OT: Why is Germany so (apparently) stupid to give up nuclear

[bitrex]

On 9/18/19 12:45 PM, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 12:02:37 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/18/19 11:33 AM, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 10:55:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/09/2019 15:40, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
John Doe wrote:
I keep wondering why Germany is being misled into giving up nuclear
power. Something is wrong, that's obvious. Not saying it portends
something else, but it could.

[...]

At the time, the world, Germany included, was well underway to
re-embrace nuclear power, to reduce CO2 emission and all that.

And then Fukushima happened.

Although tsunamis and powerful earthquakes are very much less common in
Germany they do have quite a hefty and influential green movement.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/germany.aspx

Ironically because of nuclear shutdowns they are now burning vast
quantities of dirty lignite in inefficient former East German power
plants to make the bulk of their electricity and despoiling the
countryside with ugly open cast lignite/brown coal mines.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/rich-seams-the-fight-over-east-germany-s-brown-coal-reserves-a-472816.html

France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now.
They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx


Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear
contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only
metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while
France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that
generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of
France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.



Where you get the water to cool reactors from is a problem in many areas
of the world. 40% of France's fresh water reserves go to cooling their
reactors before anyone else gets it.

Build the rectors on the cost, so there is plenty of cooling water.


A problem with fission power and why you can't build 'em fast among
other reasons is every plant is different and has to be engineered to
its particular location and environmental circumstances because of the
coolant constraints. Fossil fuel plants are more "modular" and solar
even more so.

You can build fossil fuel-fired power plants and wind farms and solar
farms in all sorts of sizes from small to huge depending on
environmental constraints. Water-cooled fission plants are only
financially viable to build in one size, huge, so they have to be
hand-crafted each time with respect to where they are.

The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly
political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so
for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

One can see it as that the public are all scardey-pants terrified of
things they don't understand, or that the public has a more accurate
assessment of the risks than the profit-driven nuclear industry, who
despite the public actually giving them numerous chances to prove them
wrong seems to manage to fuck things up with regularity and scare the
crap out of them once again every decade or two.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 9/18/19 12:45 PM, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 12:02:37 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/18/19 11:33 AM, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 10:55:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/09/2019 15:40, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
John Doe wrote:
I keep wondering why Germany is being misled into giving up nuclear
power. Something is wrong, that's obvious. Not saying it portends
something else, but it could.

[...]

At the time, the world, Germany included, was well underway to
re-embrace nuclear power, to reduce CO2 emission and all that.

And then Fukushima happened.

Although tsunamis and powerful earthquakes are very much less common in
Germany they do have quite a hefty and influential green movement.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/germany.aspx

Ironically because of nuclear shutdowns they are now burning vast
quantities of dirty lignite in inefficient former East German power
plants to make the bulk of their electricity and despoiling the
countryside with ugly open cast lignite/brown coal mines.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/rich-seams-the-fight-over-east-germany-s-brown-coal-reserves-a-472816.html

France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now.
They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx


Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear
contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only
metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while
France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that
generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of
France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.



Where you get the water to cool reactors from is a problem in many areas
of the world. 40% of France's fresh water reserves go to cooling their
reactors before anyone else gets it.

Build the rectors on the cost, so there is plenty of cooling water.


A problem with fission power and why you can't build 'em fast among
other reasons is every plant is different and has to be engineered to
its particular location and environmental circumstances because of the
coolant constraints. Fossil fuel plants are more "modular" and solar
even more so.

You can build fossil fuel-fired power plants and wind farms and solar
farms in all sorts of sizes from small to huge depending on
environmental constraints. Water-cooled fission plants are only
financially viable to build in one size, huge, so they have to be
hand-crafted each time with respect to where they are.

The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly
political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so
for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

Folks whose other alternative is freezing in the dark (in a Siberian
Arctic winter, no less) tend to be more realistic about these things.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 12:45:33 PM UTC-4, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 12:02:37 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/18/19 11:33 AM, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 10:55:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/09/2019 15:40, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
John Doe wrote:
I keep wondering why Germany is being misled into giving up nuclear
power. Something is wrong, that's obvious. Not saying it portends
something else, but it could.

