We don't hear about the many, many failures in nuclear plants that don't release radiation, but do cause a scram of the reactor. Here's one I'd like to get more info on, but real info is hard to find. They aren't going to tell us anything they don't have to and the reality is hidden behind the newspeak of the industry.
How many deaths due to nuclear power? How many due to coal? Conclusion?
Jeroen Belleman
Machinery does fail at times. Nothing worth reporting in this case, had there not the word "nuclear" been involved it would not have been reported. Something went wrong, they fixed it and carried on.
The antinuclear propaganda has been hammering nonsense for decades now and thus made all but impossible building enough nuclear power stations which are the only practical way we know of to generate enough power without burning something. All the windmills etc. are... windmills, will never be anything more than just a show/way to drain taxpayers money.
Dimiter
====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI
If you can't figure it out nothing I say is likely to make a difference.
Coal is going away, but not because of the pollution, because of the cost. Other energy sources are more cost effective. Nuclear can be a steady source for baseload, but it isn't very dispatchable and new reactors are becoming prohibitively expensive. We are presently in a semiconductor shortage in part because it is so expensive to build a fab so if you don't know it will be close to 100% utilized it doesn't get built. Nuclear plants are 10x as expensive.
Conclusion? You will never see a peaking nuclear power plant.
That's clearly not the case.
E.g., the state of Iowa gets ~60% of it's energy from wind. Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas... even "oil rich" Texas get 20-40% of their respective needs from "windmills".
In the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Montana, Idaho, etc.), hydro is
40 - 60%.Solar's biggest presence is in California at ~20%.
"Taxpayers" have been subsidizing petroleum for decades (when they tell you a war is "not about the oil" you can be pretty sure it's about the oil!). And, most of that infrastructure is already in place and largely paid for.
[Note that all of the roadways and airports benefitted petroleum producers; had travel remained the issue for railways, do you think petroleum would have the place it has/had to date?]Nuclear isn't as much an operational problem as it is a disposal problem. You don't hear many countries standing up to be disposal sites for the world's nuclear waste! (gotta be a market, there!)
I have met any number of people associated with nuclear who seem to have the same attitude. As long as the systems stop a meltdown, we are all good. Trouble is it doesn't work that way. The fact that some last ditch safety measure worked this time doesn't mean the system is safe. Clearly there have been significant accidents. There will be more in the future. We don't know how many or how severe. The problem with nuclear is that the worst case scenario is much, much worse than anything we have seen to date. Compound that with the higher risks of aging plants and the rising costs of new facilities and barring some new concepts, you have a dying industry.
There is work going on in small reactors, but they are a long way to being ready for prime time. Even then it does nothing about the waste disposal issue which many just want to ignore by thinking it can be shoved into any hole in the ground.
It is just so clear that renewables are coming on strong and with the addition of power storage facilities can potentially supply all our energy needs for the foreseeable future. I don't get why people complain about such a fundamentally sound concept.
Until the next blackout in Texas, may be then they will come to their senses.
Hydro is and has been OK - if you have it. Not so the windmills etc.
Well that has been the antinuclear song for decades, I know.
Toshiba had a small reactor commercially available > 20 years ago, guess why it got to nowhere. IIRC it was meltdown safe by design etc.
The nuclear waste issue is used to scare the public. Nuclear waste is kept safe not because it is any problem to protect the public from it but because it can be used to make nuclear weapons. Not that the latter makes the problem any easier to deal with of course.
Q: If you install XkW peak of wind/sun power plant, how much can conventional plant can you retire?
A: zero.
Because sometimes the wind/sun isn't there, and you have to either have power cuts or conventional plant. No, if the wind isn't blowing /here/, you can't presume it is blowing /there/, and sun doesn't always shine (even through rose-tinted spectacles)
In the UK a rule of thumb is that that wind output is below x% of peak output for x% of the time. Hence it is less that 1% of peak for 3 days/year.
Coal releases more nuclear radiation and kills more people every week than the entire history of nuclear power accidents.
They are so expensive because the attempt to placate fear-mongering greenies have massively increased costs and even more massively retarded innovation. A new generation of reactors could be 1/5 the price and ten times as safe, at least.
CH
George h.
The Texas problem was not due to renewables. Rather, it was due to poor maintenance on conventionally fired plants.
"Cohan said three factors were probably at play, though it's too soon to say to what degree each played a role in causing the outages.
