Just a quick point on the cost of nuclear. A large part of the cost of nuclear is due to the very intense safety systems which have been added on a little at a time. Each small safety thing has increased the cost but nobody has taken all of the intentions of those changes and integrated them into a stable and safe system without the need for all the little safety features.
The best example I can give is cars. Adding air bags, lane change detection, car in front detection, ABS, and so on each makes cars safer, but never questions the underlying adduction that cars are good. Why not trains?
In rectors we can have passive safety systems where the moderator is a liquid which is blocked in by a solid plug. The solid plug is frozen moderator and sits at the bottom of the system. If the power is cut or fails the plug stops being cooled and melts, draining the moderator. Without the moderator the neutrons are going too fast to trigger the chain reactions and everything stops. No sensors or control systems are needed, it just passively stops and cools naturally, while also being way cheaper.
SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It can though. Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
Historically, they were built as baseload plants without load following capability in order to keep the design simple which led to many anti-nuclear activists claiming this. It’s just not true though.
Why?
No. They’re not. The costs are just externalized and safety is, comparitively, neglected.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
In the power grid of today (and even more so in the future), that’s fairly slow. On good days wind and solar already produce more than 100% in several countries, so it needs to be able to drop to 0%. Worse however is that nuclear is already expensive, and shutting it down means it’s just a hunk of a building costing money. It’s why private investors have largely shunned nuclear in the modern days: it’s not econonically viable anymore, or even if it is it’s just not profitable enough. And that picture seems to be getting worse and worse every year.
Sure, but the power companies don’t pay for that so to them it’s cheap, which was the point.
SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Not really. Reciprocating gas engines are specifically designed for balancing loads with renewables and have maneuvering capabilities in the 25-100% range with the state of the art at ~25%/minute slope.
Startup time is 15min-1hr for gas, 30min-2hr for nuclear.
You’re correct that gas is better on all these metrics, but it’s far more comparable than you’re making it out to be.
Also needs to be mentioned that these are very oversimplified metrics and things look better for nuclear the deeper in the weeds you go imo.
That’s not how any kind of turbine works.
The same could be said of solar. ‘It’s a very expensive capitol investment and as soon as the sun goes down it’s just a stupidly expensive roof costing money’.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
Solar is significantly cheaper. Like it’s not even funny how much cheaper it is. This means that other than the sun going down, they’re always going to be producing because it’s by far the cheapest power available. And because they easily earn back what they cost, it’s perfectly fine if they don’t operate at 100% efficiency.
For nuclear to remain economically viable in these market conditions it has to be similarly profitable, and it just isn’t.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That’s just an issue with capitalism, not with nuclear energy itself. Placing solar panels everywhere may be easier and cheaper short-term, but it’s far from optimal. Ideally we’d like to have a bit of both.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
You’d have similar problems doing this under communism tbf. It’s expensive under any economic system. Solar at least has the advantage that any Joe Shmoe can put it on their roof and produce their own power, not being dependent on big energy corpos.