California slashes residential solar feed-in rates

[Shannow]

It's called a duck neck load curve. The solar power comes on line in the morning so fast, floods the grid with power forcing thermal plants off line and the opposite happens in the evening all the solar drops off line faster than thermal plants can come on line. The only power source that can react fast enough is hydroelectric, followed by gas turbine.
For example in Australia there are people claiming their utility provider gives away free power for a few hours at solar power peak, but then a few hours later power jumps up to 44cents a kwh.
The green energy simps claim this is "progress". I say it's a system on the verge of failure. But what do I know I only have a 2 year degree in power plant and grid operations.

Here's mine, no Time of use metering, and in winter/spring...my generation will double to over 40KWh/d in the next few months...Feed in was 12c/KWh ($120/MWh), and purchases were 27c/KWh 4 yearws ago, now 7.6c, and 38c respectively.

Note those numbers in the next chart, the grid...Peak, yesterday was about 30c/KWh wholesale (plus 10-15c transmission and distributor charges, my supplier loses 7c/KWh)...and in the middle of the day it's going to -5c/KWh, whick means that the thermals not only don't get their fuel costs back, but they PAY for their minimum generation to be absorbed by the market.

 

[Snagglefoot]

So in a deregulated market how would a natural gas turbine power producer get compensated for pulling power off from morning to sunset. There would have to be some serious compensation to bring it on at sunset.
Actually a lot of that power would show up for AC loads in the afternoon.

 

[Shannow]

So in a deregulated market how would a natural gas turbine power producer get compensated for pulling power off from morning to sunset. There would have to be some serious compensation to bring it on at sunset.
Actually a lot of that power would show up for AC loads in the afternoon.

They get paid for what they generate...they get to pay for when they generate at below SRMC market prices...or they get out of the way and shut down.

There's no "capacity" market.

 

[Bladecutter]

Nuclear wins every which way, except it may cost more.
If they really care about the environment, it should be worth the cost.

Nuclear costs more for two very important reasons:

1 - You need to make sure it is safe, 24/7.
If a nuclear plant goes south, it does so in a hurry, and it can go very, very badly, for anyone who lives in the region, and down wind or stream of it. You need highly trained and fairly well compensated workers to make sure things keep running well, all the time. Some people don't want to work in a nuclear plant, while other people don't want to work in a coal mine. I can't really say that I've heard of very many people getting sick working on a solar or wind farm, however.
If a solar panel has a failure, nothing bad happens. If a wind turbine seizes up, nothing happens. If a coal train overturns, yeah, you messed up that local area, and have to rebuild tracks, and clean up the mess, but the chances of someone even getting a mild cough are pretty low. If a hydro dam bursts, that can have some pretty horrific results downstream, and can be a nightmare, too, but the area is still habital after the water recedes. The Russians damaged a natural gas pipeline a few months back under a sea, and yeah, that's bad, not not the end of the world, unless you care about global warming and the ozone layer. Oil spills on land and in the sea are pretty bad ecological nightmares.

2 - That spent fuel is now really dangerous waste, and it has to be transported someplace that can store it safely, and guard it securely, forever. That costs money, too. You can't take a spent fuel rod and turn it into toothpicks, you know.
When you compare the waste of each power source, nuclear loses by several magnitudes compared to everything else.

When a nuclear plant is online and running perfectly, its a fantastic source of power.
If its winds up neglected by a negligent owner, or faces a random earthquake, it can be a huge accident with long term repercussions.

I like nuclear power.
But you can't argue that it wins in every which way and is better for the environment with a straight face.

 

[Shannow]

Got to be careful comparing nuclear, especially risks and waste.

Commented a while ago with an ex TMI engineer on the board that my assessment was that the American reactors (and therefore the Japanese) were designed to produce waste...that could be reporposed to the weapons programme.

Advanvced nukes are incredibly more safe, and less wasteful...and last a lot longer than the 15-20 years that many of the allegedly clean technologies provide

 

[OVERKILL]

Nuclear costs more for two very important reasons:

Nuclear CAPEX is higher, OPEX is not. Most nuclear plants have extremely low operating costs.

1 - You need to make sure it is safe, 24/7.
If a nuclear plant goes south, it does so in a hurry,

No, it takes quite a while for things to go south and a whole lot of stars need to align for it to get that bad. Fukushima was a total LOCA (they had no pumps, and no power to run them if they did have them) and it still played out over several days.