•First, some power plants may not have been operational during routine maintenance, Cohan said. Peak demand typically occurs in the summer, so it's not unexpected for a coal or natural gas plant to be offline in an effort to tune up for the warmer months. •Second, some power plants may have failed to operate in the cold, Cohan said. "Plants are optimized to run under our typical and our extreme summer conditions, but they aren't as well prepared and engineered for extreme cold," he said. •Third, some natural gas plants may not have been able to get adequate supply of gas to be converted into electricity, Cohan said. Unlike a coal plant that has a ready stockpile, natural gas plants don't store as much on site, meaning any disruption at the supply source will lead to a disruption in turning on the lights."I don't see any mention of frozen windmills or ice-covered solar arrays.
"Renewables" was a straw man argument that tried to appeal to emotion instead of fact:
"Some have pointed to freezing on wind turbines as a potential cause of the widespread outages, saying the renewable energy source is not reliable, but Cohan called those arguments "a red herring."
Note that Iowa is typically considerably colder than Texas yet hasn't had the problem the cold brought *to* Texas affecting Iowa wind farms.
Texas appears to have gambled on maintenance and prevention and paid for its lack of planning.
Had they not had their own *isolated* electric grid, they could have benefitted from excess power available from the other national grids coming to cover their shortfall.
Of course! We have quick-responding plants (especially natural gas) because you can't rely on the more-sluggish sources (nuclear) to provide ALL of the power you need. How is that any different than planning for a cloudy day?
But you don't need to burn coal to provide that reserve capacity. That's why 40% of our power comes from natural gas fired plants.
And the UK isn't the whole world. If a solution doesn't fit
*its* needs doesn't mean the rest of the world can't benefit from it.Finally, not all load is "essential". Tell me my energy source is going to cost me a premium, today, and I won't heat the water in the swimming pool. Or, may opt to install better insulation in the house to downsize the HVAC plant if the price increase suggests that as a solution.
I don't think twice about leaving four or five computers running, forgetting to turn off the light out in the storeroom, etc. Electricity is relatively cheap.
OTOH, If I opt to wash my car, I don't leave the water running (perhaps on the "lawn") while I'm soaping up the car! Water is far more precious -- *despite* being inexpensive!
Yeah, I here you can get a 5 bedroom home in Chernobyl pretty cheap!
Yes, and we are here! Renewables are now lower cost than new nuclear power facilities. People go on about how renewables require backup power, which is the same for nukes! They have regular power outages for refueling as well as unplanned outages. Then they require peaking facilities because of an inability to be ramped up and down with demand. On top of that anything that reduces their availability runs up the energy unit cost because capital amortization being such a huge portion of total costs.
On top of the realities of the economics the end user cares about, the investors are not ready to build a $10 billion plant that can reach $20 billion or more by the time it is done drastically cutting the ROI in a competitive market.
Like thorium reactors, we don't really have the time to wait for the development process. By the time they are ready they likely will be economically unviable too.
People are scared of things when they can't get or don't believe the truth. Nuclear waste is a scary thing regardless of which aspect of it is the "truly" scary part.
Yes, the song of those in denial of reality.
Storage is coming on line, EVEN in the UK, as we speak. By the time renewables are a major part of the energy solution storage will be a significant factor allowing coal plants to be retired.
10 years ago people here pointed to the high costs of solar and wind and the small amount of generation installed. Both have picked up steam and are becoming significant factors in power generation even now.You can keep making the same arguments, but every day they are clearly less and less true.
Why do you keep babbling about coal? We kill more people in cars every day than from energy from coal. So what???
That is your delusion. If nukes could be made safer, the safety advocates are making them less safe??? Wow, maybe you should talk to your doctor about your meds?
Not exactly true. The Australian electricity generating industry is remarkable reluctant to invest in anything but solar farms, wind-farms and grid-scale storage storage. They get more kilowatt hours per buck invested from windmills and solar farms, and aren't interested in building anything that burns fuel they have to pay for. They've already got all the fast-start gas turbines they think they will need, and aren't fond of paying for the gas they burn on the rare occasions when they are needed.
Since Australia started exporting natural gas, it's domestic price has doubled, which hasn't helped.
The US right wing is fully committed to nuclear terrorism and carrying out a nuclear strike against a US population center:
The UK is retiring its coal plant with essentially nothing to replace them. It will end with power cuts one hard winter when the wind doesn't blow. They have already had to pay heavy industrial users to shut down during some winter tight spots.
They are quite often already out of juice before the evening rush hour starts. Basically badly designed and fit only for southern climates.
You live in a world of your own where magic can make things you want happen. The reality is that renewables can do something but they are nothing like a complete solution to a very difficult problem.
In the US peak electricity use coincides with peak solar availability for air conditioning. In the UK peak electricity demand is for heating in mid winter on cold grey days sometime with no wind at all. We are actually reliant on the French nuclear generation interconnect to cover the shortfall (and it is getting worse). Not least since post Brexit they have threatened to cut off the Jersey electricity supply in a dispute over fishing rights (they could just as easily do it to the UK).
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