Nuclear energy

[HungryHobo]

and it'll keep. if they ever really need to they could dig up the unprocessed waste. I doubt it would be people on the edge doing that since breeders aren't cheap, it'd be wealthy governments and corporations.

[EdgarJPublius]

Considering how the waste is stored, it's not like such work would be especially dangerous anyway. Current containment systems for stored waste are designed to outlast the radioactive elements stored inside, and are over-engineered to a ludicrous degree.

And anyway, no-one actually wants to build a storage facility, so most of the waste is still stored on-site.

[Zamfir]

I was on the Finnish site for their planned end-storage, and they look serious. They're not constructing yet, but the site has been picked, researched and kept clear (it's next to most of their reactors), they have the money available, and in the next few years they will dig an example tunnel. There is no hurry, as the current intermediate storage still holds room and the fuel has to stay up anyway for now, but they seem on schedule to have a working end storage when the current storage starts running out.

I suppose that not all countries have the geological features and geographic space, but it was still hopeful.

[jules.LT]

Current containment systems for stored waste are designed to outlast the radioactive elements stored inside, and are over-engineered to a ludicrous degree.

Do you have a link to the details on this?
The anti-nuclear guys had gotten me worried on that subject.

[Yakk]

I doubt the containers are designed to outlast the nuclear byproducts, and their byproducts. That would involve making a containment device that survives proton decay.

Outlasting the most radioactive phase? Much easier!

[roflwaffle]

I assume you didn't live in southern California in the late 90s...

True that. Blackouts are a function of three things... Generation, transmission, or asshole power companies like Enron manipulating the market.

[pizzazz]

Current containment systems for stored waste are designed to outlast the radioactive elements stored inside, and are over-engineered to a ludicrous degree.

Do you have a link to the details on this?
The anti-nuclear guys had gotten me worried on that subject.

Here are some examples of the tests they put the containers through: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4

I think it was mentioned above, but no one has ever even gotten hurt from nuclear waste being transported.

I assume you didn't live in southern California in the late 90s...

True that. Blackouts are a function of three things... Generation, transmission, or asshole power companies like Enron manipulating the market.

Don't forget asshole politicians trying to force them to sell at half their cost.

edit--forgot about the main reason I posted.

[HungryHobo]

Wasn't there a bit on that in the old "Physics for Future Presidents" lectures?

They built the containers for transporting nuclear material then to try to reassure people they had some kind of ad campaign showing all the crazy things they could survive.

Driving them off cliffs, smashing them into giant walls in the middle of massive explosions, ramming trains and various massive things into them at high speed with the container being shown to survive utterly unaffected and damn near indestructible.

unfortunatly what this meant was that they had a video filled with fire, exposions, trucks crashing into walls, trains ramming into trucks, blasts, bangs and flame everywhere.

and it scared people. Rather than thinking "wow, those containers can survive damned near anything short of a direct asteroid strike" people thought "oh god those look dangerous with all the fire and explosions, I don't want that anywhere near my town"

[morriswalters]

I may have asked this before, but has an unintentional blackout ever been caused by a generator failure?

[thoughtfully]

It's hard to imagine that it hasn't. Probably not nowadaze, although who knows what goes on in countries with less developed infrastructure.

[Athe]

Has this been said? Nuclear power as is, is nonrenewable. Should we continue to operate on the assumption that "Yeah, something will come around, like fusion!" Or should we plan for the worst case and go for things that are renewable? There is only so much fissile material on this planet, and the heavier elements are the rarer elements.

We run into the problem of sustainability with nuclear, just as with fossil fuels. We just kick the can a little further down the road. ( And if anyone wants to say "we'll get it from other objects in this solar system," does it look like we're making a lot of progress in the area of making it to other local objects in space?)

Edit: Sure there's breeder reactors, but those aren't deployed on a large scale are they?

[sardia]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... osits-last
Current technology allows for a 200 year supply at current usage rates. Breeder technology allows for 30,000 year usage at current rates. Uranium extraction from seawater gives us a 60,000 year supply. If you were to increase usage by 5 fold, then we would still have 1500 years worth of fuel from the 60,000 year of supply.
Edit: Take those numbers with a grain of salt, they rely on experimental technologies, but you can see there is plenty of uranium for the foreseeable future, it just won't be cheap.

