Schroedingersat

Nuclear is a technology like any other. With upsides, downsides, and constraints.

The upsides are vastly overstated, the downsides are vastly understated by some and vastly overstated by others, and the constraints are explained away by pretending inane scifi schemes are reality. This does not mean it has no useful niche outside its primary purpose of maintaining a weapons program, but it does mean that anything the proponents or purveyors say is worse than noise.

Bizarre moralizing and straw-manning over anyone that acknowledges the impossibility of maintaining exponential population growth in a finite volume of space is more irrelevant nonsense. It can both be true that the current population is sustainable with technogy or minor lifestyle changes and also that population growth should be halted (most effectively via education, voluntary access to birth control, and empowerment of women).

It can also be true that the technologies that maximise the amount of energy that can be used sustainably don't involve digging up ore with energy density lower than coal, venting Kr-85 everywhere or producing 4 joules of waste heat for every joule of work.

Your false dichotomy is as bad an intentional misrepresentation of reality as your previous claim about 8 year old solar prices being current. See the above point about falling back to slimy rhetorical tactics rather than engaging with reality.

The difference is a solar farm consists of 4 million identical modules and a quarter billion identical cells. If a cell is faulty, it decreases output of that module by 2%. If a module is faulty it either decreases the string output by 5% or costs $80 and 15 minutes to replace. If many modules are found to have a long term fault later, repowering comes at a cost penalty of about 1c/kWh. Building terawatts of solar involves trillions of identical cells, and trillions of trials to practise making them cheaply with zero penalty for iteration.

A nuclear reactor consists of many thousands of bespoke parts. If one is faulty, at the very least the whole thing is shut down while millions are spent replacing it, or possibly it kills a lot of people. Building terawatts of nuclear involves making each part thousands of times, and the penalty for iteration is thousands of man hours for validation as well as potentially shutting down every power plant with that part. If there is a major systematic flaw you are out 5-20c/kWh and years of output.

Yes. The capacity factor is a blatant lie given that units 1 & 2 are about 60%, and the costs are an old estimate of overnight cost without escalation or inflation.

Comparing overnight costs to final all-in prices is one way nukebros love to lie.

You're also pretending operating costs don't exist.

You're also pretending that costs for a solar project in 2015-2019 are costs today. This is another blatant lie.

Longevity is another lie. The median and mean ages of the plants that actually get completed is around 30 years, not 60. The average for nuclear plants that are paid for is even lower because so many do not open at all.

Thankyou for demonstrating.

> But at the same time, it's kind of odd he didn't notice people from his own side peddling blatant lies.

Bit odd not to notice all the lies he's telling even after they're pointed out, he doubles down on them, and then they're disproven.

There's also the camp that noticed that everything the pro-nuclear propagandists say about the supposed upsides is either paltering or an outright lie, and they constantly resort to slimy rhetorical tricks like saying:

> Those who oppose nuclear power fall in two camps: people who honestly believe there is something insurmountable about nuclear technology, and antihumanists, who think humanity as a whole is bad, and the planet would be much better if we were fewer, the fewer the better (see for example Club of Rome [1]).

rather than engaging with reality.

The USA quotes AC capacity, costs and power.

So a 100MW plant in the US quoted at $110 million including the cost of finance, profit margin, regulatory compliance, insurance and transmission with a capacity factor of 27% has 130MW DC of modules. Some other countries will quote DC so there may be a discrepancy. You can find comparions in things like the IRENA generation costs report, the ITRPV or the frauenhofer photovoltaics report. The US is also almost all single axis tracking where other countries may have fixed tilt as dominant.

New fixed tilt utility solar in 2023 is about 50-60c/Wdc or 80c/Wac. Single axis is about 70c/Wdc or $1/Wac.

The chinese nuclear project doesn't include inflation since 2008 (40%), cost of finance/escalation, chinese-government-accounting, or insurance. The (admitted) costs per watt of the chinese nuclear program have also increased substantially since 2008. Even with these, the claimed capex per MWh is comparable to solar in the west, but the O&M would make it much more expensive. Solar in china is 20-50% cheaper than the west.

In the west O&M is about $30/MWh, which overlaps with the all-in cost of solar.

Also note that the cost of the Turkey facility you mentioned includes a factory which will produce many times more modules.

The idea that this hasn't been tried repeatedly is a myth.

You're amortising the cost over a time period that is in direct contradiction to reality, at an EAF that is in direct contradiction to reality at a cost of capital that doesn't reflect the likelihood of project failure or early closure. On top of excluding all the indirect subsidies.

€11bn for 1.6GW on a European nuke that will run about 70% of the time and statistically will close in around 30 years while costing $30/MWh for O&M is around 16c/kwh

> The local Wikipedia says nuclear ramps up or down at 5%/min. This is faster than any other method of generation.

How is paying extra to ramp at 5%/min once a day "faster than" being able to switch off in seconds and back on in a minute like a wind turbine, or turn on and off in milliseconds as many times as you like like a PV inverter or even stopping starting in minutes like a reciprocating or OCGT peaker or ramping 0-100% in minutes repeatedly like hydro?

