No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons.
The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is.
The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.
Yeah, and they have floods, too (Re: Fukushima). I'm a proponent of nuclear fission energy (to complement solar/wind/hydro) but it has to be done safely. Hopefully in the future we don't have to rely on it (switch to nuclear fusion or something else), or solve the nuclear waste issue somehow.
Green energy and nuclear are in different product categories. They are in no way comparable. It's like trying to compare an electric scooter to a work truck. This is because green energy is mostly fine for transient demand, but at this time, is completely unsuitable for base load applications. Nuclear is a base load product (base load pricing is quite expensive) and needs to be far more reliable. Its failure modes are such that we can build a reliable energy grid around it, and have done for decades. You can't say the same for green energy (right now) as evidenced by its multiple failures as of late, which is now responsible for decreasing the security of Europe.
The crisis in Europe and elsewhere shoots holes in the theory that baseload is somehow no longer applicable. Baseload is not cheap particularly because it must be very reliable (and is more expensive), and is why green energy alone is too variable and completely insufficient at present to replace other baseload providers.
The assumption embedded in that line of thought is that the failure modes (and times) of peak and baseline power will never significantly overlap. Essentially, by injecting more variance and different types of uncertainty, frailty and the chance of systemic failure are increased (as shown in Europe), especially regarding second and third order effects.
Clearly, placing any country's energy security in the hands of ever changing climate (less winds and high cloud cover) or at the feet of dictators has to factor in some where.
There are a number of issues:
1) Short term, the faster we avoid CO2 the better. If SLAs make that more complex, then it is a net loss. Long term, the situation will be different because cheap gains will be gone.
2) Europe has mostly privatized energy. Who is suppose to set the SLA?
3) Nuclear plants need to be refueled. Does the SLA include a couple of months downtime every few years? That would suggest that the SLA is uniquely tailored to nuclear. 100% uptime? How is nuclear going to deal with that?
4) Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear.
Basically what we need is flexible electricity production. On their own, nuclear, solar and wind are all equally bad at flexible electricity production. So the questions are:
- how do we get cheap storage
- how do we minimize the amount of storage we need
> Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear.
Load following nuclear power stations are a thing.
--- start quote ---
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute
Technically that is true. Economically, that means that if a nuclear power plant runs for significant amount of time at 50%, the price of electricity will almost double.
Nuclear plants use water from a local river, or sea, for cooling. Or some plants use air and have cooling towers. Nuclear plants are also tightly regulated by law. So there is a limit on how warm cooling water the plant is allowed, as per environmental regulations, to release into the river, or to the sea.
If weather gets hot, the temperature of the incoming cooling water gets warmer, too. And having to operate within the limits of the maximum allowed temperature for the outgoing cooling water, the plant may have to regulate its power output, or maybe entirely pause operation.
The temperature limit is mostly a legal one: There is concern about the environmental effects of releasing warmer water to the water bodies. From an engineering point of view, the plant would probably be able to operate, and just release warmer water.
I'm not debating the mechanisms; I'm after a source that hopefully reliably cites the frequency and severity of it. Wind and solar power drop to zero regularly, as we would expect. If nuclear does the same, then the comparison is totally valid. If it's something else then the comparison becomes less valid or invalid.
Why are you so keen to defend one particular power production method on one narrow stat?
This isn't a game of Top Trumps where you need to find any one stat that's higher than your opponents to declare victory.
Nuclear has to be better than wind and solar and hydro and batteries and everything else (demand response, better insulation, undersea grid connectors etc.) all working together across a wide range of metrics to find a place in a modern grid.
It is failing at this. The alternatives are cheaper, better, greener, safer, quicker to build.
Narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect does not change this big picture reality.
I'm not keen to defend anything. I know this can seem unusual, but I'm just trying to understand the situation as well as possible. I'm not treating any option as a team to blindly cheer on.
The problem with what you're saying is that to supply peak power at all times could require building capacity in each method to supply full power, in case the others all fall to zero power. And even then, you hope that they don't all fall to zero, I guess.
Why can't they just refrigerate the water before releasing? Nothing too crazy just a few degrees. Run it through cooling pipes are something to dissipate the heat.
They could evaporate some of the water to cool the rest. This is why many nuclear plants in the US have cooling towers. But cooling towers consume water, and are fairly expensive.
Curtailment of nuclear power due to periods of extreme heat has had the effect of reducing European nuclear power output by approx. 0.1% since the year 2000. For France specifically, which with its many inland river-sited plants has been the worst hit country, the corresponding figure is approximately 0.15%
> Now, increasingly, more frequent heat waves and hotter average temperatures are making those waters so warm that engineers are concerned that it can't do the job. Analysts say climate change is to blame.