[HungryHobo]

There's approximately four and a half billion tons of Uranium in the sea.
There's about 40 trillion tons in the earths crust.

"The consistent 3.3 ppb U in seawater is in chemical equilibrium. If it were being depleted, we would expect that additional U would be leached and put in solution from ocean bottoms, hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, and terrestrial sources (primarily through tidal pumping on the continental shelves, with some from rivers and other discharges). If we extracted a billion tons over hundreds of years, it is more likely that the oceans will contain nearly 4.5 billion tons than be reduced to 3.5+ billion tons."

So if we ever did get the hang of getting uranium from seawater in any way then running out of uranium stops really being a problem.

It seems likely that in coming years we'll see more large scale desalination plants coming online and given that one of their outputs is extra-salty seawater, including uranium salts, would the outputs of such plants be a good place to build hypothetical uranium extraction facilities.

[Ghostbear]

Has this been said? Nuclear power as is, is nonrenewable. Should we continue to operate on the assumption that "Yeah, something will come around, like fusion!" Or should we plan for the worst case and go for things that are renewable? There is only so much fissile material on this planet, and the heavier elements are the rarer elements.

We run into the problem of sustainability with nuclear, just as with fossil fuels. We just kick the can a little further down the road. ( And if anyone wants to say "we'll get it from other objects in this solar system," does it look like we're making a lot of progress in the area of making it to other local objects in space?)

Edit: Sure there's breeder reactors, but those aren't deployed on a large scale are they?

That breeder reactors aren't in large scale use now would just be an argument that long term nuclear power should probably use breeder reactors. According to wiki we have about 5 billion years worth of uranium if we switched over to breeder reactors. For all practical purposes, a properly instituted nuclear power infrastructure is as good as being infinitely renewable -- if we haven't figured something better out over 5,000,000,000 years (if we even still exist as a species) then I would be rather amazed. Even if we didn't switch to breeder reactors, the use of thorium would expand our potential fissionable fuel supply by 450% -- assuming just the 200 year supply that sardia's article mentions, that would give us 1,100 years of known supplies.

[firechicago]

There are two problems with breeder reactors, one economic and one geopolitical. The economic problem is that even with a whole pile of favorable assumptions, it costs about twice as much to dispose of nuclear waste as it does to reprocess it. Sure, we can assume that electrical power will just be more expensive in the future, but if that's the case, then a whole bunch of other technologies (wind, solar, etc.) become competitive too.

The geopolitical problem is that large scale reprocessing means keeping a whole bunch of plutonium around in a form which would be relatively easy to build a weapon out of. That means that any state with reprocessing technology is almost a de facto nuclear weapons state, and keeping all that plutonium secure and out of the hands of non-state actors (e.g. terrorists) is a huge problem.

[Soralin]

Has this been said? Nuclear power as is, is nonrenewable. Should we continue to operate on the assumption that "Yeah, something will come around, like fusion!" Or should we plan for the worst case and go for things that are renewable?

There is no such thing as renewable energy, that would be a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. If you're talking about something like the Sun, the Sun fuses 620 billion kg of hydrogen into helium, every single second, it's running off of a limited supply of fuel, same as everything else.

Now, ok, the Sun is a bit different, given that it's going to be doing that regardless of if we use the energy coming from it or not. We can't turn it off, or slow it down to conserve that energy.. at least, not yet.

[Yakk]

The fuel costs of nuclear power plants are trivial. It would be like saying that the price you pay for wind doubled, so wind power is no longer economical.

An 80% increase in the cost of reprocessing nuclear waste compared to disposing it, if that cost is trivial as a function of the power supplied ... it isn't a key problem?

[firechicago]

The fuel costs of nuclear power plants are trivial. It would be like saying that the price you pay for wind doubled, so wind power is no longer economical.

An 80% increase in the cost of reprocessing nuclear waste compared to disposing it, if that cost is trivial as a function of the power supplied ... it isn't a key problem?

