Interesting Links for 27-04-2016

[andrewducker]

What if you could always have the _best_ advice? (tags: philosophy short_story thefuture Technology advice viaJack ) Portishead Recorded a Cover of Abba's "SOS": Listen to it. Although possibly not on the bus, as it just made me cry on the way to the doctor's.
(tags: music sad ) What scientists learned when they bribed babies with crackers (tags

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

We might be approaching cost effective extraction of uranium from seawater but unfortunately we're not approaching cost effective nuclear reactors.

On a levelised cost basis fuel makes up about 5% of the cost of electricity from a nuclear power plant. You could half the cost of fuel and your nuclear energy would still cost 97.5%. Capital and financing costs make up about 85% of the levelised cost. Much of those costs are driven by the health, safety and environmental regulation of nuclear energy - which may, or may not, be too strict or too lax depending on your view.

It's nice to know we can get at the stuff but I suspect the uranium is likely to stay in the sea for the next hundred years or so whilst we burn the last of our natural gas reserves and stick up windfarms and solar panels. Only when we discover that we're short of energy then or if the manufacturers of nuclear reactors can get themselves both cheap and safe does it make sense to start extracting lots of uranium from sea water - or anywhere else.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - nuclear power still seems to be having problems being both safe and cheap. Maybe some day...

[nojay]

Nuclear power IS safe compared to hydrocarbon-fuelled power generation. it's scary though, unlike our old familiar friends like coal, gas and oil that brought us Aberfan, Brent Alpha, Deepwater Horizon...

Extraction of uranium from seawater still has some way to go to beat conventional extraction costs -- minehead yellowcake (U3O8) is currently priced at $27.60 a pound (the market is US based, don't blame me for the weird mass units). There's an oversupply of the world market for fresh uranium feedstock for enrichment while Russia and China are pressing ahead with developing their spent fuel reprocessing capabilities which would undercut the mining industry even more.

[andrewducker]

Nobody said it wasn't safe - just that it's having problems being both safe and cheap. Hopefully some day it will manage both.

[nojay]

All the alternatives are dangerous and cheap but there's no social or regulatory pressure to make them safe at their expense, unlike nuclear power. It's not reality-based, it's a visceral fear of radiation that just isn't there in the case of hydrocarbons (unless you come from a coal-mining background where the fear of a pit disaster was always present, the idea that your father might not come home that night as the mine rescue teams worked to get down the shaft and start extracting the bodies).

[anton_p_nym]

Agreed; the problem isn't that safe nuclear power is too expensive, it's that unsafe fossil fuel power is too cheap. Whenever we get around to accounting for the costs of carbon sequestration (or of not sequestering carbon) and handling other residuals the gap will narrow a great deal, perhaps even tipping in favour of fission. (Dunno how expensive proper sequestration will be.)

-- Steve thinks nukes make an excellent source for base-load power in regions not lucky enough to have good sources for hydroelectric generation.

[danieldwilliam]

My guess is that a combination of wind and solar PV, better batteries, better interconnection and better grid management will probably beat nuclear on price even for baseload over the next couple of decades.

Not because nuclear is intrinsically more expensive than the renewable set up but because nukes have to jump through a bunch of regulatory and public perception issues that renewables don't, renewables are more modular and because the manufacturers of nukes still think they are competing with coal and I think they stopped competing with coal a few years ago.

But, I'm guessing.

[anton_p_nym]

Thing is wind and solar (pv or thermal) just aren't good sources for base load; you can't get a predictable (or reliably throttlable) flow from them, making grid management a nightmare without going very big into storage... and my guess is that storage'll be ruinously expensive (in terms of grid-level production, not for occasional personal use) for the near term. Nukes aren't perfect, but they can deliver a steady supply.

-- Steve's still uncertain how variable-output renewables can be integrated into a grid (or even microgrid) while maintaining reliability; it's not a simple issue to solve.

[danieldwilliam]

The question isn't whether storage can be made cheap. It's whether it can be made cheaper than nukes.

I *think* storage has an advantage here - there's more effort going in to research,  batteries have uses other  than pure static storage which gives them a premium to exploit during the early stages of a shift to mass production and they probably gain more from economies of scale and learning curve effects than nukes do.

There is also the impact of interconnecting grids which reduces the need for storage. It helps nukes get a better than base load price but probably not as much as it helps non-despatchable renewables.

The cost of renewables should keep falling for another decade or so.

So my guess is that,  on a whole system cost, renewables,  storage and better grids beat nukes over the long term on cost.

Hinckley Point being an example of what's going on with the nuclear industry.

[resonant]

Solar is now under $1 US per installed watt of delivered output, with delivered cost to the grid of $0.04 US per kWh. And the price is plummeting faster than I would have thought possible just a few years before. It's already cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than natural gas. Within a few years, it will be impossible for power companies to get any bank to finance nuclear plant construction, because the forecast price of solar and storage will be so low.

I personally think nuclear power can be a safe, useful source of heat and electricity for countries far from the equator (such as northern Canadian communities isolated from the southern grid). My province currently relies heavily on incredibly safe CANDU reactors for its power. But I don't see nuclear being a significant contributor to the grid after our existing reactors reach the end of their service lives, not with how solar prices are falling, and not with advances in storage systems.

[lilchiva]

If gas and coal were emerging energy technologies, we wouldn't use them because they are dirty. This I will totally grant you. However, I am instead suggesting that expanding what is essentially "combustion engine" technology is absolutely the wrong way to go. It doesn't seem reasonable to scale up, yet another potentially damaging energy source, when it is clear we can't contain things once they get out of hand. With sites like Indian Point and Fukushima still leaking, five years on, I am not sure how anyone can suggest that it's safe, even when compared to hydrocarbon, unless we are using a comparison totally evades a correction for scale and time on task.

[danieldwilliam]

It's an odd sort of perception issue and risk appreciation.

Judged over the course of a thousand years nuclear energy is much safer than fossil fuels. A small but cummulative risk of some pretty nasty and sudden industrial irradiation over a large area with visible losses for everyone affected vs a small, widespread and persistent risk of contributing to an early death plus a large, probably slow, but perhaps entirely avoidable risk of changing the entire climate with dififcult to see losses and some wins for people.

There's an irony that of the three invisible risks, radiation, air polution and the weather, the one that is hardest to see is the one people are most conscious of. Hey ho - that's people.

And it's probabaly fair to say that a lot of the cost of nukes is driven by being hyper aware of the risks. It affects not just the over engineering of them but also the persistent delay and cancellation and re-design process which makes every nuclear plan N in a series of N.

[nojay]

" A small but cummulative risk of some pretty nasty and sudden industrial irradiation over a large area with visible losses for everyone affected"

This is provably true for coal-fired power stations if you swap out scary word "irradiation" for "contamination". See, for example, the London smogs in the 50s that actually killed thousands of people with impaired lung function, really killed them and not fractionally increased their chances of developing a cancer decades after their exposure to a few grammes of radioactive isotopes spread over a thousand square kilometres of land. Then there was the nitric and sulphuric acid rain problem killing large swathes of trees in Scandanavia, tonnes of mercury released into the atmosphere each year, radon from coal crushers at the coal-fired power stations etc. etc. Real deaths and sicknesses, not just at the mines but familiar and acceptable since it's not as scary as nuclear.