this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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The most recent nuclear reactor built in the US bankrupted Westinghouse and is set to raise utility rates. Oh, and it’s $17 billion over budget and 7 years late.
Yep. Yet, Climate scientists still believe that we need to rely on a combination of nuclear and renewable energy in order to combat climate change. This tells me we're bad at it, and we need to get better at building and maintaining nuclear plants.
Nuclear solves one of the biggest issues with renewables because the energy output can be adjusted.
This in turn means that you need less energy storage capacity in order to supplant existing technologies.
Honestly I'm just happy we're moving away from fossil fuels.
Nuclear is a great supplement to wind and solar PV.
Especially when the share of renewables get close to 100%.
Going from 85-90% to 100% imply to almost double the capacity of renewables energy available, even with batteries and thermal power stations as a backup.
On the other hand having 10-15% of nuclear really helps to stabilize the grid and lower the need to oversize the renewables power production.
Yes, power output can be regulated in nuclear energy. It is, however, not economical to do so most off the time. Building a nuclear reactor is a massive capital investment, so any time you're not running at 100% you are increasing your payback time, which leads to more expensive electricity.
I'm taking a course on power generation, transmission, and distribution, and you basically said what I wanted to say.
If you look at generation in California, there's a huge peak during the day (due to the increased supply of power from solar) and a decreased demand for power in general (because needs are being met by individual solar). The extra power needs to be stored/used or wasted. No other options, which is what makes solar weaker (than it could be) right now - we don't have the storage capacity to be keeping the excess for nighttime.
They don't think that. Take South Australia for example - it's moving towards 100% renewables with the help of a mix of sources including battery storage. There's no need for non-renewable nuclear energy in the mix.
Bettery storage is horrible for the environment.
Some of the smartest people in the world have been working for over half a century to get better. And yet it's still getting more expensive to build them.
Maybe it's just hard and a dead end. Like the paddlewheel or dirigibles. At the time they felt like the future but there were unforeseen problems in scaling them up to meet expectations, and we found better, safer ways of doing the same thing.
Small nuclear reactors seem to work pretty well. Using them for deep space or disaster response would make sense. Just park a Seawolf off the coast and hook it up to support the grid.
It is not hard due to lack of knowledge, it is hard due to politics, and the fact that they require trained / skilled builders and operators.
So it's a cold start problem. As we aren't making many, we don't have much trained staff.
Haven't we been building reactors for decades though? Are all those guys dead along with the COBOL programmers?
We have documentation, but you.need to have construction crews working to keep the specific routines and needs sharp.
Sure they have people "ready" to work on such projects but it takes significant time to tool and train up, even for the "ready" folks because they don't do these jobs often.
Are they significantly different from normal specialized plumbing/electrical/heavy construction work? Weird, complex things get built all the time these days and I'm curious how much different pouring concrete for a reactor is compared to, say, a bridge.
How many dozens of years will the area around the bridge be inhospitable if the concrete is not poured, and mixed correctly? Who would take the risk doing the work except for people that are highly trained or extremely ignorant? There's a lot of specialized work involved with the whole process including creating the reactors, which until recently, have mostly been specialized designs for each plant. Lots of articles about nuclear energy and it's problems can be found online if you're interested in reading more.
I'm pretty sure the most recent reactor built in the US was by GD not Westinghouse, and was on time and budget
If we were talking about naval reactors you'd have a point.
But this is what I was talking about in another post: Maybe big reactors are a bad idea? Maybe there are issues with getting them to utility-scale that, like blimps, makes them the less ideal solution for most applications?
Huh, it's true. sauce
Great article, the one time a corporation actually loses money from cutting corners, and it's because government inspectors kept catching them in the act. Hilarious!