But that's just the direct fuel costs, if you read further in the piece you'll see they estimate that with capital costs they estimate an added cost of about 7 mill/kWh, an increase in cost of about 7% over current prices (about 10 cents/kWh). Sure, that's not a huge increase, but it's not nothing. And that's with a whole pile of favorable assumptions.

And if we're willing to spend a little more money now to solve problems that won't be acute until decades or centuries in the future, then why not invest in wind and solar, or utility scale power storage to make wind and solar more reliable, rather than pouring money into projects that will create huge geopolitical problems.

[mosc]

And if we're willing to spend a little more money now to solve problems that won't be acute until decades or centuries in the future, then why not invest in wind and solar, or utility scale power storage to make wind and solar more reliable, rather than pouring money into projects that will create huge geopolitical problems.

Read the thread? because you can't tell the wind or the sun "I'd like 52.5 MW of power today please, not 52, not 53." Utility scale power storage to make power sources with 10% capacity factors dependable doesn't exist. You're talking about storing thousands of GWH of electricity. The closest thing we have is hydro power, and we're tapped out.

And on top of that, photovoltaic solar is moronically stupid for bulk power generation. It's not a technology problem. The technology is fairly mature. It simply doesn't add up.

[lutzj]

And if we're willing to spend a little more money now to solve problems that won't be acute until decades or centuries in the future, then why not invest in wind and solar, or utility scale power storage to make wind and solar more reliable, rather than pouring money into projects that will create huge geopolitical problems.

Read the thread? because you can't tell the wind or the sun "I'd like 52.5 MW of power today please, not 52, not 53." Utility scale power storage to make power sources with 10% capacity factors dependable doesn't exist. You're talking about storing thousands of GWH of electricity. The closest thing we have is hydro power, and we're tapped out.

And on top of that, photovoltaic solar is moronically stupid for bulk power generation. It's not a technology problem. The technology is fairly mature. It simply doesn't add up.

If we imagine the sort of facilities that could store such huge amounts of power, we just come back to many of the same "geopolitical problems" as nuclear power.

[firechicago]

Read the thread? because you can't tell the wind or the sun "I'd like 52.5 MW of power today please, not 52, not 53." Utility scale power storage to make power sources with 10% capacity factors dependable doesn't exist. You're talking about storing thousands of GWH of electricity. The closest thing we have is hydro power, and we're tapped out.

And on top of that, photovoltaic solar is moronically stupid for bulk power generation. It's not a technology problem. The technology is fairly mature. It simply doesn't add up.

I'd kindly request that you assume that I'm not completely ignorant until proven otherwise. I'm well aware of the issues with solar and wind as base load power generators, which is why I raised objections specifically to breeder reactors, not nuclear power in general. Also, most proposals for utility-scale solar are not based on photovoltaics, so I'm not sure how they're relevant.

If we imagine the sort of facilities that could store such huge amounts of power, we just come back to many of the same "geopolitical problems" as nuclear power.

Being able to store huge amounts of energy is not the same thing as being able to easily release it in a sudden, catastrophic, weaponizable manner. For example, if we didn't care about efficiency we could put a pipe at the bottom of the Hoover Dam and use solar or wind power to pump water back into Lake Meade during the day, which would not be appreciably more dangerous than building the dam in the first place. Sure someone could release that water by blowing up the dam, but that is (a) not a trivial feat in and of itself and more importantly (b) not terribly useful if your target doesn't happen to be downstream.

More generally, I don't think it's a good idea to try to fix climate change by making the only problem of equal scale as a threat to our existence as a species (i.e. nuclear weapons proliferation) worse. We have 200 years worth of mineable Uranium left at current rates. In the next hundred years I'm a lot more worried about us blowing ourselves up than I am about running out of fuel. It's not much more than a hundred years ago that the chief sources of energy for our economy were biomass and muscle power, and the main problems were running out of whales and horses burying our cities in dung. I'm pretty confident we can find something safer in the next hundred years. I'd much rather take that chance than hand every tinpot dictator the chance to produce unlimited plutonium by spreading reprocessing technology to every corner of the world.

[morriswalters]

From the New York Times.

