Apple’s support for MacOS can been shorter than their laptops longevity (the longevity of their laptops got quite bad when then tried to make them as thin as an usb-c port). So Linux support is also important there imo, and as the original post pointed out because Apple makes it so hard to for Linux to support their hardware, long-term software support may be something to think about before buying a MacBook.
MacOS is abysmal with backwards compatibility. In the music space, everything just breaks every few years. With Snow Leopard, Lion, Catalina, Sequoia. While Windows versions work forever, you're stuck having to upgrade and buy new versions of software to run on newer versions of MacOS. That's if you're lucky. Sometimes you might have no path and you need to look for new software.
I don't really understand the idea of micro-grids, how do you account for redundancy, or long term storage if inclement weather goes on for a few days? Do you just keep big fossil gas generators as backup? Moreover residential is one thing, but industrial is another.
There are a bunch of existing spreadsheets that allow you to estimate sizing of the panels and batteries.
You couple that with maps that show 'full hour equivalency' figures for your area, and add in how much extra reserve you want, using calculations based off "I want the system to handle X days of no solar" and "I want the system to be able to charge back to full, given typical household load, within Y days."
A number of folks with off-grid systems have backup generators for the odd "two weeks of rain" situation or a failure of part of the system.
It ends up being fairly efficient because you can size the charger to almost fully load the generator. A fridge uses about 1kWhr/day, which is about 15 minutes of a 3kW generator running...
I just want some big fridge/freezer manufacturer to build a "green fridge" with a 24-48VDC port and include a ~100W panel that anyone could wire up. Auto-switch to 120VAC as needed. Newer fridges run a variable drive motor, so the circuitry required has gone down.
These exist as camping fridges (ex:
https://www.amazon.com/DOMETIC-75-Liter-Portable-Refrigerato... there are also a few different full-size deals floating around. From what I've seen, these are a terrible idea for normal home use: they're eye-wateringly expensive, and for the sake of efficiency you give up a lot of nice features like air circulation and humidity control that are commonplace in far cheaper ordinary 120v AC fridges. Great for short-term use, but if you plan on keeping food fresh for weeks instead of a few days, you're gonna be annoyed.
With microgrids, you have multiple days of storage. Maybe you have emergency backup generators, but that's unlikely. There's a cost tradeoff between extra solar capacity (on cloudy days you still get energy, after all) versus the cost of storage. It's all solvable, just takes money. As transmission would. And often, 3+ days of battery storage is going to be a looooot cheaper, particularly at the load levels that a lot of microgrids will see.
Though I don't think developing areas will necessarily have large industrial needs, it turns out that industrial can be easier than residential if most of the industrial need is process heat. Because we have super super cheap tech for storing high amounts of heat for many many days. Lots of storage startups are exploring this space now.
Having multiple days of battery storage is 5-15x more expensive than thermal storage at the moment, IIRC.
Storage may not even be needed. Or be very small compared to what's used elsewhere.
Eg. the boats mentioned in article: if their 'solar roof' is big enough, and they're only used during daylight hours, they might be run without any batteries. Simply PV panels -> converter -> motor.
Likewise, some activities that use more power could be limited to those hours where solar power is plenty.
On a large AC grid it's difficult to control the consumption side. But on a small/local grid (or single-building setups), much easier: short lines between producers & consumers - literally.
You have to balance the cost of providing continuous, reliable power against the cost of losing power once in a while. The more flexible you are in your needs, the easier you can work around losing power and the cheaper you can make your power/storage system.
FLA3 is a first of a kind and is a bad example. Nuclear is working very well for France at the moment, we are back to high-availability and making a lot of money through exports.
Large-scale solar is less susceptible to these budget problems as the technology is more mature. The problems here mostly centre around power distribution and the unpredictable nature of (PV) solar power where production can go from close to zero to maximum in the span of a few seconds only to drop down to close to zero again after a few more seconds. Roof-top solar has become so popular that the distribution networks are getting overloaded on sunny days. In e.g. the Netherlands those who have roof-top solar power installations are starting to get billed for delivering power back to the network [1,2]. These problems can be solved by installing local energy storage - 'home batteries' - but these are as it stands too expensive to be economically feasible.
I live in Sweden and have a 14.5 kW solar installation on a barn roof. When I installed this I signed a 5-year contract which enables us to sell power back to the network at market rates. I do not expect us to be able to sign a similar contract once this one runs out and will have to consider adding energy storage to the system - this is why I installed a hybrid inverter when I built the system.
You are not making the point you think you are. The market conditions changed from zero interest rates to escalating material prices and the highest interest rates in decades.
Since the projects are so predictable the developers called it quits. In a perfect world they would have hedged their costs but here we are.