> In little-noticed but publicly available reports to regulators, nuclear plant owners revealed that unusually hot temperatures last year forced them to reduce the plants' electricity output more than 30 times – most often in the summer, when demand from nuclear plants is at its highest. In 2012, such incidents occurred at least 60 times. At one plant in Connecticut a reactor was taken offline for nearly two weeks when temperatures in the Long Island Sound surged past 75 degrees.
It's not like you can just change the legislation to say "allow hotter discharge water" though -- the plants' very engineering criteria is being impacted. Warmer water has lower absorptive capacity to cool the primary loop so things get dicey when temps increase outside the design specification.
All designs that take water from rivers and return it there. There usually is a regulation for the maximum water temperature in the rivers, so during the summer they can't heat up the water as much, leading to lowered energy output to the point where they have to shutdown some or all reactors of a plant.
That doesn’t imply that nuclear plants regularly get close to this threshold nor that it’s common for all nuclear plants of this type (consider 2 identical plants positioned on differently-sized rivers: the larger river will be able to absorb more heat than the smaller river, ergo reliability of this sort varies).
It's not just the river's ability to absorb the heat, it's also the plant's design criteria. The river water is the coolant in the secondary loop, warm water obviously has less capacity to absorb heat, so the plant will either get hotter (not great!) or will have to slow down the reaction to produce less heat (also not great during the summer when demand is the highest!). This isn't just an environmental concern but a design problem.
Not OP but I google dit and found this [0] from almost 20 years ago. No mention of it being every summer though, and it was during a heat wave that disproportionately affected france.
I like the engineering of nuclear power plants, but I'm not particularly biased towards them over renewables.
But we need to greatly improve energy storage if renewables are going to work.
Places like Scotland have generated equivalent to around 97% of their entire electricity consumption from renewables - yet still consume around 13% of their energy from fossil fuels as they export the renewable energy at peak production.[1]
I also just really don't like the misinformation that surrounds nuclear energy. I majored in Physics and it's just irritating to see people so confident in their ignorance. I recommend the book "Atomic Accidents"[2] as an excellent book on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear power plant engineering in general.
Yeah. We need a better transmission grid before we can go to 100% renewables (balancing out Scottish wind with Spanish solar). But a better transmission grid is miles cheaper than nuclear, so it's still a no brainer.
Citation? In particular, small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas (but we can’t know for sure because anti-nuclear folks have prevented us from seriously testing it) which is almost certainly less than the cost of solar/wind and tens of thousands of km of massive copper cables.
So let’s get our thumb off the scales and allow them to build their technology so we can find out it’s true price? It’s equally foolish to assume that the prices won’t fall over time as we optimize.
I guess we just need omniscient philosopher-kings to tell us ahead of times which safety regulations were actually necessary. Is there R&D into crystal balls?
I am asking you how one determines which regulations are actually necessary. Those of you making this "too much regulation" argument never seem to go into detail on that. Judging by every other industry that has ever existed, this is not a tractable problem -- one determines what regulations are necessary by failing and learning from the experience. With nuclear, how many meltdowns are you willing to tolerate to get this experience?
> I am asking you how one determines which regulations are actually necessary.
This is something that experts need to work out.
> Those of you making this "too much regulation" argument never seem to go into detail on that.
Our arguments don't require us to specify specific regulation to eliminate, it suffices to note that we tolerate tens of thousands of annual deaths due to fossil fuels and we tolerate virtually zero deaths due to nuclear. We can be sure that there are regulations which are onerous for relatively little safety gains, but to your point most of us aren't experts here and can't speak to specific regulations or how they work.
> Judging by every other industry that has ever existed, this is not a tractable problem -- one determines what regulations are necessary by failing and learning from the experience.
Not at all. The number of deaths we're willing to tolerate is a choice, largely one driven by lobbyists. For example, we tolerate tens of thousands of annual fossil fuel deaths, transportation deaths, etc. The only reason we tolerate so few nuclear deaths is because of FUD campaigns.
> With nuclear, how many meltdowns are you willing to tolerate to get this experience?
Well, we could look to our own past experience or the experience of other countries which had extensive nuclear experience and virtually zero meltdowns despite far less regulation.
So we have high operational costs but a lower capital cost for SMRs since we lose the size advantage of regular reactors. We then hope that these higher operational costs are offset due to the scale advantages of building many reactors. That's gonna require some huge cost savings?
You're making a lot of assumptions, including that the only difference between SMRs and older generation reactors is size. SMRs are also much simpler, with the express purpose of reducing operational costs. Maybe the operational costs would be higher, but we aren't going to know that without more robust analysis or--heaven forbid--trying out SMRs.
They will be a bigger part of the costs compared to current reactors. Which is normal because employment costs are high. It's a popular choice now because all the latest reactors in the west have huge budget overruns.