[...]

At the time, the world, Germany included, was well underway to
re-embrace nuclear power, to reduce CO2 emission and all that.

And then Fukushima happened.

Although tsunamis and powerful earthquakes are very much less common in
Germany they do have quite a hefty and influential green movement.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/germany.aspx

Ironically because of nuclear shutdowns they are now burning vast
quantities of dirty lignite in inefficient former East German power
plants to make the bulk of their electricity and despoiling the
countryside with ugly open cast lignite/brown coal mines.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/rich-seams-the-fight-over-east-germany-s-brown-coal-reserves-a-472816.html

France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now.
They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx


Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear
contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only
metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while
France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that
generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of
France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.



Where you get the water to cool reactors from is a problem in many areas
of the world. 40% of France's fresh water reserves go to cooling their
reactors before anyone else gets it.

Build the rectors on the cost, so there is plenty of cooling water.


A problem with fission power and why you can't build 'em fast among
other reasons is every plant is different and has to be engineered to
its particular location and environmental circumstances because of the
coolant constraints. Fossil fuel plants are more "modular" and solar
even more so.

You can build fossil fuel-fired power plants and wind farms and solar
farms in all sorts of sizes from small to huge depending on
environmental constraints. Water-cooled fission plants are only
financially viable to build in one size, huge, so they have to be
hand-crafted each time with respect to where they are.

The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly
political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so
for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

The US Army built some small reactors. One was at Ft. Greely Alaska. It had no cooling towers. The cooling water was pumped back into the ground near the base's drinking water wells. It was shut down just before I arrived, but they had continued to operate it for over a year with leaking pipes in the heat exchangers, so they were heating the buildings with radioactive steam, ans well as using it in the base laundry. They are just now working on plans to dismantle the site, after over 45 years. There are reports of higher than normal cases of Thyroid cancer among the soldiers and family memebrs who were stationed there from the mid '70s, onward.

 

[whit3rd]

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 3:24:59 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:

On 9/18/19 6:17 PM, bitrex wrote:

like at a basic level the public might expect the nuclear power industry
to not have a long history of repeated safety standard violations and
maintenance problems and ...

Oh, I get it! It's a purity test. Automobile drivers kill forty thousand folk
a year, nuclear industry hovers around the same accident rate as other
industries, but 'standard violations' are all carefully documented and
the documents trotted out for occasional display.

In Iran, papers from the US embassy are occasionally waved at a camera,
accompanied by accusations of collusion/espionage/impure-thinking.

Noone ever passes a purity test, or is found 'not guilty' in a kangaroo court.
The public only ought to apply judgement when empaneled into a jury and given
a thorough look at facts, and there's a good reason for that.

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 6:17:47 PM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:

On 9/18/19 12:45 PM, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:
On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 12:02:37 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/18/19 11:33 AM, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 10:55:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/09/2019 15:40, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
John Doe wrote:
I keep wondering why Germany is being misled into giving up nuclear
power. Something is wrong, that's obvious. Not saying it portends
something else, but it could.

[...]

At the time, the world, Germany included, was well underway to
re-embrace nuclear power, to reduce CO2 emission and all that.

And then Fukushima happened.

Although tsunamis and powerful earthquakes are very much less common in
Germany they do have quite a hefty and influential green movement.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/germany.aspx

Ironically because of nuclear shutdowns they are now burning vast
quantities of dirty lignite in inefficient former East German power
plants to make the bulk of their electricity and despoiling the
countryside with ugly open cast lignite/brown coal mines.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/rich-seams-the-fight-over-east-germany-s-brown-coal-reserves-a-472816.html

France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now.
They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx


Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear
contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only
metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while
France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that
generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of
France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.