Have a look at Bent Flyvbjergs work. Nuclear power is only beaten by the Olympics and nuclear waste storage in risk of cost and schedule escalations. Solar and wind occupy the other end of the spectrum.
A hunch would say that the first large scale off shore wind projects in the US falls in the middle of the spectrum, but nowhere near nuclear power. As evidenced by the developers having such good grasp of the costs that they canceled the projects the instant they stopped being viable instead of continuing down a path of sunk cost fallacies.
I'm waiting on a small piece of solar park to be delivered and assigned to me and it is late by more than a year. When the planners are morons, anything can be late.
There is bridges between military and civilian nuclear, however keep in mind that nuclear reactors like the EPRs being built in the UK are designed such that producing the necessary fission products to produce weapons is basically impossible. To produce those isotopes you generally want a reactor that allows online refueling.
OTOH, it is possible to "burn" nuclear weapons in civilian reactors, as done in the Megatons to Megawatts disarmament program.
> There is bridges between military and civilian nuclear,
The article make it very clear: Without civil nuclear power the maintenance cost of the nuclear powered sub fleet would skyrocket. The civil nuclear power generation masks the costs associated with maintaining the necessary know how and industrial base to fuel military nuclear reactors.
> however keep in mind that nuclear reactors like the EPRs being built in the UK are designed such that producing the necessary fission products to produce weapons is basically impossible.
Really. Last I checked these reactors were fueled with 5% enriched uranium oxide. Plutonium is formed by transmutation of U-238 which is in ample supply in that fuel. What's really stopping the UK to claim that Plutonium is the 2022 shuttering of their only reprocessing plant in Sellafield.
It's not like they need more Plutonium anyway. The UK currently sits on a 140t civilian stockpile of Plutonium in addition to whatever the military has. The pit of a nuclear bomb (fission or fusion) requires approximately 5kg Plutonium.
It was a partial meltdown that cause 2 billion dollars in inflation adjusted damages.
While it harmed the public perception of nuclear, it was really the cost that slowed down investments in US nuclear which then had knock on effects long term. The best way to think about it is power companies had other investments they could make that had less risks even if they had lower returns. Thus the cost is balanced not vs 0 returns but in comparison to the added benefit from nuclear.
Fewer investments meant losing knowledge of how to build the things which further reduced nuclear’s advantages. Until today when nuclear just can’t compete successfully and anyone that tries sees vast cost overruns.
That is what happened, but I can't pass by without highlighting how irrational the response was.
I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy.
And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish.
Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.
2) lacks the skills to properly independently evaluate the scope of (99% of the public doesn’t own a Geiger counter, and 99.9% would be unable to quantify risks even if they did)
3) is potentially lethal
And the authorities the are supposed to be able to do #1 and #2 are caught repeatedly and obviously lying about the hazard.
It’s perfectly rational for people to get ‘irrationally’ scared. All they know is the folks who are supposed to be protecting them from this actual threat are not credible! And there is an actual threat (probably)!
You basically summarzied the reasoning of a Soviet working group investigating Chernobyl. The investigation is needed, because people, being occupied with the clean up, are reasonably scared and have no reason to believe government claims without a proper investigation.
Yes, I spent some time today reading official reports on Chernobyl, again. Hell, even the Soviet reports are damning for their own nuclear industry, calling out organizations, people and structural defficiencies. As is the IAEA. And none of those groups can even remotely be accussed of being anti-nuclear.
Couldn't you say all of the same things about coal? The risks are largely invisible, people can't assess them, and people definitely die due to its use.
Maybe there needs to be another criteria. Something like, "when the hazard comes with a scary label"?
Acid rain is pretty obvious (and easy to measure with ph strips, which are easy to find).
Nasty smog is pretty obvious.
Plumes of gunk from smoke stacks are obvious.
Now, co2 and fine particulate contamination (like say radioactive contamination from ash), yes. Those take decades to be noticable (if at all). There have been big issues because of it, statistically. But those are not well known/accepted either by the public. And certainly not the most common 'acute' problems.
Something like a release of radiation from a nuclear power plant can (and usually is), completely invisible. As is things like ingesting fallout. It usually kills years or decades later.
If you can see radiation, you're pretty much a dead man walking already.
A reactor melting down is a sudden acute incident that can release massive amounts of completely invisible radioactive elements that won't kill anyone for decades - or in weeks/months, if really bad.
By the time something has obviously gone wrong from the outside (like the core blowing up in Chernobyl, or the reactor building blowing up due to Hydrogen explosion in Fukushima), massive releases are essentially guaranteed. But still usually invisible. Cherenkov radiation 'sky beam' from chernobyl excepted. [https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-dis...]
And with a little avoidance, a lethal dose might be easy to not have! If you have good data. Without good data, it's a crap shoot though.
You lead with a questioning No - but then about half way through your post you came to a certain yes. The threat of governments not protecting us from nuclear radiation is smaller than the actual costs of governments not protecting us from coal.