Also, this is with technology we have right now that we know works. The problem with SMRs is they have always been 5-10 years away from being ready. We have to plan based on what we know now, not make pipe dreams based on technology we would like to have and which may never pan out.
The us navy has been building SMRs for decades. Their reactors don't need to generally be refueled either since they use higher grade fuels and burn them in place for 30+ years. So, there are differences but mostly these aren't cutting edge designs, they are 50 year old concepts that have been studied and understood to death.
Yes there are differences, but the fact that the NRC can't certify a reactor class that the navy builds (without interference from the NRC) is itself a problem.
> The us navy has been building SMRs for decades. Their reactors don't need to generally be refueled either since they use higher grade fuels and burn them in place for 30+ years. So, there are differences but mostly these aren't cutting edge designs, they are 50 year old concepts that have been studied and understood to death.
I have a hard time seeing nuclear weapons grade fissile materials spread around in every SMR in every town around the world as a feasible solution.
«This small modular nuclear reactor will provide cheap energy for the city for decades! AND, in case of surprise enemy attack, it will be used as a nuclear land mine!! You all will be HEROES!!!»
> We have to plan based on what we know now, not make pipe dreams based on technology we would like to have and which may never pan out.
Same deal with solving for reliability with renewables. We should invest in solving both problems. Moreover, I suspect that "always 5-10 years away from being ready" has a lot more to do with regulators than feasibility.
Exactly, the price of nukes are roughly 100% regulation at this point. nuscale spent $500M+ just pushing paperwork at the NRC in the US and still haven't built one. It wouldn't surprise me if the NRC required global asteroid strike mitigations, just in case. The fact that not a single NRC approved design has successfully been built, should tell you that they exist to drive the costs so high has to be economically unfeasible.
Apparently, South Korea though has kept the costs down to 1980's levels.
A buddy of mine's joke is that the cheapest way to get new nuke plants in the US is to build a huge naval fleet and park them in ports.
I might note for readers of you book recommendation that despite the title, James A. Mahaffey the author also wrote a pro nuclear book and was a contributor to Power to Save the World[1]. He's definitely in the pro-nuclear camp, and is an expert on nuclear control systems, having introduced digital/computer controls to the industry.
If we're choosing power sources based on the amount of lies told about them, then I'm afraid renewables win on that metric as well.
They invented a conspiracy theory that the entire planet's scientific community was trying to destroy the economy for secret marxism reasons for goodness sake.
You'd need to find someone who thinks Godzilla is a documentary to equal that level of nonsense.
Nonsense. If it weren't for FUD campaigns, nuclear energy regulations could be more lax (there's a huge chasm between the safety of nuclear and fossil fuels and no one had a problem with fossil fuel deaths for most of the last half century) and investment could continue in finding more economical designs. Note that various Asian countries are able to build and operate even older nuclear plants economically.
Nonsense right back at you. Nuclear with a normal level of regulation, with the same level of up-fuckery seen in other industries, would have eventually reached a level of safety, but only after a long string of nuclear accidents (just like as air transport required large numbers of crashes to achieve today's safety.)
Would that have been politically realistic? I think clearly it wouldn't have been. So don't complain about a level of regulation that nuclear requires in order to exist at all.
I don't buy this at all. First of all, even assuming these regulations were required at one time, it doesn't suppose that they're still needed today to keep nuclear reasonably safe--we could ostensibly lift much of that unnecessary regulation now that things are safe and allow nuclear to compete fairly.
Secondly, the whole point of anti-nuclear FUD is/was to make nuclear "politically unrealistic", so it doesn't make sense to argue that "political realism"--not FUD--is responsible for the high levels of regulation.
Thirdly, lots of countries (China, South Korea, etc) have had nuclear programs with much lower levels of regulation and far better economics, which goes to show that, absent FUD, nuclear power can be safe enough to be "politically realistic".
> The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables
“Modern renewables” aren’t competitive at all, you can’t build a grid based on them. The ginormous amount of renewables in Germany compared to how much CO2 per kWh their grid produces (https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE ) is everything you need to know.
Even in places like California (where I live) where Solar is viable, renewables will require so many battery storage to remove gas plants that it’ll push their co2/kWh way higher that nuclear.
You have invented a fictitious enemy in your own made up "culture war" to rage and rail against what you believe is the one true answer. Thousands of hectares of pristine remnant bush are bulldozed to move, note not install, move, wind turbines into place. Nobody blinks an eye when thousands of hectares of remnant bush gets covered in solar panels. I'm the greenest person I know, a self identifying eco-facist. And I want a nuclear power station in every suburb. And so should you, if you gave a rats arse about the actual environment, and not some fake "war" raging in your meme-space while actual living things get ground into dust in the actual real world.
The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is.
The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.