Safety systems are redundantly redundant. You have multiple types, and each type has a backup. This is fundamental plant design, you make every effort to prevent a serious incident from happening, but if one does happen, there are numerous mitigation mechanisms to contain, slow, stop and control it.

An operator acquaintance of mine likes to refer to the CANDU as cold molasses. Everything happens in slow motion. It's a reactor that doesn't want to run, but once you do get it running, it doesn't keep you on your toes. When we lost a fuel channel at Pickering back in the 80's (a 2m long split in a pressure tube) they didn't even have to use the emergency shutdown system. That's the most "exciting" event that ever happened with our 20 units.

and it can go very, very badly, for anyone who lives in the region, and down wind or stream of it.

The purpose of the aforementioned safety systems is to ensure that it can't go very very badly. Fukushima was a total disaster, but nobody died, the contamination was reasonably contained, despite the Mk1 containment (1st generation), of which newer plants have seriously improved upon.

Of course people will bring up Chornobyl. A Soviet design with no containment designed to be fast and cheap to build with the bonus of producing weapons material, that's not in any way comparable to Western plants.

You need highly trained and fairly well compensated workers to make sure things keep running well, all the time. Some people don't want to work in a nuclear plant, while other people don't want to work in a coal mine. I can't really say that I've heard of very many people getting sick working on a solar or wind farm, however.

I've never heard of anybody getting sick as a result of working at a nuke plant either, regulation prohibits it. This unnecessary statement is nothing but fear porn.

They are the most highly regulated civilian work environments out there. You are scanned coming in and out of the plant, and going between zones. There is an incredible amount of oversight and the regulator can shut the plant down if there are violations. The background radiation level in many places around the world is higher than what most nuclear workers will ever see.

The difference between that and working at a wind or solar farm is that wind and solar don't pay well. Most of the jobs are transient "Carnie" jobs, and there are very few post-install positions. Nuke plants employ anywhere from hundreds up to thousands of people, depending on their size, and a nuclear operator can push up on $400-500,000/year in the supervisor roles.

If a solar panel has a failure, nothing bad happens. If a wind turbine seizes up, nothing happens.

A wind turbine (or solar farm) can (and have) start a forest fire, which happened up here during the construction of Nation Rise. We've had more people die from wind turbines than we have at the nuclear plants, and the nuke plants don't spontaneously combust, like we've had multiple wind turbines do this summer.

If a coal train overturns, yeah, you messed up that local area, and have to rebuild tracks, and clean up the mess, but the chances of someone even getting a mild cough are pretty low. If a hydro dam bursts, that can have some pretty horrific results downstream, and can be a nightmare, too, but the area is still habital after the water recedes.

The most devastating power generating incident in history was the failure of a hydro-electric dam. The Banqaio dam failure in China (also Soviet, like Chornobyl) killed somewhere between 26,000 and 240,000 people.

The Russians damaged a natural gas pipeline a few months back under a sea, and yeah, that's bad, not not the end of the world, unless you care about global warming and the ozone layer. Oil spills on land and in the sea are pretty bad ecological nightmares.

And, when a Western reactor buggers up, it bricks itself (TMI). Unless there are some Western nuclear power plant failures that I've never heard of that caused the widespread death and contamination you are alluding to with all these examples?

2 - That spent fuel is now really dangerous waste, and it has to be transported someplace that can store it safely, and guard it securely, forever. That costs money, too. You can't take a spent fuel rod and turn it into toothpicks, you know.

No.
Spent fuel is highly active for the first few years. All the most active fission productions have insanely short half-lives, so these are the ones that are the most dangerous, but also burn off the quickest. This produces a significant amount of heat, which is why it cools in a pool for 5-10 years until it can be shuffled into a storage cask. The activity, and thus the danger of the fuel, has already fallen off a cliff at this point.

The storage casks are designed to last ~100 years. These are called "interim storage", as they are temporary.

In Finland, and everywhere else that's building a DGR, the SNF is then shuffled out of the casks, put into tubes, and then put into what's essentially a mine.

After ~500 years (shorter for certain fuel types like CANDU) the radioactive decay has reduced to the level of the ore that the fuel was originally made from. You can hold it in your hands. It is not "forever" dangerous.

Products like Cyanide, Arsenic, Mercury, which are also stored in deep geological repositories, ARE forever dangerous however, and have to be managed in perpetuity. Some of these chemicals are used to produce wind turbine and solar panel components.