And the idea that there is a risk we can't detect is silly, we radiation is easy to detect. The issue is we can't detect a threat because there appears not to be one. The risks aren't quantified because the threshold for a paniced response has been set far too low, so there is panic without a problem. And the population doesn't own Geiger counters because they are canny with their money and they don't have a reason to own one. If there was a risk, it'd be easy to make measuring devices generally available. You can buy one for less than $100.
My ‘yes’ was for long term, persistent exposure. Not an acute accident.
Panic tends to happen in acute accidents because people
don’t have time to prepare or do any of those things you’re talking about.
When the folks who are in charge during a crisis are clearly either incompetent or lying, and it’s one of those acute situations where people don’t have time to get all those things, that’s when it’s perfectly rational to be ‘irrationally worried’.
When there is a history of that kind of thing happening, that’s when it’s perfectly rational to be ‘irrationally worried’ long term.
That's exactly my point, though. Lots of people die from coal mining as an industry. That is largely invisible.
The health effects on the population at large are also significant, but largely invisible. Radiation? Also measurable, but largely invisible.
But often the same people who are fine with coal will tell me how terrible three mile island was and that it is evidence that we shouldn't expand nuclear.
Coal mining deaths are very, very visible. Coal mining is also clearly filthy and dangerous. If you don’t see it, it’s only because you’ve never seen coal mining or been to a coal mining town.
No one who mined coal - ever - was unclear on how bad for them it was. Even long before we had x-rays or modern medical anything.
Mining uranium kills people in ways that aren’t so obvious, and in proportions that didn’t make any sense even based on radiation models.
It turns out radon gets easily carried in on dust, and miners were getting 300x the radiation exposure that their Geiger counters or dosimeters showed was possible.
They also were ingesting/breathing in trace amounts of things like Polonium, which also weren’t showing up.
Radiation is scarier because it’s not obvious when it’s there, or how bad it’s going to be for someone until way after it’s too late. And it’s hard to figure out - like you really need a solid physics degree AND a medical degree to understand becquerels (or curies) vs rads vs rem, and what that actually means for a random human somewhere in a mine.
The unknown is always scarier.
Coal dust is not confusing anyone, and requires zero degrees to understand how shitty it is to breath.
Oversight that is explicitly called out throughout the repoets on the Chernobyl desaster, by both the IAEA and the USSR. Always funny how the hardest nuclear proponents can't even bothered reading the executive summaries of incident reports prepared by the nuclear industry itself.
Am I going to get push-back for saying economic policy makers should hold USSR reports with suspicion? Their ability to make rational decisions was so hopeless their civilisation collapsed. Doing the exact opposite of their economic recommendations is a strategy that is legitimately on the table.
And oversight is different from strangulation. If we could dial back the regulations to mere oversight I'd go find something else to talk about.
Who talked about "economic recommendations"? The IAEA INSAG-7 report, an update on the initial Chernobyl report INSAG-1, is a quick read (I just did it in the last 20 minutes or so).
That report, which includes official translations of two USR incident reports, is all about safety and technical aspectsbof RBMK reactors, nowhere do they talk about the future use and deploymant of nuclear power plants. After all, all those reports were written by the people being as pro-nuclear as you could be in the late 80s... Granted, people back then wrote long form documents not published on social media.
I linoed to the report elsewhere, ypu honestly should read it. Including the truely damning ones the Soviets wrote regarding safety, regulation and oversight at, and around, the Chernobyl power plant, especially affecting the extension units incl. rwaczor No. 4 which ultimately exploded.
Are you suggesting we should roll nuclear safety back to 1980s USSR standards? That is a lot more extreme than what I'm comfortable with, and sounds like it is bordering on recklessness. Those were the goons that caused Chernobyl.
I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target. Nobody is advocating ignoring 50 years of improvements in safety tech and understanding, we just shouldn't be bankrupting nuclear companies in pursuit of impossible goals.
The standard for damage should be similar to coal.
Are you intentinaly misreading my comments? Sure seems so.
If anything, Chernobyl shows us that, regardless of how low regulatory and safety standards are, economic and career interests always push people and organizations to violate them. Hence, the point would be to put even stricter regulations in place.
On the other hand, you took official incident reports as, to qupte, economic recommendations. And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.
Generally so, HN has a really problem with quantifying risks. In FMEAs, the detectability, propability and severity of a failure mode are combined to calculate a risk value. If a risk is potentially disastrous, and if nuclear accidents are disastrous they really and truely are, the underlying failure modes have to be mitigated rigirously. There is no thought of "some accidents have to be accepted for the greater good" in developing systems that can, and have, killed people. This attitude shows in each and every discussion around aerospace accidents as well... And it is the main rwason I have a hard time accepting software devs as part of the greater engineering community.