Why do that, when you can just present the surplus/deficit coldest-sunniest day in late spring and pretend it is an essential aspect of all renewable generation?

You see, that's the greenwashing bit.

It's not made from water, it's made from fossil gas.

All these schemes to increase demand aren't about making electrolysers to replace existing grey hydrogen, they're ahout selling grey hydrogen.

Hydrogen has a GWP of 11.

Cube square law also makes small scale hydrogen storage more expensive than batteries.

Then you're back to limited niche uses, or needing expensive, leaky distribution.

The best use of hydrogen for seasonal arbitrage is making it into sponge iron and ammonia for steel and fertiliser then storing that. Then your seasonal-cadence variability is gone.

The mirai has worse range, has less power, is heavier, has less internal space, is bigger, requires more mining if rare minerals for fuel cells, lasts fewer miles before replacing the storage/fuel cell system, refuelling for daily use is much more cumbersome and it costs ten times as much to fuel as current gen EVs.

The supposed overwhelming advantage results in saving 20 minutes on a 1000km trip (if nobody else used the hydrogen station before you, otherwise fuelling times are the same).

With current state of the art batteries being put into next model cars that last bit goes away too.

In what possible world do hydrogen passenger cars have a future?

A laptop powerbank cost about as much as those and will run enough lighting to read for days.

Lower cost than that, there are C-grade prismatic cells. Usb/12V adapters exist for a single cell as well, although i'm not sure if they are in that form factor.

Rough service incandescent bulbs are exempt and will last decades driven at a quarter power.

Sure it's a special order, but it's a special case.

You actually think this is convincing.

Wild.

Very nice attempt at gaslighting, but claiming it's "partially spent fuel" and that calling it waste is a lie is like claiming shit is "partially eaten food" because you can still see a couple of corn kernels.

It's a very obvious attempt to spread the myth that reprocessing somehow magically makes the entire mass of SNF fissile and will magically make all the fission products go away.

What are you even talking about?

> The big lie is calling it waste; "partially spent fuel" is more accurate

Which you doubled down on twice, before backpedalling and claiming you never meant that the *other* 99% of the waste wasn't waste and "partially spent" actually means "has a few leftover dregs that don't make a meaningful difference".

No, see I answered the actual question, which is oil. Which is mass limited. With how much energy would be available to do work at the destination.

You jumped to a ship two orders of magnitude larger and then insisted LNG carrying was mass limited, not volume limited.

I did not forget anything, merely pointed out the bizarre attempts to mislead.

You are attempting to insinuate that reprocessing will eliminate the nuclear waste and obviate mining new U235.

It does neither.

Stupid semantic games and motte and bailey rhetorical techniques do not change this.

> Liquid natural gas is less dense than water, so of course ocean transportation of it is not mass limited. Did it really no occur to you that I was referring to transportation of lithium batteries?

You were comparing LNG by mass to batteries by mass.

Now you're trying to pretend I was comparing volume to volume rather than a ship full.

So I guess the answer is no. You've never considered saying anything in good faith.

Yes. You could have done that rather than comparing to a ship two orders of magnitude larger.

That wouldn't have been a ridiculous attempt to mislead.

The relevance is that fertile material is not "partially spent fuel" in any extant fuel cycle.

First it does nothing to the fission products (which are the bulk of the radioactive waste by mass). Second turning U238, Pu240, Am241, and transuranics other than Pu239 into usable fuel has never happened without being a minor side-product of neutrons from a fissile source, and using the dregs of Pu239 that is <1% of the spemt fuel and <20% ofntue waste does not reduce the radioactivity of the waste, rather it makes it more dangerous because Pu239 is significantly less harmful than the result of putting MOX in a nuclear reactor, as is regular spent uranium fuel.

Pretending otherwise is knowingly disonhest.

Also false. LNG carriers are volume limited. Hence Q-Max vessels carrying about 100,000 tonnes vs bulk carriers of similar length carrying 400,000 tonnes.

Also I said useful energy. Depending on application, electricity is 1.5-5x as useful per joule.

Have you considered not just reaching for the stupidest possible lie on every occasion?

Answering the original question, it's about 10-20x as much usable energy for the oil. So if there's a wind farm 5% of the distance than an oil farm, the cost of the ship part is a wash.

Oil is much more energy dense.

Using current gen batteries, this is a cargo of about 1200t for 240MWh

Oil would be 13000MWh of chemical energy. Or a replacement for 2000-7000MWh of electricity.

It would never be worth transporting electricity from the oil well, but if the option is transporting oil 3000km or transporting electricity from a wind turbine 200km away, the battery-ship is a better use of the ship (but maybe not a better use of the batteries than using a wire).

The much higher capacity 8000 gross tonne hydrogen carrier can deliver about 1400MWh, after spending 3000MWh filling it up with a bunch of electrolysers then liquifying the hydrogen which you'd have to build a floating platform for. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suiso_Frontier

8000 tonnes of 200Wh/kg batteries is 1600MWh.

This is dumb, but hydrogen is much, much dumber.

Now do an LNG tanker the size of a 100TEU feeder ship as an actual comparison.

Why are nukebros incapable of comprehending the difference between fissile and fertile?