5376

Then what’s the point of the argument?

Edit: Never mind, I see the problem. I’m not arguing that the manufacture of electric cars is no worse, but that’s what I said above. Sorry about that. My point is that the comparison is silly if it doesn’t take into account the useful life impact.

5377

Yes, perhaps, but I’m just disputing the assertion that it is climate change activists that are the problem with nuclear.

5378

It also works because your state is incredibly flat with lots of space well suited to wind generation. And even so, it’s still only 16% of your power (at least according to ERCOT)

Dude, the small wind farm doesn’t produce anything close to the same amount of power. You aren’t gonna install 4.2GW like at the Flamanville nuclear facility with some good-ole boys and a truck. Flamanville produces 14TWh annually. That’s terrawatt hours.

That single nuclear plant, not even including the new core that is currently being built and will expand its power by 50%, produces around 20% of all the power generated by every windmill in the entire state of Texas.

Don’t get me wrong, wind power is great. I’ve been directly involved in the development of wind power. But it’s not going to scale to the level you need, certainly not nation wide. You should build more wind power… but if you don’t build nuclear power, then you are extending the time you’re going to be burning dead dinosaurs.

That’s the thing dude, there are basically no sacrifices. The footprint is incredibly small compared to virtually every other means of generating power.

5379

It’s not about government vs private run, it’s about where the money is committed and what the long-term plans are. The navy has a great safety record, but has advantages in regulation, administration, regulation, and funding. Does the success of the navy nuclear program have lessons we can make use of in the public power sector?

Build small and modular instead of large and custom? Navy uses standardized designs in every class of ship, with only 25 or so designs built and tested across all ships since the 1960s. All current operating subs use the same reactor design, for example.

Plan for short lifetimes and replacement instead of eternal recommissioning? The AVERAGE age of nuclear plants in the US is 38 years old, and the oldest is about 50. Older riskier reactors are still in use because they can’t be replaced. Navy reactors are designed for long run times between refueling, but the whole reactor or ship is decommissioned and replaced when old.

All navy reactors and cores have a lifetime plan for disposal as soon as they are built. The govt maintains several shallow-burial high security sites where they retire all their old reactors, and can plan to secure them forever. All public commercial plants in the US are basically depending on temporary storage for all spent fuel and waste, because we haven’t completed a long-term storage national facility.

5380

I feel like a reason is that the Navy doesn’t deal with any of the red tape, except for the actual safety regulations of the engineering itself. They don’t have to do repeated environmental impact studies. They don’t have to fight in extended legal battles with randos who want to stop their progress. They don’t They just build a reactor on a boat and launch it.

We built the USS Ronald Reagan, which is 2GW’s of nuclear power generation, surrounded by a freaking floating city full of some of the most advanced military tech in the world, for $4.5B and in 5 years from keel laydown to commission.

5381

Convincing people to go with nuclear power is a political sacrifice. Paying the cost to create those safely designed reactors, maintain them, and upgrade when necessary is an economic sacrifice. Would those sacrifices be worth it? Absolutely, in my opinion, but I’m not the politicians and financiers who have to put it on the line. Those folks haven’t done so, and until you can convince them otherwise, you’re not getting significant nuclear expansion. It’s not enough to stop at “modern nuclear tech is advanced enough to be safe and efficient” - it is, but that does you no good if no one is willing to use it or to pay the up-front and ongoing costs.

As for this discussion with @Timex in particular, I’m done with it until he (or someone) can point to a feasible plan that addresses overcoming negative political pressure, regulatory capture, and safety taking a back seat to profit.

5382

But that’s his point. At the moment politicians are pretending they can get around this problem by adding much more popular renewables to the energy mix, and that has done a lot of good, but is now hitting fundamental limits (c.f. the Energiewende and the amount of coal still in the German energy mix). As long as we pretend that we can actually solve this problem with current renewables (which I am not convinced by, except for in geologically blessed locations like Iceland) we make it much harder for anyone advocating nuclear.

5383

Exactly. You need to shatter the myth (and that’s what it is, a myth) that you are going to solve the issues of carbon emissions without nuclear power.

The choice you have is either build nuclear power plants, or build fossil fuel plants.

Right now, the latter is what is happening. We are building a ton of new natural gas power plants.

Pretending that if we don’t build nuclear power plants, that we’re going to just magically transform our energy economy over to renewables is damaging to the planet at this point. The fight against nuclear power has caused potentially irreparable harm to the environment, and that harm grows every day the misguided fight continues.

Again, I’m in the middle of this mess right now, with PA shutting down nuclear plants and replacing them with natural gas plants… It’s the wrong direction.