If you think someone is misreading your comments, my advice is to either shrug and accept that not everyone understands or try to explain yourself more clearly. Paranoia is a bad mindset. And energy policy is, fundamentally, about economics. We've regulated a lot of industries out of existence for no particular reason and, while that annoys me, the damage is slight compared to the huge societal costs of the crazy energy policies the Western powers have been adopting.
1980s standards of safety aren't really an acceptable option in the modern era, and you are the person laying down 1980s and 1990s reports as something to be referred to. That isn't a very good strategy IMO, we should be aiming for higher standards than they could achieve then. We have much better tech and science now. The issue is that the regulations have gone waaay overboard, we're pushing huge costs onto the nuclear industry for next to no benefit to anyone.
> And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.
I still am, the amount of oversight the nuclear industry has been subjected to is silly.
However, and this is a point I thought was going to be obvious to everyone, 1980s USSR standards are also silly. Not as silly as the modern standard, in principle, but nevertheless I think we can do better.
I'm thinking that society can maybe be talked down off the ledge and accept airline-industry levels of safety. Then we can have cheap power and historically outstanding safety and an order of magnitude less environmental damage than coal, and cheaper power prices. It'd be a great equilibrium. Regressing to the 80s is not really something I'm tabling as an option here. If the plan was to do that then the anti-nuclear people would have some respectable points.
Airline industry levels of safety? So real six sigma? I am all for that! Just as a heads up, that includes all those incidents that never make to the news. You know, a crack here, corrosion there. A failed sensor, a insignificant coolant leak...
And you know why the Chernobyl reports are so significant? Because to date it is the worst nuclear accident, also the most thoroughly investigated one. And specifically because of all the fuck ups, it allows us to see a lot of risks and issues in one single report, not spread across a half dozen or so. Added bonus, everyone knows about Chernobyl.
After all, I read it, multiple times actually. I also read some of the public reports on the 737 Max, and the basic parallels in behaviour of people and organizations are astonishing.
Just im case so, I am not saying coal is better, we absolutely should leave existing nuclear plants online as long as sofely possible. Building new ones is just not economically feasible anymore, for almost a decade so. Wind and solar are simply cheaper, and hence more profitable fprninvestors, and the environment. And until tue transition is complete, nuclear and some gas plants for covering peak demand short notice, is a viable way to go.
By the way, regarding 80s and 90s safety regulations, you do know from when most of the current nuclear fleet dates, right? And there is so much retrofitting you can do...
Humans, in general have a real problem quantifying risks, especially risks involving low probability events. I don't think this is unique to HN (although, it seems like there may be a disproportionate amount of confidence discussing these risks).
> I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target.
The problem is: what are you willing to tolerate? Here in Bavaria, many decades after Chernobyl, you still have to scan wild game meat and shrooms for radioactivity. You can't even assume that a dead zone around a disaster site will be kept secure - the Ukraine war proved that, with uneducated Russian troops disturbing the radioactive dust layer as they moved around and entrenched themselves around Chernobyl. The only place where it's really feasible to have a nuclear accident site contained reasonably well is the continental United States, everything else is way too much at risk for third-party interference.
Nuclear radiation is among the worst issues you can have... you can't see it, people aren't aware of how radiation sources look like, and it's way WAY too easy to cause serious incidents the more widespread its use is - the "orphan sources" wikipedia article is pretty damning, and a lot of that is the relatively small amounts that are used in radiotherapy devices. As a species, we can't even have these secured and protected from theft and incompetent idiots - how anyone can ask for even more usage of nuclear energy is beyond me.
In the end it seems the pro nuclear, and indirectly anti-renewables, argument seems to boil to renewables being a socialist conspiracy to sabotage the Western economy and society or something like that.
> I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables.
We have a ton of these people in Germany. "Technologieoffen" they call themselves - the reality is that they want to keep the old structure of big utilities and massive profits for shareholders alive.
> Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.
That's what a grid is for. Build a national grid with serious transfer capacities (China can do it over 1000s of km's, so the US can just as well if it wanted), and suddenly you can use East Coast solar to power the West Coast. Or here in Europe, with French and Portuguese offshore wind and solar from Northern Africa. On top of that, incentivise large consumers (data centers, heavy industry) to upgrade their processes to be able to handle dynamic load shedding, and invest into powerful gas and hydrogen fuel cell based peaker plants to cover for the very small amount in a year where neither solar, wind nor dammed hydro is enough to supply the entire country.
The serious issue with nuclear is that they cost billions of dollars to build. At the moment, in Germany 44% of the total power is generated using renewables [1], in peak times (i.e. summer) renewables account for up to 70% of the month's load [2]. The investment for NPPs can't ever be recouped at that point, which is why even small scale projects such as NuScale got the boot [3]. No matter what the pro-nuclear crowd hopes, the free market has decided against it.
Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. Hence no free market when it comes to building nuclear power plants, unfortunately. Otherwise we’d have a glut of safe electricity at amazingly low prices. Of course safety was the pretext for that overregulation but when such a complex technology has the lowest deaths per megawatt (except solar) [0] - maybe we can relax the rules a little.
I know about your suggestions and while they are all good ideas I just don’t see them widely implemented in reality for some reason. Maybe because they all require government intervention which is slow, expensive and prone to corruption from the fossil fuel lobby.
Meanwhile the non-renewable part of energy generation is made burning coal, gas and oil and spewing pollution and even radioactive particles in the air, pollution that kills millions every year. Also spewing CO2 causing climate change, e civilization-ending danger getting closer and harder to avoid.
No free market for nuclear? Interesting, but not true. Simoly kWh prices show that wind and solar were cheaper than Hinkley C already, what, 5 years ago? Since then, solar is getting cheaper every year.
On electricity markets, which in Europe only take variable coats into account, the ranking, cheapest to most expensive, is: wind and solar, hydro, coal, nuclear and oil followed by gas. So even there, in hard cold numbers, nuclear looses. Even without taking the huge fix costs of nuclear plants into account, or the long term coats like waste storage.
Why do you think even small, and potentially cheaper, reactor projects get axed?
> Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. There is no free market when it comes to nuclear, unfortunately.
And for good reason. There is no power generation that has a potential for serious damage compared to nuclear. The cost of Chernobyl was at least 235 billion dollars [1], Fukushima is estimated to end up at around 200 billion dollars [2]. The only other kind of power generation that can destroy entire swaths of land in a single strike is dammed hydro, but even the largest catastrophe to date, the Kakhovka dam destruction in Ukraine, cost only 14 billion dollars [3] - and it didn't render the affected land permanently uninhabitable and only cost the lives of about 50 people, compared to Chernobyl's death toll.
It's utter madness to risk this much money and this much destruction when there are so many different ways of getting power. Nuclear power may be the cheapest per kWh on paper, but that is only because the worst-case risk is implicitly assumed by the government without accounting for it in insurance premiums - at least the major Western countries limit operator exposure to liability claims to a fraction of the potential cost [4]. This is beyond unsustainable, it's financial russian roulette.
We will not be able to live entirely without NPPs, I agree on that one, as we need them to create Co-60 for radiotherapy sources and the nuclear weapon powers to get new feedstock to maintain the warheads, but we should try as a species to get rid of nuclear weapons anyway and only keep the minimum we need for radiotherapy and fundamental research.
> There is no power generation that has a potential for serious damage compared to nuclear
Of course there is. Good old oil, coal and gas burning. Since we’re fear-mongering on potentials here, would you like to estimate the cost of a runaway green house effect that turns the whole Earth into Venus? Climate scientists are warning we may already be beyond that point of no return. And we are still putting CO2 into the atmosphere while arguing the “potential” dangers of nuclear!
> And we are still putting CO2 into the atmosphere while arguing the “potential” dangers of nuclear!
We're building renewable generation capacity at a far greater speed (as said, Germany alone > 1GW a month...) than we ever could using nuclear power. This in turn enables us to shift residential and commercial heating to heat pumps - even assuming a gas power plant, 1 kWh of electric power replaces 4 kWh of heat power.
Let me know when you start closing fossil fuel power plants like you closed your nuclear ones. So far you’ve just restarted some coal-fueled ones until the LGN terminal is done next year. And that terminal will bring in GAS, not solar or wind. [0]
Till then - you’re selling pretty dreams, while in reality killing people and dooming the planet.
I totally forgot that now insurance, or re-insurance company is willing to insure against that risk. I am sure that is because those companies a anti-nuclear environmentalists and it has nothing to do with their risk models showing nuclear power plants to be uninsurable from a risk / profit perspective.
There we agree. There is only one problem: nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors in the West, they are not competetive with renewables anymore. So every dollar invested in new nuclear reactors is a wasted dollar. The fossil fuel lobby benegits largely from that, because every dollar going into nuclear projects, which will be completed at least a decade later if not more, is a dollar not going into renewables going online in the next year. And it is the latter that posses a problem for fossil fuel plants, not the former.
Anyway, as with EVs, capitalism has decided: wind and solar it is, that's where the money goes and not nuclear. For mostly the same reasons come 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. Profits and money.
I'm expecting the automotive industry will just start producing vehicles that aren't effected by that requirement and those will be marketed in much the same way as SUVs have become pretty much the only vehicle type available because they're permitted to emmit more CO2.
Yes, free markets have fuelled a technological boom that delivered us renewables - an incredible, completely unexpected feat. But it may be a case of too little too late.