Where you get the water to cool reactors from is a problem in many areas
of the world. 40% of France's fresh water reserves go to cooling their
reactors before anyone else gets it.

Build the rectors on the cost, so there is plenty of cooling water.


A problem with fission power and why you can't build 'em fast among
other reasons is every plant is different and has to be engineered to
its particular location and environmental circumstances because of the
coolant constraints. Fossil fuel plants are more "modular" and solar
even more so.

You can build fossil fuel-fired power plants and wind farms and solar
farms in all sorts of sizes from small to huge depending on
environmental constraints. Water-cooled fission plants are only
financially viable to build in one size, huge, so they have to be
hand-crafted each time with respect to where they are.

The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly
political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so
for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

One can see it as that the public are all scardey-pants terrified of
things they don't understand, or that the public has a more accurate
assessment of the risks than the profit-driven nuclear industry, who
despite the public actually giving them numerous chances to prove them
wrong seems to manage to fuck things up with regularity and scare the
crap out of them once again every decade or two.

That's a pretty fair assessment. The thing is we have tried our hardest to not have any accidents and yet in the 50 years we've been using nuclear power it has had a few serious problems, none of which should have happened. I think I've run the numbers here before. When the lifetime of the plants and the quantity are accounted for, the risk of another accident is not trivial. It may not be 50-50, but it is worse than 1 in 100 even.

The worst, however, is yet to come as the plants age and even more so, the waste fuel mounts up. We just don't have any viable plant to store the waste long enough to assure it won't be a problem.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

It's interesting that nukes provide "district heat" in some countries. You have to be close to do that and here I believe most nukes are not close to even small towns. Three mile island was on a... well, island! North Anna is nearest to Mineral, VA which has a population of maybe a few hundred while the county seat is a few thousand population and is some 10 miles away.

--

Rick C.

+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[bitrex]

On 9/18/19 7:05 PM, Michael Terrell wrote:

A problem with fission power and why you can't build 'em fast among
other reasons is every plant is different and has to be engineered to
its particular location and environmental circumstances because of the
coolant constraints. Fossil fuel plants are more "modular" and solar
even more so.

You can build fossil fuel-fired power plants and wind farms and solar
farms in all sorts of sizes from small to huge depending on
environmental constraints. Water-cooled fission plants are only
financially viable to build in one size, huge, so they have to be
hand-crafted each time with respect to where they are.

The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly
political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so
for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

The US Army built some small reactors. One was at Ft. Greely Alaska. It had no cooling towers. The cooling water was pumped back into the ground near the base's drinking water wells. It was shut down just before I arrived, but they had continued to operate it for over a year with leaking pipes in the heat exchangers, so they were heating the buildings with radioactive steam, ans well as using it in the base laundry. They are just now working on plans to dismantle the site, after over 45 years. There are reports of higher than normal cases of Thyroid cancer among the soldiers and family memebrs who were stationed there from the mid '70s, onward.

Not uncommon for many types of power plants to have cooling towers, and
for nuclear plants built prior to the late 60s or early 70s to not have
them, e.g.:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Rowe_Nuclear_Power_Station>

cooling towers were the filthy green's fault!

 

[bitrex]

On 9/18/19 9:14 PM, Rick C wrote:

One can see it as that the public are all scardey-pants terrified of
things they don't understand, or that the public has a more accurate
assessment of the risks than the profit-driven nuclear industry, who
despite the public actually giving them numerous chances to prove them
wrong seems to manage to fuck things up with regularity and scare the
crap out of them once again every decade or two.

That's a pretty fair assessment. The thing is we have tried our hardest to not have any accidents and yet in the 50 years we've been using nuclear power it has had a few serious problems, none of which should have happened. I think I've run the numbers here before. When the lifetime of the plants and the quantity are accounted for, the risk of another accident is not trivial. It may not be 50-50, but it is worse than 1 in 100 even.

The worst, however, is yet to come as the plants age and even more so, the waste fuel mounts up. We just don't have any viable plant to store the waste long enough to assure it won't be a problem.