The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust

Hidden in an unknown corner of China is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.

www.bbc.com

When you compare the waste of each power source, nuclear loses by several magnitudes compared to everything else.

That's nonsense. Nuclear produces the least amount of waste per unit power of any source out there and is the only one that is required to be responsible for its entire waste stream. A single wind turbine blade graveyard, full of adhesives and fibreglass, leaching directly into the soil, occupies an area larger than all the spent nuclear fuel produced by the US over the last 50 years, which can fit on a football field.

How about all the pollution from the coal being burned to produce the solar panels in China? These facilities have their own coal power plants. These externalities are never accounted for.

Nuclear fuel is also recyclable, like is done in France. This material can be even further utilized in breeder reactors and those with higher neutron economy like MSR's or alternative CANDU fuel cycles.

But, as noted above, the best thing about radwaste is that it gets progressively less dangerous over time, which is not the case for the waste products and chemicals used in the production of several of the other technologies being panned as less problematic. This is easy to do because they aren't responsible for their waste streams like the radwaste folks are.

When a nuclear plant is online and running perfectly, its a fantastic source of power.
If its winds up neglected by a negligent owner, or faces a random earthquake, it can be a huge accident with long term repercussions.

Where has just an earthquake caused a problem? If you are going to say Fukushima, that wasn't the earthquake, that was the Tsunami, the plant, and all the other plants in Japan, weathered the quake just fine, like they had done in the past.

While Tepco created a massive cleanup problem for themselves, nobody died from the incident at the plant. Thousands died from the Tsunami, which devastated the area. The Tsunami created long-term repercussions for the area, the "grandfathering" regulation that permitted Tepco to avoid upgrading the seawall and relocating the backup generators, created long-term repercussions for the company.

I like nuclear power.

But you can't argue that it wins in every which way and is better for the environment with a straight face.

Well, it has the lowest lifecycle emissions of any technology we have available (which includes decommissioning and SNF storage), and, besides hydro, is the only non-emitting source that can provide firm, reliable power to provide the necessary electricity for an electrified society if we truly wish to phase-out fossil fuels.

Its biggest detractor is high capital cost. There is also the issue of access to cooling water, but that's a problem for any Rankine Cycle plant.

 

[Skippy722]

Nuclear CAPEX is higher, OPEX is not. Most nuclear plants have extremely low operating costs.

No, it takes quite a while for things to go south and a whole lot of stars need to align for it to get that bad. Fukushima was a total LOCA (they had no pumps, and no power to run them if they did have them) and it still played out over several days.

Safety systems are redundantly redundant. You have multiple types, and each type has a backup. This is fundamental plant design, you make every effort to prevent a serious incident from happening, but if one does happen, there are numerous mitigation mechanisms to contain, slow, stop and control it.

An operator acquaintance of mine likes to refer to the CANDU as cold molasses. Everything happens in slow motion. It's a reactor that doesn't want to run, but once you do get it running, it doesn't keep you on your toes. When we lost a fuel channel at Pickering back in the 80's (a 2m long split in a pressure tube) they didn't even have to use the emergency shutdown system. That's the most "exciting" event that ever happened with our 20 units.

The purpose of the aforementioned safety systems is to ensure that it can't go very very badly. Fukushima was a total disaster, but nobody died, the contamination was reasonably contained, despite the Mk1 containment (1st generation), of which newer plants have seriously improved upon.

Of course people will bring up Chornobyl. A Soviet design with no containment designed to be fast and cheap to build with the bonus of producing weapons material, that's not in any way comparable to Western plants.

I've never heard of anybody getting sick as a result of working at a nuke plant either, regulation prohibits it. This unnecessary statement is nothing but fear porn.

They are the most highly regulated civilian work environments out there. You are scanned coming in and out of the plant, and going between zones. There is an incredible amount of oversight and the regulator can shut the plant down if there are violations. The background radiation level in many places around the world is higher than what most nuclear workers will ever see.
View attachment 175623

The difference between that and working at a wind or solar farm is that wind and solar don't pay well. Most of the jobs are transient "Carnie" jobs, and there are very few post-install positions. Nuke plants employ anywhere from hundreds up to thousands of people, depending on their size, and a nuclear operator can push up on $400-500,000/year in the supervisor roles.