The problem is we spent last 100 years spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instead of switching to nuclear due to the nuclear fear-mongering from environmentalists. Now we are facing Climate Change, a civilization-ending danger. And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.
The rational strategy would thus be a (slow, controlled, careful) cost-reducing deregulation and nuclear buildup in parallel with renewables and closing down of legacy plants.
But we are facing the same resistance and fear mongering from the exact same politicians and ideologues that got us into this predicament in the first place. I am pretty sure no solution can come from the same people and way of thinking that created the problem.
Fun fact: Free markets have not a lot to do with the technological leap of solar, that was mostly German subsidies for PV. In the end only Chinese companies benegited from that, but that is a different topic.
Nobody, I repeat nobody, is financing new nuclear reactors in the developed world (except specialized and military applications). The money goes, for quote a while now, into renewables and, sadly, some coal plants (which is mainly due to CO2 certificates being too dirt cheap, and making coal plants financially viable). The free market and financials decided against nuclear, as did politics in a lot of countries.
One thing you do ignore so, getting new nuclear reactors up and running takes decades in Europe, there is no such thing as a fast built out. Not even if the public and political will would be there, which it isn't. All we do achieve with argueing for new nuclear capacity is slowing the build out of wind and solar down and slow development of grid scale storage tech.
>The free market and financials decided against nuclear
I'm just trying to fully understand the position here. How do you mean "free market"? Because it seems a disproportionate amount of nuclear cost is driven by regulation. I'm not even saying that unwarranted, but it certainly seems to be very different from the colloquial definition of a "free market".
"It seems" is usually not true. Sure, nuclear is regulated. As are all other forms of electricity generation. As usual, regulation is written in blood, or in the case of nuclear three figure billions of clean-up costs after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Regulation, I might remind you, that was written by staunchly pro-nuclear organizations.
Also, just necause you have regulations doesn't mean you don't have a free market. Hence, there is a free market for nuclear electricity. Thing is, nobody wants to finance new projects (with the exception of developing countries, but those have a lot of catching up to do).
One cost nuclear power plants do not have to carry is insurance against large accidents. No insurance comoany would take on said risk, hence the state is carrying that risk. Soubds to me like a huge cost factor is taken off from nuclear power plant operators here (just to pick one example).
As said elsewhere, I'm all for keeping existing NPPs running as long as safely possible (which was the reason Germany had to shut down a couple), and shut down coal plants instead. Building new NPPs takes too long to be a viable solution, and is too expensive (and hence the lack of fubding for new ones).
The rants about regulation being rooted in safety miss the point. As I stated before, I'm not making a claim that regulation is bad or unwarranted. What I'm pushing back on is the idea that the nuclear industry operates in a "free market." Utilities, in general, do not operate in a free market in the US. They are regulated monopolies. A startup cannot just decide to start generating electricity and tie into the grid, irrespective of whether they meet all the safety regulations. Not all regulations are safety-based but rather based on economics of scale being beneficial for the consumer. That's why it's not a free market.
So while there's a lot to discuss about the relative costs of nuclear, claiming they are the result of a free market doesn't really hold water.
> Free markets have not a lot to do with the technological leap of solar, that was mostly German subsidies
The technology used to make solar panels is the same used for semiconductors. It evolved al Moore's law speed thanks to an unregulated free market for the tech industry. Same reason we enjoy a cheap supercomputer in every pocket in 2023 instead of the city’s Eniac. That’s what lack of regulation does.
What German guvernamental subsidies did was to build a lot of Solar capacity in a country with relatively little sun. I hope it works out for them, but I remember earlier this year importing nuclear electricity from France.
> And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.
It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs.
Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).
> Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind
I root for them to succeed. I do love renewables. But I know that in my country at least the waiting time today for panel purchase, installation and grid connection is over a year. However they are subsidized by the state so that adds time and bureaucracy.
The rest… I have my doubts: it’s all ideas but little reality. We’ll see in about 5 years time, I guess.
Meh, a lot of heavy industry is still running on machines from the 60s. Incentivising them to upgrade their old crap to modern times would cost them billions (which is why they've been dragging their arses so long), but it would bring a lot of consumption savings and flexibility to the grid.
I personally knownof three energy hungry places, two former employers and and one nearby, that runs those really old machines (chemical plants from before the war, WW1 in one case, graphite production of the same age and paper machines at pretty old sites) that are perfectly able for almost a decade now to adapt their production, within certain limits of course, to provide load balancing. They even go as far as adapting production to electricity prices in the spot market and speculate with their long term contract volumes. Litterally making millions, to the point production for zhe waste bin is almost profitable (which renders the whole sustainability angle moot, but I digress).
Morw of that, some storage, bio gas and hydrogen peaker plants, geo thermal and renewables and we are good to go.