Inquiry Declares Fukushima Crisis a Man-Made Disaster

The commission also accused the government, Tepco and nuclear regulators of failing to carry out basic safety measures despite being aware of the risks posed by earthquakes, tsunamis and other events that might cut off power systems. Even though the government-appointed Nuclear Safety Commission revised earthquake resistance standards in 2006 and ordered nuclear operators around the country to inspect their reactors, for example, Tepco did not carry out any checks, and regulators did not follow up, the report said.

This is evidently a report from a Blue Ribbon Panel assigned to study the disaster. We need Nuclear Power. This is not helpful.

[EdgarJPublius]

I'm not convinced that there is a 'nuclear weapons proliferation' problem, certainly not one that even approaches the magnitude of threat posed by continued reliance on non-renewable fossil-fuels.

And anyway; thorium.

[HungryHobo]

I'd much rather take that chance than hand every tinpot dictator the chance to produce unlimited plutonium by spreading reprocessing technology to every corner of the world.

enrichment is only getting easier as time goes on, used to be you'd need facilities miles long to enrich uranium, now it can be done with some very precise tech in an easy to hide room sized facility.
it's not going to get harder.

we're gonna have to find alternative approaches sooner or later rather than relying on controlling the fissionable material.

[stevey_frac]

Read the thread? because you can't tell the wind or the sun "I'd like 52.5 MW of power today please, not 52, not 53.".

You keep making the assertion that incredibly precise amounts of power must be delivered, and that predictions of power use are incredibly accurate. Is is provably false. Ontario just blew past predicted power consumption by more then 5%. And yet, the grid still hums. No one is talking about using solar or wind for baseline generation, and thermal solar, and wind generations plants can make a significant contribution to the grid by reducing demand.

Grid operators monitor the grid in real time, and use peaking plants to make up temporary shortfalls, until cheaper, slower reacting power comes online. The same principle applies when you have unreliable generation. Windmills just dump their power on the grid, and other plants reduce their outputs, or shutdown accordingly. We have systems in place to make this work.

[HungryHobo]

The same principle applies when you have unreliable generation.

absolutely. only horribly magnified.

now rather than having to just cope with some somewhat unpredicatable variation in demand you have to also cope with unpredictable, huge variations in supply.

So you need far more power sources you can turn on and off at a moments notice and even worse you have to double up your baseload with sources you can actually rely on to supply when you want it.

It's a massive problem with renewables. Hydro and solar thermal are good since the former can be varied easily and the latter is slow to vary and predictable but wind and PV are utterly terrible for that.

[stevey_frac]

Except, no one is suggesting that you got all your power from wind, not that you use renewables as baseload. If we can miss our prediction on demand by 5%, we can tolerate a 5% penetration by wind power. We're not there yet. Also, wind power on a large enough scale is more predictable then you think. Perhaps not on a week to week basis, but you can get decent 'next hour' predictions to know if you need to fire up or down generation. Germany already does this... It's not insurmountable, and no where near the situation that Mosc is making it out to be.

[roflwaffle]

Portraying energy generation as something from one source is something of a straw man. It's not nuclear versus solar, it's what percentage of renewables, nuclear, and FFs minimize GHG emissions and costs. That's probably about the same amount of nukes we have now, a dash of solar to compete against expensive peaking plants, nat gas for load following, and a ton of wind to compete against everyone depending on the generation profile, all tied together with a smarter, maybe even national, grid.

[EdgarJPublius]

The national smart grid is a fairy tale told to make wind power seem like a practical idea.

In reality, a national smart grid would massively increase the amount of power transmission infrastructure needed, incur significant inefficiencies and transmission losses, and most such plans create unnecessary risks in the form of single-points-of-failure, y'know, in case it wasn't a bad enough idea already.

Local smart-grids are a great idea, and adding intelligence to existing grid inter-connections probably couldn't hurt. But a national smart grid for transmitting power from generating 'hot-spots' to high demand markets is a non-starter.

[HungryHobo]

a dash of solar to compete against expensive peaking plants,

if you'd said hydro this would make sense since it can be ramped up and down at will and fast.