A wind turbine (or solar farm) can (and have) start a forest fire, which happened up here during the construction of Nation Rise. We've had more people die from wind turbines than we have at the nuclear plants, and the nuke plants don't spontaneously combust, like we've had multiple wind turbines do this summer.

The most devastating power generating incident in history was the failure of a hydro-electric dam. The Banqaio dam failure in China (also Soviet, like Chornobyl) killed somewhere between 26,000 and 240,000 people.

And, when a Western reactor buggers up, it bricks itself (TMI). Unless there are some Western nuclear power plant failures that I've never heard of that caused the widespread death and contamination you are alluding to with all these examples?
View attachment 175619

No.
Spent fuel is highly active for the first few years. All the most active fission productions have insanely short half-lives, so these are the ones that are the most dangerous, but also burn off the quickest. This produces a significant amount of heat, which is why it cools in a pool for 5-10 years until it can be shuffled into a storage cask. The activity, and thus the danger of the fuel, has already fallen off a cliff at this point.
View attachment 175625

The storage casks are designed to last ~100 years. These are called "interim storage", as they are temporary.
View attachment 175618

In Finland, and everywhere else that's building a DGR, the SNF is then shuffled out of the casks, put into tubes, and then put into what's essentially a mine.

After ~500 years (shorter for certain fuel types like CANDU) the radioactive decay has reduced to the level of the ore that the fuel was originally made from. You can hold it in your hands. It is not "forever" dangerous.

Products like Cyanide, Arsenic, Mercury, which are also stored in deep geological repositories, ARE forever dangerous however, and have to be managed in perpetuity. Some of these chemicals are used to produce wind turbine and solar panel components.

The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust

Hidden in an unknown corner of China is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.

www.bbc.com

That's nonsense. Nuclear produces the least amount of waste per unit power of any source out there and is the only one that is required to be responsible for its entire waste stream. A single wind turbine blade graveyard, full of adhesives and fibreglass, leaching directly into the soil, occupies an area larger than all the spent nuclear fuel produced by the US over the last 50 years, which can fit on a football field.

How about all the pollution from the coal being burned to produce the solar panels in China? These facilities have their own coal power plants. These externalities are never accounted for.

Nuclear fuel is also recyclable, like is done in France. This material can be even further utilized in breeder reactors and those with higher neutron economy like MSR's or alternative CANDU fuel cycles.

But, as noted above, the best thing about radwaste is that it gets progressively less dangerous over time, which is not the case for the waste products and chemicals used in the production of several of the other technologies being panned as less problematic. This is easy to do because they aren't responsible for their waste streams like the radwaste folks are.
View attachment 175624

Where has just an earthquake caused a problem? If you are going to say Fukushima, that wasn't the earthquake, that was the Tsunami, the plant, and all the other plants in Japan, weathered the quake just fine, like they had done in the past.

While Tepco created a massive cleanup problem for themselves, nobody died from the incident at the plant. Thousands died from the Tsunami, which devastated the area. The Tsunami created long-term repercussions for the area, the "grandfathering" regulation that permitted Tepco to avoid upgrading the seawall and relocating the backup generators, created long-term repercussions for the company.

View attachment 175628

Well, it has the lowest lifecycle emissions of any technology we have available (which includes decommissioning and SNF storage), and, besides hydro, is the only non-emitting source that can provide firm, reliable power to provide the necessary electricity for an electrified society if we truly wish to phase-out fossil fuels.

Its biggest detractor is high capital cost. There is also the issue of access to cooling water, but that's a problem for any Rankine Cycle plant.

I’m still trying to convince the powers that be to put a shipping container sized SMR in my backyard.

 

[OVERKILL]

I thought I’d report in on the Travers solar project which I believe is the largest in Canada. It happens to be near Vulcan, Alberta. ( the home of Spock). It’s name plate is 465 MW and it had no problem achieving that today. Here is the list of commercial solar projects in Alberta. Travers is the largest by far. It covers about 5 square miles of scrubby grazing land. TNG is the current output.

View attachment 175558

I expect the curve for Alberta will be similar to what we see in Ontario:

Solar did well yesterday during the AESO Stage 3 grid alert though, quite unlike wind.