Yeah they never even figured out good answers to some of the basic
engineering problems of the tech before they set about running the ball
with it.

among other things that alone doesn't do much to convince the hoi polloi
that the nuke industry doesn't actually run on hubris vs. uranium.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

It's interesting that nukes provide "district heat" in some countries. You have to be close to do that and here I believe most nukes are not close to even small towns. Three mile island was on a... well, island! North Anna is nearest to Mineral, VA which has a population of maybe a few hundred while the county seat is a few thousand population and is some 10 miles away.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, September 19, 2019 at 1:33:08 AM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 10:55:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/09/2019 15:40, Jeroen Belleman wrote:

<snip>

France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now..
They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx

Of course, not all their nuclear reactors are working

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/10/french-energy-firm-edf-warns-of-faulty-welding-in-its-nuclear-reactors.html

at one point twenty of them were shut down because steel castings inside the reactor turned out to be defective.

Trader4's source - a nuclear industry trade association - doesn't talk about this.

Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear
contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only
metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while
France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that
generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of
France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.

Trder4's nuclear trade association lists fifty as "under construction". The examples in the US and the UK all seem to be way behind schedule and way over budget, and likely to be cancelled, but that's not the kind of information a trade association puts out.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[bitrex]

On 9/18/19 6:35 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:

The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly
political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so
for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors  built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

Folks whose other alternative is freezing in the dark (in a Siberian
Arctic winter, no less) tend to be more realistic about these things.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

there's no money in fission power generation and never was without heavy
government support and subsidization (like a bunch of other industries
you could mention.)

As a free-market enterprise where it didn't have the luxury of shoving
most its liabilities onto other people trying to stand on its own merits
it falls down bad.

If there had ever been huge billions of easy dollars to be made off the
biz with no greater intrinsic risk to investors and the financial sector
than a gas-fired plant no amount of regulation or environmental-lobbying
(with the $5 they have available to spend on lobbying) could have ever
stopped them from springing up like weeds.

Just a high-risk money pit of an industry that could never really
deliver the goods and now finds it convenient to blame the dirty hippies
for their failures as usual.

 

[bitrex]

On 9/18/19 7:19 PM, whit3rd wrote:

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 3:24:59 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
On 9/18/19 6:17 PM, bitrex wrote:

like at a basic level the public might expect the nuclear power industry
to not have a long history of repeated safety standard violations and
maintenance problems and ...

Oh, I get it! It's a purity test. Automobile drivers kill forty thousand folk
a year, nuclear industry hovers around the same accident rate as other
industries, but 'standard violations' are all carefully documented and
the documents trotted out for occasional display.

In Iran, papers from the US embassy are occasionally waved at a camera,
accompanied by accusations of collusion/espionage/impure-thinking.

Noone ever passes a purity test, or is found 'not guilty' in a kangaroo court.
The public only ought to apply judgement when empaneled into a jury and given
a thorough look at facts, and there's a good reason for that.

Yeah people in the biz tend to take the same persecuted-egomaniac
attitude when peasants object to allowing the for-profit nuclear
industry total control over determining whether they live or die today;
it doesn't do a thing to re-enforce any confidence among the peasants
that biz-people actually know what they're doing.

 

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 18:24:53 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/18/19 6:17 PM, bitrex wrote:

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

One can see it as that the public are all scardey-pants terrified of
things they don't understand, or that the public has a more accurate
assessment of the risks than the profit-driven nuclear industry, who
despite the public actually giving them numerous chances to prove them
wrong seems to manage to fuck things up with regularity and scare the
crap out of them once again every decade or two.

like at a basic level the public might expect the nuclear power industry
to not have a long history of repeated safety standard violations and
maintenance problems and pretty good track record of hiring a fair
number of drunks and morons to run the plants day-to-day.

The nuclear industry hasn't met the basic competence tests yet

Most of those involved in the nuclear boom have retired.