Solar output peaks hours before the demand peak with a possible exception in some deserts.
Solar doesn't help much at all with peaking plants.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yr3xF4J1UVg/R ... Demand.jpg

note solar peaking at 12, demand peaking 6 hours later when solar has dropped to almost nothing.

[morriswalters]

Generation is what it is. You make power out of what you have and can afford. Change the load. Reduce demand. Would it make more sense to tear down inefficient houses and replace them, rather than to try to out generate the inefficiency?

[HungryHobo]

Would it make more sense to tear down inefficient houses and replace them, rather than to try to out generate the inefficiency?

Depends how long term you're talking. building a house can cost hundreds of thousands, figures I've seen are along the lines of €100/ft^2.

assume something like a 2000 ft^2 home, average electric bill in the UK is something like 1500€ per year.

So even if you halve the energy bill it would still take centuries to pay off by which point it would be hopelessly out of date and ineffecient.

And the cost of building a house is a real expression of the resources and energy it takes to build a house.

so no. not unless you want to waste energy and resources.


On the other hand investing a little more to make houses you're building anyway more energy effecient makes absolute sense.

[morriswalters]

I didn't ever think that you could make it pay off, not that way. I was just thinking of how many power plants and how much carbon are produced just to generate enough power to make up for the inefficiency? The point in a nutshell is that if wind or solar are going to work you have to change the load and the load curve, or demand curve if you wish. The ways we can generate power are limited.

[EdgarJPublius]

A typical house can be made much more efficient with a lot less effort than tearing it down and starting over.

Relatively minor modifications such as to windows and appliances are a good place to start. There are also some major gains to be made in ventilation, roofing and exterior coverings of most existing homes.

[HungryHobo]

Even better is to have less detached houses and more apartment blocks.

http://www.sb4all.org/uploads/Comparing ... ssions.pdf

A person living in a 5 story+ apartment block uses far less energy than someone living in a quaint little farm house, you may be able to halve the energy lost through your walls but sharing 3 of your walls with other people is even better for conserving energy.

[morriswalters]

I agree, but you have some cultural issues there. People living in high rises have known this for years, but having seen those environments, not everyone is going to be able to do it. And it doesn't impact the load curve. Demand following(am I using this correctly) is needed because the load changes, loosely like a sine wave. Flatten the curve by some mechanism and you reduce the need to respond to the load. With near constant demand then you bring on some type of generators, not based on the load, but based on the availability of other types of generators. Industrial and commercial loads are different, but the idea is the same.

Edit
Reading through the paper, they make a claim that I should have known. They say that when you count habitable space the net energy use is the same. This should have been apparent to me from how condos charge condo fees. Highrises have a lot of uninhabitable space as compared to a house. However Patio homes don't have this problem.

[roflwaffle]

The national smart grid is a fairy tale told to make wind power seem like a practical idea.

In reality, a national smart grid would massively increase the amount of power transmission infrastructure needed, incur significant inefficiencies and transmission losses, and most such plans create unnecessary risks in the form of single-points-of-failure, y'know, in case it wasn't a bad enough idea already.

Local smart-grids are a great idea, and adding intelligence to existing grid inter-connections probably couldn't hurt. But a national smart grid for transmitting power from generating 'hot-spots' to high demand markets is a non-starter.

The idea that the national smart grid is a fairy tale is a fairy tale told to make more nuclear or fossil fuel power seem like a practical idea. I wonder how much this can be nested before AZ gets PO'd and starts deleting stuff.

Practically speaking, a national smart grid is what you just described, local smart grids, with HVDC interconnects. Many grids have asynchronized connections via HVDC to avoid potential issues in that context, and within the US grid, most of the recent issues have been due to deregulation, not too much interconnection.

“Under the new system, the financial incentive was to run things up to the limit of capacity,” explains Carreras. In fact, energy companies did more: they gamed the system. Federal investigations later showed that employees of Enron and other energy traders “knowingly and intentionally” filed transmission schedules designed to block competitors’ access to the grid and to drive up prices by creating artificial shortages. In California, this behavior resulted in widespread blackouts, the doubling and tripling of retail rates, and eventual costs to ratepayers and taxpayers of more than $30 billion. In the more tightly regulated Eastern Interconnect, retail prices rose less dramatically.