 

[oil pan 4]

Nuclear costs more for two very important reasons:

1 - You need to make sure it is safe, 24/7.
If a nuclear plant goes south, it does so in a hurry, and it can go very, very badly, for anyone who lives in the region, and down wind or stream of it. You need highly trained and fairly well compensated workers to make sure things keep running well, all the time. Some people don't want to work in a nuclear plant, while other people don't want to work in a coal mine. I can't really say that I've heard of very many people getting sick working on a solar or wind farm, however.
If a solar panel has a failure, nothing bad happens. If a wind turbine seizes up, nothing happens. If a coal train overturns, yeah, you messed up that local area, and have to rebuild tracks, and clean up the mess, but the chances of someone even getting a mild cough are pretty low. If a hydro dam bursts, that can have some pretty horrific results downstream, and can be a nightmare, too, but the area is still habital after the water recedes. The Russians damaged a natural gas pipeline a few months back under a sea, and yeah, that's bad, not not the end of the world, unless you care about global warming and the ozone layer. Oil spills on land and in the sea are pretty bad ecological nightmares.

2 - That spent fuel is now really dangerous waste, and it has to be transported someplace that can store it safely, and guard it securely, forever. That costs money, too. You can't take a spent fuel rod and turn it into toothpicks, you know.
When you compare the waste of each power source, nuclear loses by several magnitudes compared to everything else.

When a nuclear plant is online and running perfectly, its a fantastic source of power.
If its winds up neglected by a negligent owner, or faces a random earthquake, it can be a huge accident with long term repercussions.

I like nuclear power.
But you can't argue that it wins in every which way and is better for the environment with a straight face.

Solar power plants fail every night and when a cloud blocks the sun. When a solar panel fails catastrophiclly it could burn someones house down, so saying nothing happens when a solar panel fails is a lie.
Heat stoke is the leading injury to solar workers so saying saying "solar workers don't get sick from working on solar panels" is a lie.
Cadinum terrillium "CdTe" based panels are incredibly toxic when smashed by hail or if caught on fire.

It appears coal power generation kills the most people out of any power source so acting like coal is harmless is a lie.

You clearly have no clue as to the difference in land and resources wind and solar eat up compared to nuclear.

I propose 3 solutions.
One don't build nuclear on known faults.
2 don't build nuclear power plants in tsunami zones duha.
3 use only pressurized water reactors so they don't blow up.
4 Always use a containment dome, no excuses.

Fukushima was built in a known mega tsunami zone.
Chernobyl didn't have a containment dome.
Both where boiling water reactors.

There is no long lasting nuclear waste when the fuel is recycled. Around 95% of the waste is heavy isotopes. When the waste is removed from the heavy isotopes it loses about 99% of it's radioactivity after 40 years. After 200years the waste is about as radioactive as English granite.
If you're stupid and use the nuclear fuel once and throw it away then it will stay dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

 

[oil pan 4]

Nuclear CAPEX is higher, OPEX is not. Most nuclear plants have extremely low operating costs.

No, it takes quite a while for things to go south and a whole lot of stars need to align for it to get that bad. Fukushima was a total LOCA (they had no pumps, and no power to run them if they did have them) and it still played out over several days.

Safety systems are redundantly redundant. You have multiple types, and each type has a backup. This is fundamental plant design, you make every effort to prevent a serious incident from happening, but if one does happen, there are numerous mitigation mechanisms to contain, slow, stop and control it.

An operator acquaintance of mine likes to refer to the CANDU as cold molasses. Everything happens in slow motion. It's a reactor that doesn't want to run, but once you do get it running, it doesn't keep you on your toes. When we lost a fuel channel at Pickering back in the 80's (a 2m long split in a pressure tube) they didn't even have to use the emergency shutdown system. That's the most "exciting" event that ever happened with our 20 units.

The purpose of the aforementioned safety systems is to ensure that it can't go very very badly. Fukushima was a total disaster, but nobody died, the contamination was reasonably contained, despite the Mk1 containment (1st generation), of which newer plants have seriously improved upon.

Of course people will bring up Chornobyl. A Soviet design with no containment designed to be fast and cheap to build with the bonus of producing weapons material, that's not in any way comparable to Western plants.

I've never heard of anybody getting sick as a result of working at a nuke plant either, regulation prohibits it. This unnecessary statement is nothing but fear porn.

They are the most highly regulated civilian work environments out there. You are scanned coming in and out of the plant, and going between zones. There is an incredible amount of oversight and the regulator can shut the plant down if there are violations. The background radiation level in many places around the world is higher than what most nuclear workers will ever see.
View attachment 175623

The difference between that and working at a wind or solar farm is that wind and solar don't pay well. Most of the jobs are transient "Carnie" jobs, and there are very few post-install positions. Nuke plants employ anywhere from hundreds up to thousands of people, depending on their size, and a nuclear operator can push up on $400-500,000/year in the supervisor roles.