5384

Is it? I think there is probably a lot of room for renewables share growth in most countries.

5385

German renewables proportion of electricty production:

2000: 6.2%
2005: 10.2%
2010: 17.0%
2015: 31.6%
2019: 34.9%

And this is a fantastic result for the planet, but the trendline is clear. Political commitment is undimmed, the technology is just getting better, and yet progress in changing the energy mix has slowed to a crawl.

Or look at these fantastic charts:

You can push the peaks for wind and solar up (although presumably with wind there are a certain amount of diminishing returns), but you can’t push the troughs up.

There’s a lot more to do with renewables, sure, especially in most of the world. But it is economically much better from the perspective of the renewables industry to have no nuclear power and CCGT backup, that should be obvious from thinking about how the charts and how inelastic supply markets work. This has created perverse incentives.

EDIT: Another example of the harm done by perverse incentives would be the funding structure of Hinkley Point C, which basically makes it a massive financial scheme to move money from UK electricity purchasers to banks, with a nuclear power plant tacked on the side. But the government gets to keep the debt off balance sheet, and the builders and banks have no reason to demur.

5386

Some other bad news about Germany…

As Peter Rez at Arizona State University discusses, renewables will not make much of a dent in their total carbon emissions. The problem is that even when renewables produce enough energy to supply all of the country’s electricity, the variability of the renewables means Germany has to keep the coal plants running, over half of which use the dirtiest of all coal, lignite.

Since Germany is phasing out its zero-emission nuclear plants in several years, the situation will only get worse. The loss of that nuclear will wipe out the total gains made in wind power (see figure), the main reason that the leading climate scientists in the world warn that nuclear needs to be sustained, and even increased.

Storage technologies, like vanadium flow batteries or pumped hydro storage, will help, but the amount of storage needed is so large, they will not be able to take over in time to keep global warming to a reasonable level, i.e., by 2040.

And Germany’s decision to shut down it’s nuclear plants was largely based on nothing besides hysteria.

5387

As a guy who has operated Navy reactors, the red tape and environmental laws and regulations that must be followed are significant. Every log entry from every plant on every ship is maintained forever and made available to Congress. Screw ups, even minor ones, are investigated with extreme rigor and the punishments are severe. There is certainly no free pass for the Navy in reactor operation.

5388

Sure, that’s why i didn’t say there’s weren’t regulations. I would assume that you have pretty strict regulations when it comes to constructing and operating a bunch of floating nuclear reactors. But i feel like they are well understood, and finite. For follow on carriers in a class, those things were made on a pretty fixed schedule and cost. After the first one in a class, they didn’t tend to have really long delays like you see in say, the construction of a commercial nuclear power plant.

And i think that ultimately, that’s a big separation between good regulations and bad.

Regulations are required for all sorts of things. But they need to be well defined. It needs to be clear exactly what someone needs to do to meet the requirements.

There are elements of government regulations which are extremely vague and poorly thought out, to the extent that the actual regulators don’t even know what the regulations intend.

As an example, you can look at the newer NIST regulations for cyber security. The regulations themselves are ridiculously vague, such that they could be satisfied by actual effective measures, or trivial “check the box” measures. And there’s no clear procedure for testing compliance, it’s almost entirely subjective.

Those kind of regulations end up being a waste of time and money.

On the flip side, the suggesting of crap like “cutting two regulations for every new one!” Is absurd, because all regulations are not equal.

5389
5390

We have the best climate.

5391

It’s cause of our clean coal technology.

5392

Yes, but Germany is one country.

I’m disputing this:

Renewables are nowhere close to fundamental limits globally, so it’s perfectly sensible for politicians to push for more popular renewables if that is the path of least resistance, and pushing for more renewables will still contribute a lot to any solution. That’s probably true even in Germany.

5393

Once again Scott, if you refuse to actually read my response you will end up arguing with things I haven’t said or have already clarified.

I will try to restate my positions:

There is a lot more scope in renewables, especially outside northern europe. However the problem is renewables advocates denying the baseload problem even exists, on the basis of, as far as I can see, no evidence whatsoever.

I somewhat cynically speculate this is because wind/solar power actually have the best economic scenario where there is no nuclear power and considerable CCGT capacity.

5394

This is an odd way to say you misunderstood what I was saying; here’s what I was saying.

Failing that, all I have is the words you wrote that I quoted.

5395

Confirming that you simply ignore any words I wrote that you choose not to quote?

I’m not responding constructively because this is part of a pattern of bad faith engagement on your part.