Ah, the Americans, who don’t understand that nuclear power in the US needs massive subsidies (23 billions) to keep from going bankrupt. That the old power plants are falling apart and prone to drought and that new ones will be too late when built and just come right to replace an old one and so won’t add to the grid.
While the $6 billion in the Infrastructure law is helpful to stem a potential flood of closures, it is still not enough, King said. In their modeling, the Rhodium Group pairs the $6 billion with the proposed existing nuclear production tax credit that’s part of the Build Back Better Act, which the Joint Committee on Taxation score estimates to be $23 billion.
Imagine that money being spent on research into better energy storage, while renewable energy sources are built, quickly, reliably and without subsidies, AND they are local sources of power that make money for local communities and give them independence from big energy producers - oh wait, America can’t have that much freedom.
Sign me the fuck up for nuclear, especially sodium reactors. I want it in my backyard, especially if it means I get a fucking excellent deal on a house. I hate the smoke every summer and the extreme weather and the lack of snow for our glaciers.
We do need more nuclear, but the nuclear industry has always been its own worst enemy.
Awful image. We’ve seen what can happen in Japan and Russia and even here in the US when corners are cut. It isn’t really a problem with the technology. It’s a problem that is inherent when corporations try to cut corners to maximize profits and people make stupid mistakes. If some other power plant has major structural issues, the plant is closed down and demoed. If a nuclear power plant has major structural issues, you could turn a 10 or 20 mile radius uninhabitable for literally thousands of years. That’s about 1/8th the land area of the entire state of Rhode Island just gone from being used.
Add to that the ridiculous fact that we have so much land here in the US that is totally empty but we can’t figure out where to put the waste.
I’m not anti nuclear at all, i think we legitimately need a diversified energy generation plan, but I just don’t think we have much of a future with building out more nuclear plants simply because the image is just so incredibly tarnished. The money and effort would probably be better spent elsewhere.
There’s plenty of diversity available without flooding yet another native town with uranium tailings from a mine you refuse to clean up in order to support a technology that can provide at most a 5% contribution to the total.
Wind, PV, solar-thermal, tidal, wave, hydro, agricultural waste based biofuel, waste methane, even orange hydrogen are all options that are less harmful and have fewer externalities.
I feel ya and think it’s strange that everyone is OK burning coal an methane while the planet literally burns. Yes, a nuke could make a 200 sq mile area uninhabitable. Isn’t what we’re doing instead demonstrably worse?
You may be interested in knowing that Georgia just brought a new one online a few months ago. Wyoming is building one. TX and SC have put money aside to study nuclear development in each state.
That’s great. Again, if these plants can pass the NIMBY groups then fantastic, but I’m guessing many of these plants are far and away from population centers. Now obviously we don’t want a nuclear plant in Central Park in NYC but we do need power generation closer to where it’s actually being used. TX and WY have lots and lots of room.
Russia was reusing a government reactor that wasn’t designed for the it. The US has had one major incident out of over a 100 plants in operations for decades. Japan faced an earthquake that was an order of magnitude higher than anyone planned for and still managed it very well given how badly it could have gone.
I have gotten to work on a few small projects in the nuclear sector they make the government and pharm look efficient and risk adverse. Just a tiny taste of it: all tape used on wires had to be a specific brand of tape and not only no splicing no terminal blocks either. Wires had to be run fully point to point. We are talking football fields of distance a single set of cables had to be run.
I see we’re back to pretending santa susanna didn’t exist again.
We’re also pretending rules like the specific brand of tape aren’t there to prevent hundred million to billion dollar cleanups like when someone used the wrong brand of cat litter at WIPP
Nuclear is also effectively ‘fossil fuel’ in the way that there are limited supplies if we can’t magically make new reactor types work. But if the whole world switched to nuclear tomorrow we have like a few years of uranium.
In the context of burner reactors (the only fuel cycle that has ever been demonstrated for a full fuel load and the only cycle with any serious proposal for a new reactor).