A wind turbine (or solar farm) can (and have) start a forest fire, which happened up here during the construction of Nation Rise. We've had more people die from wind turbines than we have at the nuclear plants, and the nuke plants don't spontaneously combust, like we've had multiple wind turbines do this summer.

The most devastating power generating incident in history was the failure of a hydro-electric dam. The Banqaio dam failure in China (also Soviet, like Chornobyl) killed somewhere between 26,000 and 240,000 people.

And, when a Western reactor buggers up, it bricks itself (TMI). Unless there are some Western nuclear power plant failures that I've never heard of that caused the widespread death and contamination you are alluding to with all these examples?
View attachment 175619

No.
Spent fuel is highly active for the first few years. All the most active fission productions have insanely short half-lives, so these are the ones that are the most dangerous, but also burn off the quickest. This produces a significant amount of heat, which is why it cools in a pool for 5-10 years until it can be shuffled into a storage cask. The activity, and thus the danger of the fuel, has already fallen off a cliff at this point.
View attachment 175625

The storage casks are designed to last ~100 years. These are called "interim storage", as they are temporary.
View attachment 175618

In Finland, and everywhere else that's building a DGR, the SNF is then shuffled out of the casks, put into tubes, and then put into what's essentially a mine.

After ~500 years (shorter for certain fuel types like CANDU) the radioactive decay has reduced to the level of the ore that the fuel was originally made from. You can hold it in your hands. It is not "forever" dangerous.

Products like Cyanide, Arsenic, Mercury, which are also stored in deep geological repositories, ARE forever dangerous however, and have to be managed in perpetuity. Some of these chemicals are used to produce wind turbine and solar panel components.

The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust

Hidden in an unknown corner of China is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.

www.bbc.com

That's nonsense. Nuclear produces the least amount of waste per unit power of any source out there and is the only one that is required to be responsible for its entire waste stream. A single wind turbine blade graveyard, full of adhesives and fibreglass, leaching directly into the soil, occupies an area larger than all the spent nuclear fuel produced by the US over the last 50 years, which can fit on a football field.

How about all the pollution from the coal being burned to produce the solar panels in China? These facilities have their own coal power plants. These externalities are never accounted for.

Nuclear fuel is also recyclable, like is done in France. This material can be even further utilized in breeder reactors and those with higher neutron economy like MSR's or alternative CANDU fuel cycles.

But, as noted above, the best thing about radwaste is that it gets progressively less dangerous over time, which is not the case for the waste products and chemicals used in the production of several of the other technologies being panned as less problematic. This is easy to do because they aren't responsible for their waste streams like the radwaste folks are.
View attachment 175624

Where has just an earthquake caused a problem? If you are going to say Fukushima, that wasn't the earthquake, that was the Tsunami, the plant, and all the other plants in Japan, weathered the quake just fine, like they had done in the past.

While Tepco created a massive cleanup problem for themselves, nobody died from the incident at the plant. Thousands died from the Tsunami, which devastated the area. The Tsunami created long-term repercussions for the area, the "grandfathering" regulation that permitted Tepco to avoid upgrading the seawall and relocating the backup generators, created long-term repercussions for the company.

View attachment 175628

Well, it has the lowest lifecycle emissions of any technology we have available (which includes decommissioning and SNF storage), and, besides hydro, is the only non-emitting source that can provide firm, reliable power to provide the necessary electricity for an electrified society if we truly wish to phase-out fossil fuels.

Its biggest detractor is high capital cost. There is also the issue of access to cooling water, but that's a problem for any Rankine Cycle plant.

That's what I have read. Generally they onlymove the spent fuel to the fuel storage pools and don't touch it for at least 2 or 3 years. There's plenty of spent fuel that's a decade or decades old and could easily be moved for recycling.

 

[thastinger]

Those deals dont exist anymore in Cali and haven't for quite some time.

It's swung the other way, with the utility getting a phat discount on what I produce and marking it up handsomely to their clients. How convenient for them.

Don't want to pay some equitable amount for my energy - no problem. I wont sell it to you then.

There needs to be sensible and fair incentive to spend the money, or people simply wont.