JFC. I get why this is profitable, these machines have been written off financially a century ago and have been money printers ever since for that reason, but this kind of behavior should be seriously penalized - it makes competition for new companies really hard (because they have to pay down the value for new machines), and it's bad for the environment as a whole because if they're still running the same motors and control units from back then, then they are wasting a lot of electricity, most likely also emit a lot more toxic effluents than a plant with modern emission controls and mitigations would, and most likely run at lower yield rates than modern processes so they're wasting more raw materials.
The machines were old, control equipement was / is newish. The same stuff would be impossible to produce on new plants in Germany, environmental restrictions are too strict. Kazachstan, India and China are the places to go. And even China didn't want that dirty shit anymore. The old sites work because they operated for ages.
Humans are inherently bad at estimating risk when it comes to low probability events. The fact that there was an irrational response shouldn’t surprise anyone.
That irrational response was heavily fueled by fear mongering from environmental activists and financed by oil producing hostile countries.
In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism.
Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians.
Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.
This view is extremely US centrict with regards to what socialism is. It also ignores decades of history when it comes European relations with the USSR and Russia later. Mixed with some red-scare level fears it turns into pure dilussion at the end...
Funny enough I was born, grew up and I currently live in the Eastern Europe.
I could tell you so much about our history and relations with Russia. From my own experience before '90, from my parents' during communism horror years and from my grandparents' during the War and the soviet occupation after.
But all that info is freely available in books and online - for naught. You can't change the mind of the Western leftists who never had to live through an actual implementation of their pet ideology. They dream about Norway, Sweden and Denmark while never even visiting Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Communism isn't socialism. Cuba is as close to old school communism as you get nowadays, Venezuela is cleptocratic, deeply corrupt regime ehixh has not much to do with either socialism or communism. And North Korea, well, what can I say, is just North Korea.
Who talked about true communism? Communism was tried, didn't work. Your own words by the way.
There is a very important difference between communism and socialism, because the latter has been tried multiple times and worked comparatively well. You even named some of the poster child countries yourself. As I said, it is a truely US thing to equate socialism with communism, followed by touting Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea as negative examples of it.
It was a partial meltdown in a pressurized water reactor, it cannot be compared to Chernobyl, it's a completely different technology. PWRs can't explode like what happened in Chernobyl.
The containment vessel held, and most of the radiation released was in the form of xenon and krypton gas vented from the reactor.
“ It was later found that about half the core had melted, and the cladding around 90% of the fuel rods had failed,[21][76] with 5 ft (1.5 m) of the core gone, and around 20 short tons (18 t) of uranium flowing to the bottom head of the pressure vessel, forming a mass of corium.[77] The reactor vessel—the second level of containment after the cladding—maintained integrity and contained the damaged fuel with nearly all of the radioactive isotopes in the core.”
Definitely not Chernobyl, but it was a significant amount of damage to the reactor. It was totaled.
There is a lot to be said for big, strong containment vessels. Fukishima's was too small and overpressure broke it open. Chernobyl didn't have one. Three Mile Island had a good one.
Many of the "small modular reactor" schemes say they don't need a big, strong, expensive containment vessel because, reasons. You can read those arguments for NuScale in NRC documents. The prototype was going to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory, formerly the National Reactor Testing Station, which is in outer nowhere, just in case.
If I remember correctly, part of the issue has been supply chain - the equipment necessary to forge the large steel parts necessary for these containment vessels are few and far between - and now all foreign.
PWR is a "Pressurized Water Reactor" using (light) water under pressure as the primary coolant. The Chernobyl block #4 RBMK-1000 was certainly a PWR.
While the precise mechanism by which the #4 reactor in Chernobyl was destroyed in 1986 was rooted in the flawed design combined with unsafe operation, this does not mean that other reactor designs cannot fail catastrophically with loss of containment and release of radioactive material. Particularly when operated outside of their specification through operator error, accidents or a combination thereof.
RBMK is not considered a PWR because it is graphite-moderated. Most reactors are classified first by their moderator. PWRs and BWRs are both LWRs, moderated by light water, as opposed to HWRs moderated by heavy water, or graphite-moderated reactors like RBMK, or fast reactors which have no moderator at all.
Any reactor can fail and any can be operated safely. The reactivity coefficients of RBMK made it harder to control, perhaps, than a PWR. Modifications made after the Chernobyl accident have improved this.
The main issue with Chernobyl 4 was its lack of a containment building. Even so, the response was an over-reaction that made the situation worse.
RBMKs are not PWRs, full stop. You're completely wrong. These terms have clear, precise established meanings, you cannot redefine them willy nilly to suit your rhetorical needs.
> PWRs can't explode like what happened in Chernobyl.
No, sadly.
PWR's sure can explode (due to hydrogen, vapor...).
