supplies.
I have no doubt that if there is suddenly an increased demand for uranium it will be found, just like we have been with lithium, crude oil, natural gas, copper, gold, it goes on an on. We're ne
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The Niger is well within their rights to do what they feel is in their best interests, obviously they should stick to any legal contracts they have signed onto with whomever. The question for Niger is if they are getting a fair shake for their resources. Politics is politics but as they say money walks so if those private companies are paying for access Niger has no real reason to stop that relationship if they are benefitting. . Welcome to why free trade has led to a longer period of peace then in histo
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There is a vast amount of uranium dissolved in the ocean. Getting at this would require processing a lot of seawater, BUT...we're about to start doing exactly this desalinating water for coastal cities that are starting to run dry. This specific application is itself going to require a lot of newly generated power.`
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Well the thing nobody ever seems to remember to mention is that the enormouse amount of power to pull resources from seawater (which are numerous, not just uranium) would likely be nuclear power in the first place so while I agree it's possible it's a bit presumptuous I agree. I would say it's viable in like a year 2050+ type of way
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I was not alive in the 60s. How would I have had excuses back then? Also, do you think Macron is blatantly lying on Le Monde? If so, you should have your head examined.
As to countries with nuclear power not having nuclear weapons, obviously you do not understand what a "capability" is.
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...Some day we'll look at the ruins of wind farms and thousands of acres of solar panels leeching toxic metals into the dead land below,
Not sure what "toxic metals" you're thinking of. The solar panels themselves are primarily silicon cells, with glass superstrate. You're maybe thinking the copper wiring?
Re:Nuclear the only viable option going forward (Score:4, Informative)
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I think your probably giving the above too much credit, just look at their comments on wind power.
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I think your probably giving the above too much credit, just look at their comments on wind power.
You're probably right.
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I assume the parent is talking about the old style panels, made with things like gallium arsenide,
Gallium arsenide was never used for terrestrial panels-- way way to expensive. GaAs, and the triple-junction cells based on GaAs on germanium, are the mainstay of space solar arrays, though.
cadmium telluride
A lot of people worked for a long time on thin-film cells, including CdTe, because in principle it could be very cheap (because it's thin and easy to deposit), but crystalline silicon got so good and so cheap that it's simply been squeezed out of the market. There's one CdTe array manufacture left.
You do have to keep in
That's just not true (Score:3, Insightful)
Moreover it would be stupid to take the limited amount of money we have to invest in renewable energy and blow it on extremely expensive nuclear projects when we have plenty of room to be building wind and solar capacity that is bot
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And these studies are obvious nonsense fabricated by activists.
The billionaire class doesn't think so (Score:2)
Also there aren't really any anti-nucular activists. You've got a handful of NIMBYs like me and you've got the entire oil industry but you won't find any environmentalists seriously attacking nuclear power except the way I did by saying we should spend our limited money on the much more effective wind and
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Ultimately you need source diversity and excess capacity to cover unusual events. I am not pro or anti on nuclear, but if you want it to work we need efficient SMRs that can load follow and be built cost effectively, ideally in locations that can use district heating. Going all wind/hydro/solar + battery pushes you into a capacity factor for wind and solar of around 5%, compared to today with ~18% for solar and 50% for wind.
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It will be entering a critical phase soon.
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No +5 Funny? You guys don't get it? Imploding .. critical ? Get it?