The amount of uranium the industry thinks they might be able to find (not the stuff already found) before the fuel alone costs more than renewable energy is about 10 million tonnes. Bear in mind the ore for the lower end if this holds so little uranium that you get less energy per kg of material processed than you do by digging up coal.
Each kg of natural uranium produces about 140GJ of electricity in the current fleet or 80-120GJ in an SMR (which is the main proposal for expanding generation).
Current world primary energy is about 550EJ/yr. Electrifying could reduce this to 300EJ, but demand is also increasing.
If you dug up all the known and inferred uranium reserves today and put it in SMRs like a nuscale or last energy one to produce 10TW (the average annual energy goal for renewables), it would run out halfway through 2025. It wouldn’t even be enough for a full initial fuel load.
If it were all EPRs and AP1000s (which have an amazing construction track record) and no demand growth was provided to offset efficiency gains if electrification, you might squeeze a decade out of it.
Check my math? I must have missed something. I’ve got 5000 years if nuclear continues to make up 10% of global energy production with no overall growth in production, 500 years if we go full nuclear, no growth in production.
For ease of math, I’ve assumed production rates will not change. This is a bad guess, but it’ll put the real answer between 500 and 5000 years.
This is quite the mental gymnastics routine. I’m going to give you a benefit of the doubt and assume you fell for it and are suffering cognitive dissonance rather than assuming you are lying on purpose.
You conflating electricity and primary energy several times in a way that boosts the answer by around an order of magnitude each time.
2680TWh is 9% of 29165TWh of electricity, not 10% of energy (either primary or final). Primary energy being around 600EJ by the same source. Final energy being harder to calculate because fossil fuels make a lot of waste heat, but usually estimated between 150EJ and 300EJ.
You could have very simply observed that 6 million is about 90 times 65,000, not 5000. 90 * 0.09 = 8. There are 8 years of fuel for current electricity demand (11x the current nuclear prodiction consuming 65,000t of NatU being ~700,000t) with the known reserves you listed.
Additionally 10-100MW scale SMRs being developed are much less efficient than large LWRs because the neutrons are largely wasted rather than making and fissioning Pu239.
This where you either apologise and stop pushing climate denial propaganda, or alternatively start a gish gallop about EBR and Phenix confirming you made your mistakes in bad faith.
Your screenshot literally says electricity in the url, not energy.
You’re now actively pretending to not understand the distinction rather than reading your own sources. Why double down when it’s already very obvious what you’re doing?
Your screenshot literally says electricity in the url, not energy.
You’re now actively pretending to not understand the distinction rather than reading your own sources
For anyone else reading this who isn’t a russian troll:
617EJ is primary energy. 10% of this is 61EJ
Electricity is around 100EJ (90EJ when that statistic was taken), 10% of 90EJ is 9EJ or the quantity of electricity produced by nuclear reactors from ~65,000t of natural U.
Playing stupid games with arithmetic and pretending not to understand that electricity is a subset of energy just makes your attempt to palter look even stupider.
You seem really worked up and are being nasty. All of my numbers have sources, I’ve explained my whole process, and haven’t been nasty with you.
What gives? Why you do me this way?
The consumption rate in the article you provided is in tons/yr. That consumption rate is for primary energy. 617 EJ is also primary energy. 10% was the best stat I could find for what amount of that 617 EJ was from nuclear. I’ve asked you if you think a different percentage would be better and you dodged.
Calculating out how long a finite resource will last with a fixed consumption rate is trivial and when I asked this question I was really curious why we came up with results that are orders of magnitude different. I’m not trolling you despite the paranoia that’s set in.
Oh we’ve reached the crying victim stage of the troll. Nice.
I’ve pointed out the tactic you used several times now. You can read any of the comments I made or your own sources if you want to try and figure out why 9/600 isn’t 0.1.
You are still pretending energy is electricity (the goal and context is to replace all fossil fuels, not just electricity) as well as for some bizarre reason pretending (insofar as your 7031t number could he assumed to have any meaning) enriched fuel grade uranium is natural uranium.
Why are you still trying? Your bullshit has been thoroughly called, there is no way to pretend you are acting in good faith.
