So really no danger of the Med drying up over the lifetime of a nuclear power station, conservatively 100 years.

Spain's reactors were fine. Regulations of cooling water discharge temperature are what are limiting the reactor output. Adding cooling towers to the power stations leads to a poorer condenser vacuum than river water, reducing electrical output by a few percent, but still a possibility. Whether it is economically worthwhile to retrofit cooling towers is another question.

From google translate """ Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion. """

No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.

It is particularly effective when you can 'rotate' the data to enhance compressibility; https://github.com/google/riegeli does this automatically for wire format protobufs by splitting data by protobuf field (well, recursively). It doesn't even have to know the message schema. Shame the project is not more widely known.

Overproducing some of the time. And pulling electricity from Sweden and Norway at other times.

> I love you now are trying to smear off-shore wind costs on everything.

Why is Denmark running the CfD auction if everything is so rosy for onshore wind and solar (plus batteries)?

> the CFD bids today are below the market price for the capture-rate of their electricity.

OK, they are betting on the future value of the electricity they produce being lower than today.

> The CFDs are also structured to not pay out when electricity is zero

So existing generators with older CfDs have priority over new generators with CfDs? Interesting.

> Who pays when half the French nuclear fleet is offline?

Why were they offline?

> Who pays for the N+1 requirements coming from nuclear power being enormous single points of failures leading to large reserves being necessary?

So the 1.X GW of standby is bad, but the whole-system sized standby required for intermittents is fine? Also let's not confuse the capacity factor of nuclear (including scheduled maintenance) with the odds of nuclear being offline unexpectedly.

> you can never formulate a solution where nuclear power is required to pay for the problem large single points of failures cause in the grid.

Wait, is this where I am meant to talk about SMRs? Or nuclear peaker power stations?

Basic maths

2.2 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 3.025x LCOE for the first nuclear power station. 1.6 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 2.2x LCOE for the second plant. 1.0 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 1.375x LCOE for remaining plant.

Wind/solar is heavily dependent on the required storage (which depends on matching supply and demand), additional transmission and backup generation prices.

Finding the price tipping points is the point of the exercise. When you catch someone's fingers on the scales you realise what the game is.

They could spend much less and restart some nuclear. https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/radiant-energy-gr...

> You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world?

CfD is going strong in the UK; it seems about the only way of deploying it, given the revenue uncertainty associated with market saturation/cannibalisation.

Denmark required CfDs too. https://windeurope.org/news/successful-danish-offshore-wind-...

Of course, other subsidies exist. Feed in tariffs. Transmission charges. Capacity and ancillary service payments to provide services that solar/wind do not.

It is interesting to see how large-scale nuclear is handled.

120% and 60% increase in cost for FOAK and NOAK (Table 2-1), plus no learning rate for nuclear construction beyond that (Table C.2).

Interest rates during construction unfairly penalise nuclear as "GenCost uses the simplest way which is to increase the capital cost by the assumed discount rate raised to the power of the construction time" (page 97)." This results in ~20% increase in capital costs against other simple scenarios like equal construction costs across each year.

30 year plant lifetime, rather than say 60 years. That results in ~10% increase in capital costs.

> Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.

That line of reasoning only works if there is something to make one plant more expensive to produce electricity than another. For natural gas the cost of fuel is far greater than the CAPEX. For intermittents only the variable OPEX can distinguish between generators, which is mostly for wind and I guess most severely for offshore wind. Cannibalisation is the big problem for intermittents. The notion of succession doesn't work for them.

The underlying demand and production has not changed so much since then. The requirements for storage still exist, and strongly depend on when the power is delivered as well as needed.

> a fossil system would also need to have months of storage

Coal and gas also get produced in the winter at a relatively constant rate. Plus we know how to handle piles of coal, caverns full of gas, tanks full of LNG, and linepack for shorter duration gas storage.

> you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve

Sure, you then have an economic problem. The effective capacity factor of the intermittents get driven down. How are they going to be paid for, if much of the time the market is saturated?

OK, so it requires a plant of fuel cells. And the cost per kW (i.e. discharge capacity) is? And it requires some facility to produce the ammonia; what is the cost per kW of electricity consumed, and at what efficiency?

Numbers would help to assess the proposal, given the claim that a halving of the cost of electricity from solar would make all the economics for ammonia work.

It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.

Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps once a year). Seasonal variations do matter.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49080874

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

What do you mean "decay chains"? Po-210 decays to Pb-206 which is stable. So you mean Po-210 decay. Let's shut down the chemical industry because someone attempted to poison The Skripals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_... .

> medical mistakes

Spent nuclear fuel is generally not used for medical isotopes. They specially prepare samples for irradiation to not have to use reprocessing, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60#Production .

> I could have a look for you

It would be illuminating to see what you find reasonable.

The source you provided does not agree with that assessment. It is purely radiation damage. The Pu-238 (half life 87.7 years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,110 years) experiments.

    plutonium-induced health effects are considered to be the result of energy deposited by alpha particle emissions in tissues that retain plutonium for extended periods (i.e., lung, bone, liver following inhalation exposure). Similar health effects would be expected from any alpha-emitting source that would result in similar cumulative tissue-specific radiation dose and dose rate.

Well, there are many definitions, for instance https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk/information-hub/factsheets/wh... is from the UK.

> The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel

You generally extract the trans-uranics from fission products. The former needs more specific treatment to deal with their longer half lives (or turning into MOX, which ends up more expensive than using normal uranium). The latter get vitrified (who needs the Sr or Cs, really).

> The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications:

The Pu-238 for the RTG is generally produced in trace quantities in reactors, with reactor grade plutonium containing mostly Pu-239 and Pu-240.

I'm not a huge fan of these tiny RTG sources either. Spacecraft yes, otherwise ... proven to be somewhat dangerous when they become orphaned.

Fortunately it is self disposing, decaying away. Unlikely plain old mercury or arsenic.