[readflaggedcomm]

>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.

Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity.

>The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.

Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastrophically instead of being gracefully shut down in favor of new ones.

And his explanation isn't to justify these claims, but to blame political opponents. Sad!

[the_why_of_y]

> Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity.

Texas has demonstrated that you can have blackouts and expensive at the same time if only you cut enough regulations.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why...

[cheaprentalyeti]

Funny, everyone was happy about how Texas scrapped so many coal plants and built so many windmills until it reached a cascade failure point and then the narrative shifted to "OMG, look at all the deregulation!"

[Trombone12]

Texas had no power because they forgot everything they learnt the hard way from their "once-in-a-decade snow storm" they had 2011.

Coal piles freezing solid because there is no roof, gas valves impossible to operate because nobody would put a box around them, no water too cool reactor cores because the pipes froze: these are not failures somehow cascading from the fact they build some windmills.

[fuoqi]

When I learnt that turbines on Texas nuclear plants stay under the open sky I was REALLY surprised. It was the reason behind the single failure, otherwise nuclear plants have weathered this crisis perfectly.

[Trombone12]

I guess the lesson is that not even Texans think nuclear is so safe it doesn't need weather protection, or maybe it's some pesky federal regulation that says that at least the reactor needs to be protected...

[Jedd]

This is a challenging position to take.

The failure point was a repeat of previous cold events -- it wasn't really a cascade event, of course, given wind turbines provide only 20% of power on the ECOT mini-grid.

Given there are similar capacity wind turbines running happily in Antarctica, and the heads-up from the 2011 & 2019 events to winterise the Texas fleet, it's difficult to see how this is a 'windmill problem'.

[edbob]

I wouldn't frame the blackouts as a "windmill problem" as they're primarily a "winterization problem", but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored. ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0. We invested billions into a generation source that at one point produced 0 and eventually "exceeded projections" by producing slightly more than 0. We could have invested those billions in basically any other source and had significantly more electricity available. Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.

[Jedd]

I see you've made many sweeping comments in this thread, some of which I can't confirm the veracity of.

> ... but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored.

Has that grid suffered lots of blackouts at times other than big freezes?

If it hasn't, then that would suggest that the designers / operators of the grid factored in the unreliability of wind, and have the baseload well covered by gas, nuclear, etc.

> ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0.

And yet:

"About half of the state’s wind capacity was offline Sunday because of turbines that had frozen in west Texas, according to the Austin American-Statesman, but high winds from the winter storm were spinning coastal turbines faster and generating more power to offset those losses." [1]

> Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.

'fewer'

I'm not sure where you're getting information that the wind stopped blowing, or why that's a reason to not use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy, or indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/02/17/fac...

[edbob]

You're reading a lot into my comments. You seem to think that I'm against using wind power, which is absolutely not true, as I've commented in the past. I'm against the current narrative's misinformation which cherry-picks stats to push a political agenda. I would like ERCOT to continue to "use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy", but in order to do this intelligently it is necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different generation sources. The fashionable anti-nuclear, pro-wind propaganda is not helping anyone to understand reality.

All of my information about the output of different sources comes from personally digging through ERCOT's minutely detailed reports[0]. I haven't seen a nice, neat fact-checking propaganda piece that deals with the relevant data, but I haven't really searched that hard because all the data is right there, straight from the source.

The "Fuel Mix Report" lists the output of each generation type in 15 minute intervals[1]. There are over 25000 GW of wind capacity, so we would expect to see a maximum of a bit less than 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods ("a bit less" is taking into account that we don't expect 100% output even in the best circumstances). The data matches this, as we see peaks reaching about 5600 GWh. The values are conveniently totaled for each day, and with a theoretical ceiling of 600,000 GWh capacity per day we see that the most actually produced on any day in Jan or Feb 2021 was 458,000 GWh on January 6th, 76% of capacity.

If we look at February 15, 16, and 17, wind output was 225,000 GWh for all three days combined, or a whopping 12.5% of capacity. This matches the pitiful performance that I was seeing in real time in ERCOT's feed.