Or is now the time you go on your gish gallop about non-existent breeders and reprocessing?
You’re about to play another imbecilic game where you try and swap around enrichment fractions and burnup rates and pretend that tails assay is 0%
You need ~67500t to produce 9EJ in a large scale burner reactor as evidenced by 67500t being consumed to produce 9EJ in a year in lrge scale burner reactors.
Do that 90 times and you have produced 810EJ or a little over 1.3 years of primary energy.
Use that electricity more efficiently than fossil fuels and it lasts a couple of years to cover everything.
Did it ever occur to you that you come off like as asshole?
I don’t get this part:
evidenced by 67500t being consumed to produce 9EJ in a year
followed by this part:
Do that 90 times and you have produced 810EJ or a little over 1.3 years of primary energy.
It sounds like your mixing up 90 years of power with 1.3 years of primary energy. (Also why are you now comparing to primary energy? You made a stink about this earlier.) The answer is beginning to look more like 100 years if we only mine virgin stuff (no recycling of fuel, no dismantling of weapons grade fuel, etc).
Where is your “a few years”? You don’t mean using the electricity produced as primary energy do you?
You are clearly bullying the OP. Seems like you are intelligent and like angry that not everyone else is on the same page. I think OP held their own, I’d have crumbled after only one or two replies from you.
You’re giving them far too much credit. The bad faith misapplication of arithmetic followed by demanding that other people untangle their exact “reasoning” is an intentional misinformation technique. Typically employed by fascists and nazi apologists, but not all anti-climate trolls are doing it to engineer dependence on russian uranium and gas so it is hard to tell whether they’re an astroturfer fkr rosatom, a fossil astroturfer, a uranium squeeze finance bro, someone who just really loves what’s happening to the people in places like Arlit or Adapa, or just a bad faith idiot.
People who are misinformed or ignorant deserve respect. Bad faith trolls do not.
Actually we are able to reuse spent fuel. I know it’s not the same comparison, but we have enough spent nuclear fuel to power the entire US for 100 years.
Thinking that a closed fuel cycle is probably possible in spite of spending 30 years and billions of dollars trying and failing isn’t the same thing as being able to do it.
No just don’t vote stupid people into governments who don’t have a plan and are just saying “turn it off at that point I am not responsible anymore so I don’t care if there is not enough renewables”
I don’t mind more nuclear if it’s done in a modern and safe fashion. The US has a tendency to build old fashioned water cooled reactors that output nuclear waste that we have to find a place for. And we do stupid things like building them on fault lines and flood zones.
If this magical reliable, cheap, abundant, fast to deploy molten salt handling technology existed, the people with it would be dominating the storage industry with carnot batteries on every abandoned (and active) coal plant as well as the solar industry with 2c/kWh CSP.
The current gen nuclear reactors are the only ones that have a chance of being built with all the known drawbacks. And even if we started building them like crazy, it would still not be enough to meaningfully contribute to mitigating climate change. All the other designs, like Thorium or SMRs are just pure science fiction and at best decades away from being viable.
Fossil fuel and monopoly utility owners desperately trying to direct resources away from the thing killing their profits to something they know is ineffective with astroturfing campaign. Fox news watchers parroting what they’re told.
There’s only one contender, buddy. This “if only you’d stop fighting and just direct 10x the resources at a non-solution” schtick is even stupider than the rest of the lies.
The nuclear industry is owned by the same people as big carbon. The only people parroting this garbage are the same people that have been pushing coal and climate denial.
Why is gifting grifters trillions of dollars to make negligible impact on climate change in response to a fossil industry marketing campaign not about the grifters or the fossil industry?
The 5GW of distributed or utility solar uses less mass and less of every individual element than the 1GW nuclear reactor except for Silicon and Oxygen (the most abundant things). 3GW of wind requires much less of everything except concrete (and the gap is closing rapidly).
1000 people (including the underpaid factory workers and the upstream supply chain) working for a year can produce, ship and install the utility PV or 2-3 years for distributed, but it takes the same workforce a decade for the NPP just at the construction site (excluding the underpaid miners in Uzbekistan or Niger).
