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I've been hearing the same line about nuclear plants taking decades to be built for decades, as if its a valid dismissal. As the saying goes, the best time to p

I've been hearing the same line about nuclear plants taking decades to be built for decades, as if its a valid dismissal. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was a decade ago, the second best time is now. We should be scaling up our nuclear capacity.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
The best time to plant a radioactive tree in your yard is never.
pydry 4y ago
Solar farms take six months. Wind farms 2-3 years. Pumped storage takes ~5 years and theres no shortage of locations: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-to-meet-all-our-renewable-energy-needs https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potenti... A non nuclear mix is also cheaper and isnt uninsurable without a catastrophe liability waiver. The best time to build a nuclear plant is 40 years ago.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Pumped storage is cool but way more situational than you think
- hokkos 4y ago
  I have read several of those studies with an automated workflow to find suitable pumped hydro/wind/solar and they consistently miss local awareness. They often use deeply inaccurate land cover classification when the simple usage of open street map could have helped, and for hydro they underestimate the recent local opposition to destroy a village to build a dam.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    There's a lot of low hanging fruit in the hydro landscape that people miss. I have a rivulet that runs near my house. It has weir dams at a few locations on it's path down our mountain, IT wouldn't be that hard to extract energy from the constant flowing water there to feed into the grid. There are turbines that exist to extract energy from a meter high head of water. Everyone thinks about power like you need one big dam, or one big plant (coal or otherwise). There's a lot of small fast flowing streams that have potential to create extra energy. I think hydro needs to be reimagined. IT always need to flood valleys to be in the mix.
    - admax88qqq 4y ago
      I dunno, patching up every little creek and flow of water we can find sounds to me like hydro just can't generate enough energy.
      - ByteJockey 4y ago
        That really depends on what percentage of water's potential energy is expended in small creeks and the like vs big rivers. I actually have no idea how to estimate that. Anyone have a good estimate on that? Intuitively, I'm thinking that most of those rivers are fed by many small streams, so it would be approximately equal. I'm entirely unsure of that though so treat it as having huge error bars.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        The problem becomes one of how spread out the energy is. Sure the water in that creek might be falling hundreds of meters, or even kilometers, but without a dam the height differential at your generator is only going to he a few metres at best. Enough to power the lighting, fridge, and washing machine in the houses that the creeks happen to run by, but not much else. With the advent of long lasting perovskites and (hopefully) some less polluting battery technologies you're not even better off cost-wise. You might be able to do something with a long pipe parallel to the creek to get more head, but then you're going to spend a lot of your energy on wall friction unless it's very wide.
        ByteJockey 4y ago
        > Sure the water in that creek might be falling hundreds of meters, or even kilometers, but without a dam the height differential at your generator is only going to he a few metres at best. Enough to power the lighting, fridge, and washing machine in the houses that the creeks happen to run by, but not much else. Could be, but that's a bunch of stuff you don't have to power with the existing system. Given how many creeks there are, that seems like it could really add up. > With the advent of long lasting perovskites and (hopefully) some less polluting battery technologies you're not even better off cost-wise. That's fair. I've learned in my life that I don't have a good intuition for what the costs of large infrastructure projects are.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Pumped storage is hard because you need a lot of space on a hill for a reservoir. Perhaps we can turn lake mead into a giant pumped storage project with a bunch of solar installed over it to limit evaporation. Then use wind, solar, or even nuclear to fill it (but that’s a lot of water that farmers might want for their fields, again, limiting evaporation is important).
- creato 4y ago
  A few example large solar plants in the US seems to have ~500MW capacity, ~30% capacity factor (so ~200MW effective capacity), and taken 2-5 years to build [1][2][3]. A nuclear plant will probably have multiple 1GW reactors, with very high capacity factors. I think your numbers are very optimistic. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
stefan_ 4y ago
Building a nuclear power plant today is assuming storage for solar and wind will not be figured out within 50 years, allowing you to sell electricity at todays price for at least this time. You can see why no one wants to take that bet. It's over, it was already over 10 years ago, stop trying to fit every crisis around a "nuclear was unfairly maligned" obsession.
- nightski 4y ago
  See you in 10 years, when we are still arguing about nuclear taking 10 more years and still dependent on fossil fuels.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Any effort spent building nuclear for the 2040s is effort that could build 5x as much solar and wind for 2025. Plus transitioning to nuclear just builds another set of kochs and saudis. Plus it makes your entire economy beholden to one of China, Russia, France, or the US. Plus it just kicks the can down the road. If you consider direct thermal forcing. We are exactly where we were in the late 19th century with greenhouse gases. There is no option but to transition to a steady state economy, and starting a bunch of projects that only pay off if you use as much energy as possible from them (and even then, solar + storage will be a fraction of the cost by the time they open) isn't the way to get there. Plus those same five countries won't even let half the world have nuclear power plants. Plus the world's uranium reserves won't actually last very long if you carry on with exponential growth (doubly so without reprocessing and breeding). Then there's all the usual risks people mention. The solution is the same as it has ever been. Degrowth, stopping waste, and renewables.
- droffel 4y ago
  Solar and wind are nice, but they don't solve the base load problem. They aren't consistent enough to operate as base load on a power grid. They are certainly convenient for maintaining peak load, but without solving the energy storage issue in parallel to the added capacity, we need alternatives.
  - natmaka 4y ago
    Spreading out production units of a mix (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal...) is key. For the sole wind: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... Then comes storage, curtailment, and backup (always necessary: fossil-fuel plants always produce around 9% of electricity in fully-nuclearized France). Moreover backup is now provided thanks to gas turbines, and we know to run them thanks to hydrogen (clean), which can be green hydrogen (cleanly produced thanks to renewable sources overproduction).
    - nixass 4y ago