None of the 15 minute periods report 0 GWh, the lowest being 149 GWh on Feb 15th. So either the granularity is not fine enough or I was just wrong to say that wind dropped to zero, and I would like to revise my position to say that wind output dropped to 2% of capacity.

Hopefully you can understand how I can both support intelligent use of wind power while being dismayed by fact-checking pieces that turn "only 25%" of our capacity being 87.5% offline into vague terms like "exceeded projections" and "wind wasn't a problem", as if 15,000-20,000 GW of capacity being offline was not a significant factor. (87.5% of 25,000 GW is 21,875 GW, but again I am not expecting wind to be able to produce at 100%).

> indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.

This comes off like you're just making things up to troll me. I've specifically mentioned winterization many times. It's also very telling that, like the fact-checkers, you have to stick to vague terms like "lost a fair chunk of capacity" without getting into the actual numbers which would show how massive that disparity really is.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation [1] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel20...

[pydry]

Every power source failed in Texas.

[edbob]

Every power source had some failures, but the only power sources that dropped all the way to 0 were solar and wind. Nuclear operated at 75% of capacity, while fossil generation seems to have been around 60%. Wind recovered slightly and "exceeded projections" by producing in the 15-30% range, but closer to 15% at night when it's coldest.

[Shared404]

Doesn't winterize wind turbines

Blames turbines for not working when it freezes.

I'm so freaking tired of hearing this.

[edbob]

All sources were notoriously un-winterized, but wind generation had the additional problem of not working when there wasn't enough wind, which is why it dropped to 0 at one point. Suggesting that wind would perform adequately if it were only winterized is simply inaccurate. It's common knowledge among non-zealots that wind and solar are far too unreliable to supply baseload generation needs, and that unreliability led to a missing 15-20 GW of generation when we needed it. Base load must be supplied by something else, like perhaps nuclear which performed pretty well despite not being winterized.

[pydry]

This isn't true. Gas and coal production suffered a lot more than wind:

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/16/natural-gas-n...

Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.

[edbob]

> Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.

That's bullshit. I was watching the ERCOT feed [0] during the blackouts, and I never saw it exceed 30%. I posted about it here extensively during the event, and no one reported seeing higher numbers. Right now wind is 5727 MW (23% of installed wind capacity), which is actually a little higher than the average generation I was seeing during the blackouts. PolitiFact very suspiciously doesn't want to say which sources are supposed to support which claims, but I can't find any support for their figures in their ERCOT links, which are the only actual sources provided.

Edit: I did a little more digging, and found that it's your claim that "wind ran at about 50% of capacity" that is completely false. The truth is that only half of the capacity was frozen, but that does not mean that the other half was producing. About half of the unfrozen capacity was not producing for other reasons. The truth is that wind output was 15-30% of capacity due to a combination of factors, including turbines freezing, batteries losing capacity and plain lack of wind. PolitiFact is not outright lying, they're just being as misleading as they possibly can be by cherry-picking stats like "50% was unfrozen" but omitting highly relevant data like "70-85% was offline". That's propaganda, not fact-checking.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

[barneygale]

Windmills? Are they making bread?

[KMag]

Yes. The big secret is they're hybrid windmills ;) The grain mills are separated from the wind turbines by electrical lines, unlike their mechanically-linked Dutch grain mill predecessors. Any excess electricity goes into BitFlour, a cryptocurrency that's "milled" instead of "mined".

(For those who missed it, the parent is asserting that "windmill" should be reserved for wind-powered mills.)

[ncmncm]

Charles Babbage called his Analytical Engine's ALU its "mill". I prefer his term.

In the case of wind turbines, it is clear that the generation unit is its mill, so I have no quarrel with calling them windmills.

They may be considered only half-satanic, having only three blades.

