Nick Cater in the Oz is impressed by #nuclear power in Finland, which has built one new plant this century, and has none currently under construction or even in planning stages.
OTOH, Finland has 7GW of wind, and much more is planned https://www.both2nia.com/en/news/almost-7-gw-wind-power-finland
@johnquiggin even a few years ago, the interest in nuclear made some sense, but with the learning/price/deployment curves on wind, solar, and batteries, and the very extended timeline for any nuclear deployment… it’s rare you see such committed sunk cost fallacy.
Second of the three European EPR ( Evolutionary Power Reactor) #nuclear projects - #France#Flamanville - will be shortly connected to the grid. The projects caused many controversies due to long delays… but they are getting completed:
🇫🇮 Olkiluoto 3 ✅ connected in 2023
🇫🇷 Flamanville ✔️ finished, will be connected by end of 2024 : 🇬🇧 Hinkley Point C 🕓 will be completed by 2027
The moment these projects get connected, they start delivering gigawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity to the grid, which is desperately needed for #ClimateChange prevention and mitigation.
Each of these has been criticised for delays (which is factually true but unfair) and “huge cost” (which is unfair and untrue).
Talking about the total investment cost in case of clean electricity sources that may live up to a century is a popular manipulation but what matters is LCOE.
It’s the cost of investment and operations divided by value of electricity produced over its life time. In case of nuclear power LCOE is quite low, in the range of $60/MWh because the relatively big initial costs is divided by decades of delivery of huge amounts of power. This is exactly the same case with very costly off-shore wind farms (e.g. the Doggerbank project) or huge solar farms (e.g. Ouarzazate in Morocco).
The reasons for delays are… complex. This article[1] by Joris van Dorp is probably the best explainer to why exactly Hinkley Point C was delayed so much. It’s a mix of reasons, starting from “first of kind” scale of the project to prohibitive and often absurd safety requirements lobbied after Fukushima by countries who saw an opportunity in replacing EU nuclear by Russian fossil gas. And they were absurd, for example because you don’t get earthquakes and tsunamis on the La Manche Channel.
And the reasons are complex, for example due to general UK attitude to funding infrastructure projects - they exclusively opt for private funding, which means the investors need to get a direct financial profit. Most people see the absurdity of private ownership of UK water utilities (which leads to no investments in the network and dumping of sewage into rivers by underregulated companies) but nobody sees the same absurdity in funding the electricity grid (which is in turn overregulated).
Hmmm weird, because now you seem to very much believe in the current decarbonisation plan involving further increase in renewables and fossil gas which may be in unspecified future replaced by hydrogen?
Another bit of Brexit related attempted policy cherry-picking comes unstuck.
The UK would like to continue to be part of the world's largest nuclear fusion experiment (based in the EU).... but the EU is now insisting that this can only continue if the UK rejoins the bloc's Euratom research scheme.
Once again the UK hopes it can knit together a bespoke research collaboration, but it seems the EU has lost patience with such 'special arrangements'.
The True Extent of US Spy Satellite Capability https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6uPjTTGHzE
A little bit on satellites that detect missile launches... as Annie Jacobsen mentions in 'Nuclear War A Scenario' #Nuclear
if i noticed something when talking with outspoken pro-nuclear people it's that you really can't trust anything they say. they are intellectually bankrupt, will use all kinds of shady argumentation tactics, ad hominems, and can't even be bothered to write their own arguments (instead using AI for that)
@kyonshi Humans are amazing as long as they can be held responsible for their actions. Notice how both nuclear meltdowns happened in countries where the political elite is much more entrenched than in the west. And while our politicians can get away with way more than they should, they wouldn't be able to get away with irradiating large swathes of their own country.
Why do PWR reactors use boric acid, as opposed to some random salt of boron? Apparently boron salts are often well soluble, from the nuclear POV we only care about boron being present, and I'd expect salts to cause fewer chemical problems due to their closer-to-neutral pH. In fact some random papers (https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/28/034/28034575.pdf) describe tradeoffs involved in maintaining pH as boric acid concentration changes.
There clearly must be some reason why boric acid is preferred over any simple boron salt. What is it?
Unstable nuclear-waste dams threaten fertile Central Asia heartland
"Dams holding some 700,000 cubic meters (185 million gallons) of uranium mine tailings in Kyrgyzstan have become unreliable following a 2017 landslide. A further landslide or earthquake could send their contents into a river system used to irrigate Kyrgyz, Uzbek and& the Soviet-era radioactive waste disposal facility showed. That event would possibly displace millions in those three countries" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/unstable-nuclear-waste-dams-threaten-fertile-central-asia-heartland-2024-04-23/#Nuclear
This piece from Jonathan Bruegel at IEEFA makes the surprising (to me) point that, despite planning new #nuclear, the French government has taken the action needed to extend the lives of existing plants beyond 40 years, as has happened in the US. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't a quicker and cheaper option than new build, and quite possibly a cost-effective complement to renewables.
The Famous Photo of Chernobyl’s Most Dangerous Radioactive Material Was a Selfie
The Elephant’s Foot would have killed anyone within a couple of minutes.
by David Goldenberg January 24, 2016 Updated: August 10, 2022
"... This picture first came to America in the late 1990s, after the newly independent Ukrainian government took over the plant and set up the Chornobyl Center for Nuclear Safety, Radioactive Waste and Radioecology (spelling often gets changed as words go from Russian to English). Soon after, the center invited other governments to collaborate on nuclear safety projects. The U.S. Department of Energy tapped the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL)—a bustling science center up in Richland, Washington—to help..."