In terms of the idea being a non-stater, construction on Tres Amigos should start this summer, so while you may think it's a bad idea, there are quite a few people who don't.

a dash of solar to compete against expensive peaking plants,

if you'd said hydro this would make sense since it can be ramped up and down at will and fast.

Solar output peaks hours before the demand peak with a possible exception in some deserts.
Solar doesn't help much at all with peaking plants.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yr3xF4J1UVg/R ... Demand.jpg

note solar peaking at 12, demand peaking 6 hours later when solar has dropped to almost nothing.

The first problem is that graph. Notice the peak demand for the day in that graph was ~36GW? Check out CA ISO's demand for tomorrow, November 5th (well into fall. In fact, closer to winter than to summer), it's ~34MW. That may be a demand curve for CA, but it's probably not for CA in the summer, or at least CA during a typical summer. It looks like an abnormally cool day, especially when CA ISO's peak demand last year was ~45MW.

Furthermore, just because a generator doesn't match up exactly with demand doesn't mean they shouldn't be used. If that were the case we wouldn't be using nuclear (or any other kind of) baseload because their generation curve doesn't follow demand. Power companies use many different sources with many different production profiles to meet demand. In terms of solar, as long it's cheaper than natural gas, even if it doesn't follow demand exactly, it will continue to displace natural gas. It won't completely displace load following natural gas, but it will displace some of it, and that's the point. If it can compete with load following natural gas in the winter, then it'll trounce it in the summer. On the flip side, if it can't compete in the summer then it won't be used. Integration depends on the cost of solar, or whatever, versus competitors, and solar has been expanding it's market share because it's cost has been declining.

[EdgarJPublius]

Tres Amigas is basically the sort of 'smart-grid' project I'm advocating. It has obvious benefits for wind and ground-based solar power, but not more than the project also benefits conventional sources. By far the greater share of the project's major benefits will be general improvements to the reliability and accessibility of the connected grids, and the financial benefits to the operators of a high-capacity power market hub.

These sorts of projects aren't going to magically make wind and ground-based solar more competitive or more feasible as base-load generation. That's the fairy tale, it makes a great story to sell to the public, but the meat of the project is the power-market it creates, which is just another arena for conventional and 'renewable' energy to compete over which can provide the most power at the lowest cost, and we already know the answer to that one.

The new superconducting HVDC cables they're using are an interesting technology, it'll be useful to see what the maintenance is like on these relatively short interconnections.

[HungryHobo]

The first problem is that graph. Notice the peak demand for the day in that graph was ~36GW? Check out CA ISO's demand for tomorrow, November 5th (well into fall. In fact, closer to winter than to summer), it's ~34MW. That may be a demand curve for CA, but it's probably not for CA in the summer, or at least CA during a typical summer. It looks like an abnormally cool day, especially when CA ISO's peak demand last year was ~45MW.

first you mix up MW and GW.
CA ISO's peak demand last year was not ~45MW because that's in thousands of megawatts. you missed 3 zeros.
and the link you give shows demand peaking at 6, exactly as mine does. solar peaks at noon (unsurprisingly) and is almost gone by that time.

look at the yearly highest peaks
http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Californ ... istory.pdf
notice all the ones at 4pm in september at a time when solar output is dropping very fast? just when your grid needs the power solar is dropping fast making it even harder to compensate with other sources for the increases in demand

for half the year it's basically worthless. there's a difference between power sources which provide power when you need them, power sources which provide power all the time which you can use as you want and power sources which ignore what you need and just produce as much as they feel like producing whenever. the former 2 are useful. the latter is just a massive pain in the ass if you're managing a grid.

[thoughtfully]

there's a difference between power sources which provide power when you need them, power sources which provide power all the time which you can use as you want and power sources which ignore what you need and just produce as much as they feel like producing whenever. the former 2 are useful. the latter is just a massive pain in the ass if you're managing a grid.

You only describe two sources here. Either you can turn them on and off at will, or you can't.