[makomk]

It was also... amusing watching capacity payments suddenly cease to be an evil subsidy to big coal and become an essential part of competent grid operations that Texas stupidly didn't have because they're right-wing libertarian nutjobs that think the free market solves everything. And by amusing I mean we're all fucked.

[robocat]

Nuclear friendly countries are struggling with the costs.

Multiple examples of problems were given for France, yet the French government likes nuclear power.

[namdnay]

Electricity in France is so cheap that EDF has had to raise domestic electricity prices in order to make it possible for other providers to compete

[Barrin92]

This is wrong in two ways. First off, electricity in France isn't particular cheap by European standards (which already is not cheap)[1]

Secondly, the EDF is debt-laden and heavily subsidized by the French state, this is why other providers cannot compete. Nuclear energy itself is on the expensive end when it comes to energy sources. As the article points out, France has not even allocated a third of the money it needs to decommission existing plants.

[1]https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[belorn]

Looking at the European data for energy subsidy (https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/en34-ener...), the energy sector that get most money is fossil fuels and by a large margin. Renewables comes in second.

Nuclear do get most money for research and development compared to other energy sources, but I have a hard time see how that translate to energy prices. R&D usually goes to universities.

If we use France specifically, according to the report here (https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/progress_on_ene...):

"In France, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Ireland and Finland, the highest shares were spent on fossil fuels (although in absolute terms, the fossil fuel subsidies in France were slightly lower than in Germany).

Both Germany and France is at the same time dwarfed by the amount of subsidies given to fossil fuel in the US. Nuclear subsidized is a tiny dot on map compared to the billions being spent on coal, oil and gas.

[pydry]

They're good until 2030 and then they're all going to start aging out at more or less the same time.

Nuclear power is extraordinarily capital intensive but fairly reasonably priced to run once it's built.

This also creates a strong incentive to run plants beyond their operating lifetime, which France may do. That takes us into exciting new territory safety-wise.

[Trombone12]

And then it becomes comes time to dismantle them, and they turn capital intensive again.

[api]

This tail end expense is maybe the largest problem with nuclear power. Economic systems and corporate structures are not set up for this. The whole economy is used to things costing nothing at the end of their life, or nearly so.

Done with a car? Scrap it, strip it, recycle the recyclables, and toss the rest. Done with a building? Implode it and cart it away. Same goes for almost all other pieces of machinery and capital.

Done with a nuke? Now you have another cost almost as high as building it to begin with! It's like having to buy your car and then spend almost the same amount to un-buy it at the end of its life span.

Yes such things can be priced in, but it requires a tremendous amount of foresight and discipline. There is a constant temptation to cut corners on any cost that won't be incurred for a long time, especially if that time is beyond the term of a politician or the career of a corporate bureaucrat.

Done with a solar panel? Send it to a bulk electronics recycler. Done with a wind turbine? Scrap it like any other piece of heavy machinery.

There are other industries with non-trivial decommissioning costs, like chemicals, oil and gas, etc., but at least the time frame is reasonably short. Nuclear decommissioning costs drag on and on, theoretically many times longer than the plant's useful life span.

[Hammershaft]

In the short term nuclear is undoubtedly expensive, but when the debt from construction is payed off, it becomes an incredibly cheap and reliable source of energy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

[dividedbyzero]

As far as I'm aware, dealing with the waste has cost taxpayers in Germany quite a lot over the last couple of decades, and all of the really hot stuff is sitting in glorified warehouses with no end in sight. I have a feeling this may still become a very significant part of the overall costs. Has any other country actually solved that problem?

[stevenwoo]

Finland? They are still doing construction but it seems all the planning stages have been done, but haven't seen recent update. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-07-31/finlands-solution-nuc... they generate the money to pay for the spent fuel disposal by taxing the revenue from the nuclear plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

[addicted]

This is what the interviewee points to in the interview itself, but also adds that they mah not be the answer because there is evidence that original estimates for copper’s corrosion were far too optimistic.

[merb]

sometimes waste is even dumped just into the earth: https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/09/italy.nuclearp...