You’re also presupposing results that have never happened historically and are incredibly easy for the fossil fuel industry (who are pushing this) to delay or sabotage.
Now just imagine if people were actually educated on Nuclear Power and how it actually compares to Solar, Wind, and Fossil fuels. Nuclear beats them and it particularly trounces Solar and Wind when you consider what it takes to power high density homes and business, making it a double win in the ecological friendly factor.
Nuclear is great and the best path forward at this time is a mix of both nuclear and renewables. We don’t have to choose one over the other, both have advantages.
i prefer having both as well. a good mix of industrial renewables with most if not every home having solar and batteries would be a very robust system with nuclear powering heavy applications and as a backup renewables.
also i greatly prefer building new nuclear power plants with the learning we have had since 3 mile island, chernobyl, and fukushima and other incidents along with other advances in tech.
I have no idea about the US power grid, so your comment may still apply there - though I guess also not for much longer.
The new problem is that in Europe we now occasionally get more than 100% of power needed generated by renewables, so we’d either need storage or fast reacting power plants to compensate for spikes and drops in the renewable supply. We’re at a point where we no longer really need new nuclear plants for some ‘base load’ - which is something they’d be good for. But as cost for operating a nuclear plant is pretty much fixed independent of power output they’re very expensive when used for compensating spikes, something Finland just learned the hard way this year.
Nope, almost nowhere in US has anywhere near that high a portion of renewable energy. Storage is just so people use as an excuse to stop building out renewables. “It’s impossible to have more than 10% renewables”. “The grid will collapse if we have 20% renewables”. Etc
Will only happend if Las Vegas runs out of water and lose population. Then they’ll want the related jobs, income, and tax revenue. Until LV dies, it’ll never happen.
If it’s any consolation, Nevada and a lot of the landlocked states are probably gonna get teabagged by climate change anyways, haha. Arizona is running out of water. My city in Montana nearly ran out of water a handful years ago, the largest one in the state. Like, out out. The river was only six feet deep and very narrow.
We nearly ran out of water again this past year when all the snow melted at once due to an early heatwave and cause the river to jump over 16 feet, which destroyed the water treatment facility and destroyed entire towns and national parks along with it. I moved to a different state after that. Somewhere less volatile.
Naturally. It’s hard for Tesla owners to pat themselves on the back for being good people if the electric their car is running off of, was generated by fossil fuels, lol.
However, regardless of climate change and its effects on the planet, our government isn’t going to choose nuclear unless they can be assured that they will make the same amount of money off of it, if not more.
Pretty much everything boils down to money, regardless of what kind of BS they feed you.
Could just pull a play out of the playbook-> Pass regulation to make it prohibitively expensive and time consuming to build anything other than nuclear.
All cars are awful, but an EV consuming 140Wh of electricity from you hypothetical all-coal grid from 60g of coal is still far better than an ICE burning 160g of petrol in their brodozer which required burning another 30g of gas and oil to refine after being pumped from a low-yield shale patch using 140Wh of electricity using that same 60g of coal.
It's less-than-optimal, but internal combustion engines are so horrifically inefficient than even a coal-powered Tesla creates fewer emissions than a gasoline car.
Yeah, that’s what most people fail to grok. This summer, 2023, will be the coolest summer for the rest of your life. In frightfully few years, weather catastrophes will be as commonplace as gas station stickups, and all of the ‘modern conveniences’ will be doubtful at best.
The internet will be frequently and increasingly unplugged, highways will buckle, flying will be only for oligarchs, hospitals will be amateur efforts, Hollywood will be in flames, pro baseball will be untenable, and wild hoards will roam what used to be the cities, searching for food.
In this mix, it’s laughable to imagine there’ll be full, stable, well-trained staffing at nuclear power plants.
Yeah cooling them with river water won’t work in the summer pretty soon and since it takes almost 10 years to build it really isn’t a reasonable choice if you see how many renewables you can rollout in that time with that money
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