The root causes will not be identical to Chernobyl's causes, and the containment will probably limit leaks for a while (theoretically at least a few days), but they sure can explode.
It also happened at Fukushima.
Some protective measures are PACs and containment, however nothing can guarantee that an explosion won't happen, nor that dangerous radionuclides won't leak outside the plant.
To be fair, the show over dramatized the KGB angle. But yes, the Soviets knew RBMKs were not the safest design, reactor 4 was built violating safety standards, operators for the test were not properly trained and then safety procedures were ignored during the test. The official incident report is a fascinating read, and should be mandatory reading for everyone studying with goal of having the word engineer in his future job title.
What with regards to the effect of graphite tipped control rods was, IMHO, as bad as having a dramatic KGB effort to keep it secret: it was forgotten. In 1983, there was an incident in an other RBMK reactor, the HBO series claims the KGB kept it secret, in reality this happened (from the INSAG-7 report and the cited USSR investigative reports):
>> The SCSSINP Commission (Annex I, Section 1-3.8) reports that, after discov-
ery of the positive scram effect at Ignalina in 1983, the chief engineering organiza-
tion informed other organizations and all nuclear power plants with RBMK reactors
that it intended to impose restrictions on the complete withdrawal of control and
safety rods from the core. Such restrictions were never imposed and apparently the
matter was forgotten.
That means in the fact it coupd explode was known, but ignored. Ignored by everyone in the Soviet scientific establishment and nuclear authorities. I don't what's worse, a secret police intervention or a whole science and industry community ignoring safety concerns until it is too late.
> Ignored by everyone in the Soviet scientific establishment and nuclear authorities. I don't know what's worse, a secret police intervention or a whole science and industry community ignoring safety concerns until it is too late.
“Whole .. community” is a stretch here.
Keep in mind that information spread is different in ussr. Kgb had people recruited from all over the place (from factory workers to politicians; 0.1% of population were in kgb). Also, lot of institutions had party representative present (officially, not hidden).
Press did not report accidents or significantly under-report casualties, and of course various good metrics were inflated a lot, even to comical levels.
In this environment, somebody using his influence in kgb or party to stop certain restrictions (because they would point to design flaw and would delay stuff) is very believable, and probably common.
Well, that the whole community of nuclear scientists, engineers and operators ignored the design flaws of RBMK reactors was an indirect conclusion of the two late 80s investigation boards the USSR (!) put in place. Read the annexes to INSAG-7, you can even find the design bureaus and directors named in there.
The KGB blocking the refit of the RBMK fleet is a myth from HBOs Chernobyl series. Truth is rather different, Legasov was seen by the younger generation as part of the establishment that held back modifications, while he simultaniously managed to piss off said establishment. And without support from the rank and file, and some enemies with the higher ups, his career was shot. Compounded by serious health issues following the Chernobyl clean up. Less dramatic than a KBG conspiracy for sure, but still bad enough.
If the HBO show had the science somwhat correct, then the operators did everything they could to make it go boom. In failure modes already defined and warned about.
That, and the fact that it wasn't was not communicated. The necessary assessments have not been done during Chernobyl No. 4s commissioning, hence not counter measures have beem defined and put in the procedures. The RBMK chief engineering org wanted to adress the incident in Lithuania, and informed operators and authorities about that intention. Chief engineering didn't follow up so, and nobody bothered asking where the announced measures and procedures were.
In the end the operators of Chernobyl No. 4 were the fucked ones, their procedures were incomplete, sometimes dangerously wrong. Leadership, incl. Dyatlov, failed to put a safety culture in place. The reactor design was not well understood, operating characteristics at below 50% capacity were never even analyzed or modelled, and inheretly unsafe (missing sensors, bad control rod design and operating procedures...). And the night shift wasn't even briefed on the test to be conducted.
One of the conclusions of INSAG-7 was, that the accident could even have happened with properly designed control rods, coolant failure could have led to the same accident. If your equipment is so inherently unstable and fragile, operating procedure, training and operators have to compensate. None of those measures was taken.
Heck, in some circunstances RBMK operators had to conduct up to 1,000 manual operations per hour (!) to keep the reactor stable. And by the way, the RBMK design didn't even meet Soviet design and safety requirements applicable in 70s when those reactors were designed.
A complete clusterfuck. The circumstances allowing said clusterfuck still exist everywhere, in all countries, industries and organisations to this day.
No one has mentioned yet (what I find to be) the most important fact: radioactive gases were vented in a populated area without any consent, review, or approval. (inb4 the nerdsniping about how and why it had to be done,it's irrelevant to my point). If you lived in the area, your community was exposed to radioactive substances, and thats where the incident really crossed the line and got people worried.
Compared with the constant deaths from coal, yeah, it's a much better bet. Thankfully moot these days, but the overreaction to these problems set us back generations at solving climate change.