[jojobas]

These glorified warehouses are cheap. Also cheap are former mines where 50 year old spent fuel can be placed with risks below that of chemical plants.

[estaseuropano]

That is simply wrong. Underground storage is not a panacea. Few mines are suitable and even those require expensive preparation and maintenance for coming decades or even centuries, with many hard to predict risks (think earthquake, flood).

[throw0101a]

Not disputing, but in the interests of full disclosure, the presenter is (per YT About):

* Professor David Ruzic

* Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering

* Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering

* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[ncmncm]

The only truly reliable and inexhaustible output of the nuke industry is falsehood.

They were lying before the first commercial plant was built ("too cheap to meter") and have continued well past the industry's deserved end ("incredibly cheap", above). The article demonstrates that even operating them, neglecting all of construction and decommissioning, costs more than alternatives.

"Incredibly" is a perhaps unintentionally revealing admission.

[api]

Are the prices subsidized? Are they actually that cheap or are you just paying the rest on your tax bill?

[fuoqi]

It does not look to me like Russia is struggling with exporting its reactors and building them domestically. Areva's issues look to me as purely organizational and political, not technical.

[behringer]

I don't think you're calculating climate change into the cost. We've got maybe 100 years left before things go nuts with the arctic completely melting.

[ncmncm]

Much less than 100 years. But continuing to operate nukes--instead of building out renewables with that money, and investing the savings in even more renewables--brings it closer.

[toshk]

To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?

[aksss]

I would have no problem with building one outside our city. And frankly compared the land clearing one would need for solar/thermal or the blight of enormous windmills, I’d prefer it. What you may be really asking is whether people are comfortable with the risk of turning into the next Chernobyl. I feel that risk is quite low, especially for new builds.

[bigfudge]

Aesthetically, I'd offer a counterpoint that incredibly high aspect ratio white carbon wings are quite beautiful, relative to monolithic concrete blocks. They are also approachable in the landscape (I love mountain biking beneath them).

I agree with your point that nimbyism shouldn't be a relevant factor in new build decisions though. The real issue is not whether you would want to live next to a new nuclear reactor, but whether you would want to live next to one in the process of being decommissioned at minimum cost contracts (or pay for the same, which is not being factored in to operating expenses). Or, live next to one of the wholly inadequate storage facilities for the hottest waste which we still have little idea what to do with.

[vcdimension]

I cannot understand how anyone would prefer an enormous grey concrete building with a large exclusion zone and large cooling towers blocking the skyline, to otherwise untouched natural or agricultural landscape dotted with wind turbines. Wind turbines allow you to enjoy more of the countryside because they take up very little space (you can walk around them). Furthermore, they seem to be quieter: https://youtu.be/zKgN2G9d0dc https://youtu.be/hEMImNj_c44

[Hammershaft]

When you compare the energy densities & land required there is nothing at all enormous about a nuclear plant. It is by far the most space efficient energy source we have (especially once you factor in the upstream footprint of mining & shipping ops)

[vcdimension]

That depends on how you measure land use; are you counting the amount of space that becomes otherwise unusable, i.e. the relatively small area occupied by the towers, or the entire area of the fields in which the wind turbines are placed? (which can still be used for other things like agriculture).

Personally I think wind turbines look quite majestic, and I like to see them when I go for a drive in the countryside.

This isn't directly related to the original question of living next to a nuclear power plant vs a wind farm, but as you mentioned, nuclear power stations require large mining operations to supply them with uranium (you have to mine a lot of land for a small amount of uranium), whereas wind turbines do not. And finally, wind turbines can be erected in the sea where they don't displace any land at all.

[lazide]

You don’t need to mine much land to get very large amounts of uranium - they tend to be underground mines, and produce a truly staggering amount of energy by mass mined. Tailings can be problematic - but even the largest uranium mines have had tiny tailings piles compared to even small wind farm footprints.

[2trill2spill]

What are you talking about? Wind turbines use substantial sums of copper and that requires mining on a scale much larger than uranium mining.[1]

[1]: https://copperalliance.org.uk/knowledge-base/education/educa...