Wonder how many people will buy power walls now to store their excess in, probably no ROI on it but they will feel better about using the power they were going to sell at .05, during the .30 tier hours.

 

[UncleDave]

Wonder how many people will buy power walls now to store their excess in, probably no ROI on it but they will feel better about using the power they were going to sell at .05, during the .30 tier hours.

I've looked at two nem3 contracts for laggards that didnt get signed up in time, and they both had batteries in them, it seems that the ROI is out to about 10-12 years with a battery now and something like 15 without it. Pretty lousy ROI either way.

One of these was a tesla power wall, the other an enphase battery, they were around 13-14K.

 

[OVERKILL]

Wonder how many people will buy power walls now to store their excess in, probably no ROI on it but they will feel better about using the power they were going to sell at .05, during the .30 tier hours.

And this is what drives energy poverty unfortunately. The folks that are able to spend the capital to avoid getting boned during the rate spikes (assuming TOU billing) are the least likely to be impacted by them. They make the choice not because they can't afford the higher rates, but because they can afford to avoid paying them.

The people most impacted by the skyrocketing rates are those least able to afford them, so you have people making choices like "heat or eat", which was a catchphrase coined during the GEA days here in Ontario where skyrocketing rates caught people off-guard thanks to wind and solar subsidies. The same thing has played-out in Germany, where the rates are appallingly high.

Political interference in energy systems tends to always end badly. Picking winners, and then incentivizing their construction, drives up system costs which disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable.

 

[oil pan 4]

And this is what drives energy poverty unfortunately.

Nothing unfortunate about. It's all by design. They don't want the poors using or having access to cheap dirty energy.

 

[thastinger]

I've looked at two nem3 contracts for laggards that didnt get signed up in time, and they both had batteries in them, it seems that the ROI is out to about 10-12 years with a battery now and something like 15 without it. Pretty lousy ROI either way.

One of these was a tesla power wall, the other an enphase battery, they were around 13-14K.

I wouldn't have figured there would ever be an ROI on a powerwall with them being 7.5-10K capacity...that is miniscule storage capacity for what they cost...like 2.50 a day savings if you were able to fully charge & discharge the larger capacity one and that is best case scenario assuming you were sized to make excess and used all of it and there were never any clouds.

 

[PandaBear]

Solar power plants fail every night and when a cloud blocks the sun. When a solar panel fails catastrophiclly it could burn someones house down, so saying nothing happens when a solar panel fails is a lie.
Heat stoke is the leading injury to solar workers so saying saying "solar workers don't get sick from working on solar panels" is a lie.
Cadinum terrillium "CdTe" based panels are incredibly toxic when smashed by hail or if caught on fire.

It appears coal power generation kills the most people out of any power source so acting like coal is harmless is a lie.

You clearly have no clue as to the difference in land and resources wind and solar eat up compared to nuclear.

I propose 3 solutions.
One don't build nuclear on known faults.
2 don't build nuclear power plants in tsunami zones duha.
3 use only pressurized water reactors so they don't blow up.
4 Always use a containment dome, no excuses.

Fukushima was built in a known mega tsunami zone.
Chernobyl didn't have a containment dome.
Both where boiling water reactors.

There is no long lasting nuclear waste when the fuel is recycled. Around 95% of the waste is heavy isotopes. When the waste is removed from the heavy isotopes it loses about 99% of it's radioactivity after 40 years. After 200years the waste is about as radioactive as English granite.
If you're stupid and use the nuclear fuel once and throw it away then it will stay dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

The problem with this is, people don't build a city where it is safe but where you can create a lot of low hanging fruit economic activities. Why people farm near volcanoes? Because the soils are fertile. Why people live near tsunami area? Because there are plenty of fishes and easy access to ocean for trades and shipping. Why people live in the middle of scorching heat in tropical rain forest? Because it has plenty of water and sun so you can grow lots of fruits. People live where they are for good reasons, so they need power, and don't want pollution, so we have "nuke in fault lines and tsunami zone". It is unfortunate but we want these economic activities we will have these risks.

I do hope everyone in the world uses CANDU reactors, or at least build enough CANDU reactors to use up all the spent fuel from other reactors. Reprocessing spent fuel would be the next best but this cost money, and as OVERKILL said nuke is mostly capex cost and not much fuel cost, so if you tag on a lot of fuel cost or waste reprocessing cost (US need 2 reprocessing plants for all spent fuel and each cost $20B) there really isn't any incentive to do it other than ideological reason (NIMBY is also ideological if you think about it).