Now that they try to restart the nuclear industry, new young people
must be hired and trained. There are also new people on the licensing
side, who are much more cautious than their predecessors. demanding
long paper trails on everything. This is driving up the cost of first
new nuclear reactors.

In the future the builders and regulators start learning the habits of
each other, thus the price of new reactors is going to drop from the
current high prices, without jeopardizing nuclear safety.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, September 19, 2019 at 2:04:21 PM UTC+10, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 18:24:53 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/18/19 6:17 PM, bitrex wrote:

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

One can see it as that the public are all scardey-pants terrified of
things they don't understand, or that the public has a more accurate
assessment of the risks than the profit-driven nuclear industry, who
despite the public actually giving them numerous chances to prove them
wrong seems to manage to fuck things up with regularity and scare the
crap out of them once again every decade or two.

like at a basic level the public might expect the nuclear power industry
to not have a long history of repeated safety standard violations and
maintenance problems and pretty good track record of hiring a fair
number of drunks and morons to run the plants day-to-day.

The nuclear industry hasn't met the basic competence tests yet

Most of those involved in the nuclear boom have retired.

Now that they try to restart the nuclear industry, new young people
must be hired and trained. There are also new people on the licensing
side, who are much more cautious than their predecessors. demanding
long paper trails on everything. This is driving up the cost of first
new nuclear reactors.

In the future the builders and regulators start learning the habits of
each other, thus the price of new reactors is going to drop from the
current high prices, without jeopardizing nuclear safety.

Solar cells are likely to drop to a quarter of their current price as the they go from generating about 1% of the world's power needs (as they do at present) to most of it.

Nuclear power is already more expensive than solar, and isn't going to get much cheaper. It's not going to be competitive.

Solar generation needs storage to let it cover the whole day. Some exists -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

has been around since 1984. Snowy 2 in Australia will build on existing hydroelectric plant.

Some will be battery based like Musk's battery in South Australia, though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

is probably a better technology, and one now being built-up in China will have nearly twice the power of Musk's unit, and store about six times as much energy.

There are other options.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, September 19, 2019 at 12:04:21 AM UTC-4, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 18:24:53 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/18/19 6:17 PM, bitrex wrote:

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

One can see it as that the public are all scardey-pants terrified of
things they don't understand, or that the public has a more accurate
assessment of the risks than the profit-driven nuclear industry, who
despite the public actually giving them numerous chances to prove them
wrong seems to manage to fuck things up with regularity and scare the
crap out of them once again every decade or two.

like at a basic level the public might expect the nuclear power industry
to not have a long history of repeated safety standard violations and
maintenance problems and pretty good track record of hiring a fair
number of drunks and morons to run the plants day-to-day.

The nuclear industry hasn't met the basic competence tests yet

Most of those involved in the nuclear boom have retired.

Now that they try to restart the nuclear industry, new young people
must be hired and trained. There are also new people on the licensing
side, who are much more cautious than their predecessors. demanding
long paper trails on everything. This is driving up the cost of first
new nuclear reactors.

Really? So for how many years did the NRC just shake hands and take the word of the utilities that things were right?

Such BS. When North Anna was built the license application was falsified to say there was no fault line nearby. They got caught and paid the whopping fine of $32,000. The point is they had to file paperwork and people checked it. What paperwork is required now that was not required in the 80s?

In the future the builders and regulators start learning the habits of
each other, thus the price of new reactors is going to drop from the
current high prices, without jeopardizing nuclear safety.

Total speculation based on BS. "learning the habits" That is too rich. The same paperwork will be filed. The same safety systems will be required. The same billions of dollars will have to be spent to build a full size reactor. That's why they want to increase the size of new facilities, so the various fixed costs can be amortized over more kWh.

--

Rick C.

++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 9:56:48 PM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:

On 9/18/19 6:35 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:

The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly
political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so
for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.

The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new
nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old
nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the
old reactors.