[aksss]

Large turbine farms are an eyesore, IMO, that dominate entire landscapes. Visually destroying the countryside is probably better than emitting 30 billion tons of CO2 each year, though. But yeah, I think a nuclear plant (as I have seen them) would be preferable, visually, to the enormous turbine farm needed to produce an equivalent amount of power. How much would that be? Avg nuclear plant generates 1GW in the US. Average turbine generates 1.67 MW. So about 600 turbines at about an acre a piece. So a square mile of turbines.

[pezezin]

I grew up 70 km away from a nuclear power plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaraz_Nuclear_Power_Plant

I have driven passed it many, many times. I can tell you that the visual impact is minimal, and the area around it is "untouched natural or agricultural landscape". Blocking the skyline? How tall do you think the cooling towers are? Wind farms have a much larger visual impact.

[toshk]

:) fair play to you. At least the real estate prices will be good.

I won't go for low risk when it comes to nuclear and not let my family grow up next to it. Only no risk would be acceptable to me when it comes to nuclear, quite some tail risk in this case.

[aksss]

Let’s keep in mind that not doing nuclear is subjecting you and your family (and subsequent generations) to the long term issue of ever-increasing CO2 output. While waiting for workable battery tech at 3% avg y/y improvement - which means a looong wait for truly reliable at-scale FF displacement. The promise of renewables is great, but planning for a battery miracle in the short term is no plan at all. IF we appropriately monetize the cost of going deeper into fossil fuels every day (which is what the globe is doing right now, still), I think the risk of nuclear is put in a better context. So it seems to me we’re talking about the global risks of continuing on current track or localized risk of nuclear plant accident. Out of 440 operable on-grid plants, how many accidents have you heard of that would have impacted you or your family?

I don’t think “no-risk” exists for any power gen tech, fwiw. There are always going to be trade-offs.

[addicted]

Do people even read the ariticles they respond to?

For interviewee points to the fact that new nuclear is significantly more expensive than solar and wind. In fact, even existing nuclear’s base running costs are higher. And here’s the kicker. Solar/wind + existing battery tech is also cheaper than nuclear. And we don’t even need battery until solar/wind generation has increased by an order of magnitude.

So $1 spent on nuclear will do a lot less to reduce CO2 than $1 spent on wind/solar. Further, that $1 spent on nuclear will still take up to a decade to start helping reduce CO2, while the solar/wind options will likely be active within a year or so.

The article may be wrong about all these facts, but in a response to it one needs to at least show why they are wrong instead of pretending the claims were never made.

[aksss]

I think what you’re missing is that solar+wind can’t do what nuclear can, which is supply reliable power 24/7.

[grogenaut]

I grew up in St. Louis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_Generating_St... was relatively close. No one cared. There were several coal plants a lot closer that were a lot dirtier. (https://www.google.com/maps/search/Alton+Power+Plant/@38.913... https://www.google.com/maps/place/Labadie+Power+Plant+Rd,+Bo...)

Notice how they're right on the river right upstream from St. Louis.

But we also had much worse things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weldon_Spring_Ordnance_Works (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5670478/), Sauget Superfund (https://old.post-gazette.com/pg/06276/727066-28.stm), Monsanto Headquarters, https://www.builtstlouis.net/ammo.html

Now I live in Seattle. I'd much rather that Callaway plant was where the Handford site is than have the Hanford Site there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

[Hammershaft]

If it is replacing the asthmatic toxins from fossil fuel (almost everywhere in the world), then absolutely yes.

[pezezin]

I grew up 70 km away from a nuclear power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaraz_Nuclear_Power_Plant), and I spent the last two years living 3 km away from a nuclear reprocessing plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Nuclear_Fuel_Limited), and I never gave a damn about it. So the answer is yes.

[betwixthewires]

I wouldn't mind if it were one of the modern meltdown resistant designs.

[paholg]

Sure.

[samatman]

Yes.