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

The best time to plant a radioactive tree in your yard is never.

pydry 4y ago

Solar farms take six months. Wind farms 2-3 years. Pumped storage takes ~5 years and theres no shortage of locations: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-to-meet-all-our-renewable-energy-needs https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potenti... A non nuclear mix is also cheaper and isnt uninsurable without a catastrophe liability waiver. The best time to build a nuclear plant is 40 years ago.

cuteboy19 4y ago
Pumped storage is cool but way more situational than you think
hokkos 4y ago
I have read several of those studies with an automated workflow to find suitable pumped hydro/wind/solar and they consistently miss local awareness. They often use deeply inaccurate land cover classification when the simple usage of open street map could have helped, and for hydro they underestimate the recent local opposition to destroy a village to build a dam.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  There's a lot of low hanging fruit in the hydro landscape that people miss. I have a rivulet that runs near my house. It has weir dams at a few locations on it's path down our mountain, IT wouldn't be that hard to extract energy from the constant flowing water there to feed into the grid. There are turbines that exist to extract energy from a meter high head of water. Everyone thinks about power like you need one big dam, or one big plant (coal or otherwise). There's a lot of small fast flowing streams that have potential to create extra energy. I think hydro needs to be reimagined. IT always need to flood valleys to be in the mix.
  - admax88qqq 4y ago
    I dunno, patching up every little creek and flow of water we can find sounds to me like hydro just can't generate enough energy.
    - ByteJockey 4y ago
      That really depends on what percentage of water's potential energy is expended in small creeks and the like vs big rivers. I actually have no idea how to estimate that. Anyone have a good estimate on that? Intuitively, I'm thinking that most of those rivers are fed by many small streams, so it would be approximately equal. I'm entirely unsure of that though so treat it as having huge error bars.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        The problem becomes one of how spread out the energy is. Sure the water in that creek might be falling hundreds of meters, or even kilometers, but without a dam the height differential at your generator is only going to he a few metres at best. Enough to power the lighting, fridge, and washing machine in the houses that the creeks happen to run by, but not much else. With the advent of long lasting perovskites and (hopefully) some less polluting battery technologies you're not even better off cost-wise. You might be able to do something with a long pipe parallel to the creek to get more head, but then you're going to spend a lot of your energy on wall friction unless it's very wide.
        ByteJockey 4y ago
        > Sure the water in that creek might be falling hundreds of meters, or even kilometers, but without a dam the height differential at your generator is only going to he a few metres at best. Enough to power the lighting, fridge, and washing machine in the houses that the creeks happen to run by, but not much else. Could be, but that's a bunch of stuff you don't have to power with the existing system. Given how many creeks there are, that seems like it could really add up. > With the advent of long lasting perovskites and (hopefully) some less polluting battery technologies you're not even better off cost-wise. That's fair. I've learned in my life that I don't have a good intuition for what the costs of large infrastructure projects are.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Pumped storage is hard because you need a lot of space on a hill for a reservoir. Perhaps we can turn lake mead into a giant pumped storage project with a bunch of solar installed over it to limit evaporation. Then use wind, solar, or even nuclear to fill it (but that’s a lot of water that farmers might want for their fields, again, limiting evaporation is important).
creato 4y ago
A few example large solar plants in the US seems to have ~500MW capacity, ~30% capacity factor (so ~200MW effective capacity), and taken 2-5 years to build [1][2][3]. A nuclear plant will probably have multiple 1GW reactors, with very high capacity factors. I think your numbers are very optimistic. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm

stefan_ 4y ago

Building a nuclear power plant today is assuming storage for solar and wind will not be figured out within 50 years, allowing you to sell electricity at todays price for at least this time. You can see why no one wants to take that bet. It's over, it was already over 10 years ago, stop trying to fit every crisis around a "nuclear was unfairly maligned" obsession.

nightski 4y ago
See you in 10 years, when we are still arguing about nuclear taking 10 more years and still dependent on fossil fuels.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Any effort spent building nuclear for the 2040s is effort that could build 5x as much solar and wind for 2025. Plus transitioning to nuclear just builds another set of kochs and saudis. Plus it makes your entire economy beholden to one of China, Russia, France, or the US. Plus it just kicks the can down the road. If you consider direct thermal forcing. We are exactly where we were in the late 19th century with greenhouse gases. There is no option but to transition to a steady state economy, and starting a bunch of projects that only pay off if you use as much energy as possible from them (and even then, solar + storage will be a fraction of the cost by the time they open) isn't the way to get there. Plus those same five countries won't even let half the world have nuclear power plants. Plus the world's uranium reserves won't actually last very long if you carry on with exponential growth (doubly so without reprocessing and breeding). Then there's all the usual risks people mention. The solution is the same as it has ever been. Degrowth, stopping waste, and renewables.

droffel 4y ago
Solar and wind are nice, but they don't solve the base load problem. They aren't consistent enough to operate as base load on a power grid. They are certainly convenient for maintaining peak load, but without solving the energy storage issue in parallel to the added capacity, we need alternatives.
- natmaka 4y ago
  Spreading out production units of a mix (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal...) is key. For the sole wind: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... Then comes storage, curtailment, and backup (always necessary: fossil-fuel plants always produce around 9% of electricity in fully-nuclearized France). Moreover backup is now provided thanks to gas turbines, and we know to run them thanks to hydrogen (clean), which can be green hydrogen (cleanly produced thanks to renewable sources overproduction).
  - nixass 4y ago