IEA chief Fatih Birol has criticised 🇪🇺 Europe for falling behind 🇨🇳 China & the 🇺🇸 US after making “two historic, monumental mistakes” in energy policy, by relying on Russian #gas & turning away from #nuclear power https://buff.ly/4azicZu
#Nuclear deal in tatters, #Iran edges close to weapons capability
Six years after the #Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear accord, Tehran is rapidly accumulating enriched #uranium, some of it very close to weapons grade. Experts fear that a #bomb could be a short dash away.
More worryingly, #Fordow was scaling up production of a more dangerous form of #nuclear fuel — a kind of highly enriched #uranium, just shy of #WeaponsGrade. Iranian officials in charge of the plant, meanwhile, had begun talking openly about achieving “deterrence,” suggesting that Tehran now had everything it needed to build a #bomb if it chose.
Fordow’s transformation mirrors changes seen elsewhere in the country as #Iran blows past the guardrails of the Iran nuclear accord.
6 years after the #Trump administration’s controversial decision to withdraw from the pact, the restraints have fallen away, one by one, leaving #Iran closer to #nuclear#weapons capability than at any time in the country’s history, according to confidential inspection reports & interviews w/ officials & experts who closely monitor Iran’s progress.
Not only has used #nuclear fuel been stored safely for decades, it can be reprocessed into fuel for the future.
Used fuel safely stored could potentially power us for centuries, via fast breeder reactors. No more mining needed, solving the waste problem at the same time.
🤦🏻♀️ When nuclear waste is so safe stored why many #nuclear storage facilities in #Germany are closed because of the great danger of those storage facilities
And when the myth of reusing the nuclear waste would be based on reality why are the #NuclearWaste storage facilities are not being emptied🤷🏻♀️
It’s all nice propaganda of the tax money wasting #NuclearIndustry and nothing else
#NuclearEnergy as it exists now is still extremely dangerous and uncontrolled
Because Germans appear to be taken over by irrational feat with everything related to nuclear. In the rest of the world the German Energiewende is quickly becoming a sad laughing stock.
There are several reasons for this, one of them being that the OPEX of FBRs is slightly higher than with conventional plants and there's simple enough uranium around. Recycling currently happens via PUREX, which is less efficient.
3 and 4 are factually incorrect. See below graph for example.
The steel industry largely depends on coal for production, which emits over 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions, but it is also possible to create steel using #nuclear hydrogen, which emits water vapor and no #CO2.
The #nuclear reactors on submarines are designed for sustained #power generation to propel the vessel, rather than a single explosive release like the atomic #bomb.
This allows them to be much larger and more powerful than the compact nuclear weapons developed during World War II.
For those keeping track at home, reactors orders of magnitude more powerful than bombs over Hiroshima or Nagasaki are floating around in the world’s oceans and seas.
@paninid
Many of those are located just outside Seattle at Keyport WA.
Honestly though all the submariners I have met are serious geeks. They are exactly the type of dorks you would want running a reactor. I got to tour a Seawolf Class sub through a connection. The crew was without exception super excited to nerd out on all the equipment.
Now if we could only harness all that energy and creativity for something other that finding other humans to blow up
The tragedy of the #nuclear phaseout in Germany in two graphs. Had the Germans remained rational after the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents and remained building new nuclear at the pace of the first buildout period, it would now be the cleanest grid of all OECD countries.
This tragedy added a lot to climate change and killed millions of Germans due to unnecessary air pollution.
The link between Greens and Nazism are a bit more complex. It’s not a simple Nazis ⇒ Greens inheritance but more of shared ancestors between these two movements in anti-bourgeois sentiment coupled with cult of “nature”, “simple life”, “return to origins” etc. In case of #Germany all of the latter were systematised in “antroposophy” movement that predates Nazism:
So the relation is more like “Nazis ⇐ Antroposophy ⇒ Greens”.
This is also the reason for widespread popularity of pseudo-science and alt-med such as homeopathy, “nature-therapies” etc in Germany and other countries of the region (Austria, Switzerland). Not surprisingly, #antroposophy ideologues are also anti-nuclear as it triggers most of their taboos (large “bourgeois” projects, “unnatural energy” etc).
Of course, all of these operate at irrational and emotional layer and have nothing to do with reality because you if you start taking a PV or wind turbine apart you will find just as much “unnatural” technology inside as in a nuclear reactor. This also explains apparent paradoxes such as coexistence of fierce anti-nuclear movement and widespread radiophobia and radon spa therapies in Germany and Austria at the same time - emotionally, the former are perceived “unnatural” but the latter is perceived as “natural” thus healthy.
@collectifission We failed to prevent climate disaster because instead going hard on nuclear 30 years ago when we needed to, fossil fuel oligarchs used useful idiots, the Greens to con us into thinking it was an us problem and not a them problem. The very people who claimed to be most concerned about it, made sure it happened. Imagine you could have been a weird climate denier and had less impact than them.
@cheryanne@coffee2Di4 They will be in govt again one day, & they will do it because the main game in Australia for fossil fuels is the exports so they will be able to extract more from our public purse from nuclear just like they are doing with #AUKUS. They will put it off as long as possible of course for their fossil fuel donors but those right wingers are the same people who want nuke weapons & a domestic nuke industry to sponge donations off, as well as established fossil fuel industry