There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors.
However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S
nuclear icebreaker reactors  built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge.
The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and
should start to generate power and district heat for the local
community at the end of this year.

Folks whose other alternative is freezing in the dark (in a Siberian
Arctic winter, no less) tend to be more realistic about these things.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


there's no money in fission power generation and never was without heavy
government support and subsidization (like a bunch of other industries
you could mention.)

As a free-market enterprise where it didn't have the luxury of shoving
most its liabilities onto other people trying to stand on its own merits
it falls down bad.

So would solar.

"The federal solar tax credit, also known as the investment tax credit (ITC), allows you to deduct 30 percent of the cost of installing a solar energy system from your federal taxes. The ITC applies to both residential and commercial systems, and there is no cap on its value"

That's just the fed subsidy here, some states are also subsidizing it
on top of that. And in virtually all states, consumers of electricity
are subsidizing it because solar homes and businesses are either zero
users of grid electricity or near zero, so they are not paying for the
huge costs of the infrastructure. Half my electric bill is for that.
So, if you have a $150 a month electric bill, $75 is going to support
the grid, without which your neighbor who is paying zero, would have
no power at night, nor any way to put his excess power into the grid
for profit. Put that $75 charge onto the solar house and suddenly
the solar miracle doesn't look the same.

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 10:02:21 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Thursday, September 19, 2019 at 1:33:08 AM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 10:55:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/09/2019 15:40, Jeroen Belleman wrote:

snip

France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now.
They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx

Of course, not all their nuclear reactors are working

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/10/french-energy-firm-edf-warns-of-faulty-welding-in-its-nuclear-reactors.html

at one point twenty of them were shut down because steel castings inside the reactor turned out to be defective.

Trader4's source - a nuclear industry trade association - doesn't talk about this.

Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear
contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only
metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while
France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that
generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of
France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.

Trder4's nuclear trade association lists fifty as "under construction". The examples in the US and the UK all seem to be way behind schedule and way over budget, and likely to be cancelled, but that's not the kind of information a trade association puts out.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Wow, you finally figured out how to use google yourself, eh? Thanks
for confirming for all that what I posted, that there were over 50 nukes
under construction, was correct. It's your OPINION that because some
are behind schedule, they will be cancelled. Of course if it was some
lib govt project, which are ALWAYS behind schedule and over cost, why
then there would be no such issue there of course.

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, September 19, 2019 at 12:31:08 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 10:02:21 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, September 19, 2019 at 1:33:08 AM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 10:55:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 17/09/2019 15:40, Jeroen Belleman wrote:

snip

France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now.
They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx

Of course, not all their nuclear reactors are working

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/10/french-energy-firm-edf-warns-of-faulty-welding-in-its-nuclear-reactors.html

at one point twenty of them were shut down because steel castings inside the reactor turned out to be defective.

Trader4's source - a nuclear industry trade association - doesn't talk about this.

Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear
contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only
metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while
France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that
generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of
France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.

Trder4's nuclear trade association lists fifty as "under construction". The examples in the US and the UK all seem to be way behind schedule and way over budget, and likely to be cancelled, but that's not the kind of information a trade association puts out.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Wow, you finally figured out how to use google yourself, eh? Thanks
for confirming for all that what I posted, that there were over 50 nukes
under construction, was correct. It's your OPINION that because some
are behind schedule, they will be cancelled. Of course if it was some
lib govt project, which are ALWAYS behind schedule and over cost, why
then there would be no such issue there of course.

It is not a far leap to say some will be canceled. They canceled the reactors in South Carolina because of the massive overruns. If a company expects to spend $2 billion on a reactor and before they've committed the full $2 billion they find out it's going to be $5 or $6 billion, that's not a hard decision to make if they don't have the money. Heck, the South Carolina project implosion took down the Westinghouse nuclear company with it.

Yeah, it's very likely some of those 50 projects will also implode under the weight of the ballooning costs.

--

Rick C.

--+ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209