I think this person has an agenda they want to push and they want to shout down anyone with ad-hominems who doesn't share their world view.
Is this not against hacker news guidelines?
Dang?
Huh? spenrose's most recent comment about nuclear power starts with:
> I am rooting for lots and lots of new nuclear
> Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies.
It's a lot of double speak so I can see how it would be confusing. But definitely take a closer look.
Pointing out the ad hominem's goes further in discrediting the argument, than throwing your own insults and trolling through their history.
All he did was discredit himself in front of the rest of us.
I do think France has it right, but there's some other things to consider. France is phasing out some of its nuclear and does not plan on replacing it. No they aren't going to 0% or even 50%, but they are doing it and this is a good idea. They are replacing old plants with renewables where they can and replacing and building new plants where they can't. This is part of why France has been doing so well in terms of CO2eq production (one of the lowest in Europe, which is especially crazy considering it doesn't have the hydrodynamic opportunities that Sweden does, who also uses a fair amount of nuclear).
Remember that no matter what you do, you want a diversified portfolio for power generation. You don't want to rely on a single resource.
A statement they keep making to placate anti-nuclear advocates but keep postponing and postponing. Because there's no way to reliably generate the majority of electricity using wind and solar, and only small parts of France are suitable for hydroelectricity.
Diversification doesn't matter for energy that comes from heat engines. Just like how many countries successfully grew their economies with > 80% fossil fuels plants, there's nothing wrong with powering a country entirely on nuclear power. Sure it's good build alternatives where it's cheaper. But the main draw of nuclear power is that its output entirely controllable. Diversification is much more important in renewables where you don't control the weather.
This is really confusing. Me, nor France, said that they are going to go to 0% nuclear. In fact, I remember saying
> No they aren't going to 0% or even 50%
Maybe I should be more clear and say "Less than 50%".
So I'm confused because I'm reading your response as disagreeing what IS happening (decommissioning IS happening) and taking it to mean that ALL reactors are being proposed to be decommissioned. Which is definitely not true.
> Diversification doesn't matter for energy that comes from heat engines.
What? We've always had diversification. So does every other country. They also always have. Different energy sources have different advantages. It would be dumb not to use the one that has the most advantage for the specific situation. And of course there's the old saying "don't put all your eggs in one basket." But you seem to be disagreeing with this but also agreeing by saying
> Sure it's good build alternatives where it's cheaper
A big part is that France doesn't produce its own nuclear and so renewables do provide some self resilience. That does have some advantages, but obviously France does want to keep a mostly nuclear system (recycling is self resilience too).
> But the main draw of nuclear power is that its output entirely controllable.
Which this isn't really true. You CAN throttle nuclear but not infinitely and surely not like you can with coal or natural gas. France just sells the excess and this "throttles" a lot for them. It is very efficient.
> there's nothing wrong with powering a country entirely on nuclear power.
The issue is easier for France than other countries, simply because momentum. One thing you have to consider with building reactors is that they take longer to develop and build than other sources. Which I'll agree that we should have started yesterday, but let's be realistic. If you really believe this then you should also be a proponent of renewables because they are a better stop gap to a nuclear based system than coal and natural gas are.
> So I'm confused because I'm reading your response as disagreeing what IS happening (decommissioning IS happening) and taking it to mean that ALL reactors are being proposed to be decommissioned. Which is definitely not true.
They keep delaying their supposed nuclear cutbacks: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/frances-decision-to-d...
The reality is that wind and solar can't replace nuclear or Fossil fuels without some insanely good energy storage that is currently the stuff of science fiction.
> Which this isn't really true. You CAN throttle nuclear but not infinitely and surely not like you can with coal or natural gas. France just sells the excess and this "throttles" a lot for them. It is very efficient.
Incorrect. Reactors can be modulated in terms of thermal output. You can throttle the electrical output even if the thermal output remains the same by cooling the water more aggressively. Furthermore excess energy is not a hard problem to solve. Desalinate water, or other energy intensive tasks are good energy sinks.
> One thing you have to consider with building reactors is that they take longer to develop and build than other sources. Which I'll agree that we should have started yesterday, but let's be realistic. If you really believe this then you should also be a proponent of renewables because they are a better stop gap to a nuclear based system than coal and natural gas are.
France built up it's nuclear generation from 10% to 80% in the span of 15 years. By comparison, solar and wind are still waiting for an effective energy storage system to come into existence.
Renewables are not capable of generating more than ~40% of a country's electricity due to the fundamental mismatch between the time that energy is generated and the time that energy is consumed. Look at Germany to see the failure of solar and wind to produce a carbon free energy system. The solution exists, and has existed for over half a century now.
And my point, is that France has repeatedly postponed even these much more modest plans for denuclearization.
Regarding the immense capacity required for wind/solar: see Figure 10 of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424.... They essentially optimize the renewable mix to minimize cost while considering different scenarios for storage costs. The optimization must meet 100% of the demand at 100% of times for the grid in a few different states over the last decade of real data. Plot shows the levelized cost of power or LCOE (the color) in the storage energy vs storage power capacity space. In Arizona, it's no problem, renewables are for sure gonna work out even without a storage miracle. Not so much everywhere else, although I bet most people are so climate woke they wouldn't have a problem paying double for power. I don't want to though.
There are flaws here as well. First, how will they enforce the optimal mix of solar and wind? Will they set quotas of how much of each can be built? As soon as you fall out of the optimum, prices go up. And then there's the material/engineering issue. This kind of storage production is out of this world. Yes, Tesla is going to make 100 $/kWh batteries and they will have dozens of giga factories, but we'd have to produce more than we have ever made. That scares me, and even then, the cost is not lower than natural gas. Gentlemen, natural gas is king - it's so cheap, and easy, and dispatchable.
For resiliency, the key is distributing your power and not depending on others to get things to work. So don't rely on solar plants in another state, or gas pipeline, or whatever. Get it done locally. The paper averages the nationwide demand and production which requires a national grid, and this is not resilient. Grid failures tend to cascade and everyone is affected. Some literature on terrorist or weather based grid vulnerabilities (might not be accessible since this enters sensitive info):
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/assault-on-california-power-sta...
- Lanza, R. Fragility of Energy Networks. in INTERNATIONAL SEMINARS ON PLANETARY EMERGENCIES AND ASSOCIATED MEETINGS- 47thSession (2014). doi:10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004
- Wang, S. et al. An Optimization-Based Adaptation Framework for Coastal Electrical Infrastructure Resilience To Climate Change.
PS. Love the character attack with insinuation of conspiracy theorist. Nicely done. To be clear, I get paid by nuclear lobbyists to troll sites like these.
Also, hydro is a massive part of the energy mix going forward and excluding it gives meaningless results.
Environmentally, rivers need variable flow rates to minimize silt buildup so doing so is actually good for the environment. Comparing the costs of constructing a dam with the cost of extra generating capacity, this flexibility is also extremely cheap. They do maintain a minimum flow at all times it’s generally a low fraction of average let alone maximum capacity.