About Fukushima, they are more of a Japanese management problem than a technical problem. There was a concern of tsunami, they decided not to solve it and grandfather it instead. They had a cooling problem that could be solved by flooding the reactor with sea water, they decided to take a chance and it blew up in their face literally. Japanese management has a way of forcing people to submit and Japanese culture dislike whistle blowers unlike US (or even China), and they abused that culture and now they are taking that consequence. My wife works for a Japanese pharmaceutical and their sales and regulation staff would drink with gov officials and contract manufacturers, test labs, etc to get things to "pass". I would not trust what their regulations and governments say without another foreign government (i.e. US FDA) verify with data. If another government manages the Fukushima TEPCO plant it would never have gotten this bad. They would either upgraded it or in the worst case flood it with sea water way earlier than too late.

 

[PandaBear]

And this is what drives energy poverty unfortunately. The folks that are able to spend the capital to avoid getting boned during the rate spikes (assuming TOU billing) are the least likely to be impacted by them. They make the choice not because they can't afford the higher rates, but because they can afford to avoid paying them.

The people most impacted by the skyrocketing rates are those least able to afford them, so you have people making choices like "heat or eat", which was a catchphrase coined during the GEA days here in Ontario where skyrocketing rates caught people off-guard thanks to wind and solar subsidies. The same thing has played-out in Germany, where the rates are appallingly high.

Political interference in energy systems tends to always end badly. Picking winners, and then incentivizing their construction, drives up system costs which disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable.

Unfortunately, energy is always a political subject as those who hold the energy (oil is one form, coal is another) holds the power.

TOU is now possible due to smart meter, so I would say a lot of our behavioral change would have happened before solar if that was available even a decade ago if that's possible. TOU happening earlier would have discouraged people from overbuilding solar but it is just a perfect storm hit at the same time with the legacy solar (pre low interest rate, pre Chinese solar boom, pre smart meter policy that would never have envisioned duck curve). It would be solved eventually with the right technology, but I think for a decade or so we will have some very different behaviors in the market that people would see as weird 50-100 years later.

Batteries for air conditioning and electric resistive heat dryer? Batteries for stove and oven? Charging your car in one place then let the car charge another car to "jump start"? Burning gas to generate electricity in a car to power the house to use an electric stove to boil water? People 50-100 years from now would wonder what the heck were we thinking.

We will build some interesting new infrastructure and technologies though. I don't think batteries for the grid would be the right way to go as it is just not that cost effective. I do think natural gas plants would be improved to ramp faster (on the combined cycle side) and heating and cooling will improve to time shift more efficiently than "turn on your AC early". If we can get cooling time shift under control, solar duck curve is actually going to be ok.

 

[BMWTurboDzl]

Got to be careful comparing nuclear, especially risks and waste.

Commented a while ago with an ex TMI engineer on the board that my assessment was that the American reactors (and therefore the Japanese) were designed to produce waste...that could be reporposed to the weapons programme.

Advanvced nukes are incredibly more safe, and less wasteful...and last a lot longer than the 15-20 years that many of the allegedly clean technologies provide

In the US there's a real fear of nuclear waste transported by rail. Never mind that the US isn't really good a high* volume precision construction on budget.

*The US would have to build hundreds of new reactors.

 

[BMWTurboDzl]

And this is what drives energy poverty unfortunately. The folks that are able to spend the capital to avoid getting boned during the rate spikes (assuming TOU billing) are the least likely to be impacted by them. They make the choice not because they can't afford the higher rates, but because they can afford to avoid paying them.

The people most impacted by the skyrocketing rates are those least able to afford them, so you have people making choices like "heat or eat", which was a catchphrase coined during the GEA days here in Ontario where skyrocketing rates caught people off-guard thanks to wind and solar subsidies. The same thing has played-out in Germany, where the rates are appallingly high.

Political interference in energy systems tends to always end badly. Picking winners, and then incentivizing their construction, drives up system costs which disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable.

There will always be poor who have to make this type of tradeoff regardless of the generation source.

 

[BMWTurboDzl]

Nothing unfortunate about. It's all by design. They don't want the poors using or having access to cheap dirty energy.

Where would you build 600 new nuclear reactors and how likely do you think those sites would get built on budget?