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[mainiac]

best immediate option

I'm sorry, you were talking about nuclear, the only power source where you have to plan in decades, and then you started talking about "immediate option".  What is this immediate option you are talking about?

[Reelya]

Prior to the Fukushima accident, in 2004 the Japanese government had calculated the cost of nuclear power at 5.9 yen/kWh. A recalculation was made after the accident to include social costs, such as accident settlement, compensation and area decontamination. This new estimate was 8.9 yen per kWh, but it excludes the costs of nuclear waste storage, decommissioning of nuclear reactors and indemnification insurance. Estimates have shown that if these are included, then nuclear power costs would exceed 100 yen/kWh. This compares with 9.9 to 17.3 yen/kWh for wind and 33.4 to 38.4 yen/kWh for solar.

Yeah, I'm kinda dubious on the actually cost-effectiveness of nuclear, regardless of the environmental pros and cons. From what I've heard before and just read here, it's only economical if you don't take into account the full life-cycle of the plant, waste, etc and all the other costs. As you can see from the estimate above, almost all the actual costs are in the stuff they hand-wave away.

Plus of course they're large scale infrastructure that you need to invest a lot of fossil fuel-based energy and materials into, there's the fuel used to mine and transport uranium. So building them to replace coal plants would spike up CO2 emissions, which you'd expect to get back over the course of the plant's existence. That's not to mention that usable uranium is fairly limited in how many decades-worth there is, even at current rates of use. There's a lot in the seawater, but seriously, if we develop the tech to cost-effectively extract uranium from seawater for energy, then we'd probably have developed better options than burning the stuff to drive giant steam engines.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx

Current usage is about 66,000 tU/yr. Thus the world's present measured resources of uranium (5.9 Mt) in the cost category around 1.5 times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.

Nuclear is currently supplying 11% of the worlds' power. If we went for 100%, then there would be a 10 year window to work out where/how to get more. Sure, some more will be found in that time, and extraction will improve, but I doubt they're going to double known reserves in 10 years. It's clearly not a long-term solution to all our problems then, and it has a huge fossil-fuel expending lead time.

[mainiac]

It's also incredibly generous to nuclear to allow them to assume an extremely long payback period when the cost of solar and wind is dropping so fast.  It's like trying to justify buying a super expensive PC by saying that you are going to keep using it for ten years.  Sure you could keep it running for ten years but that is just not economically sensible when way cheaper computers will deliver the same performance in three years.

If we start planning a nuclear plant today and things go smoothly it might open by 2025.  By 2025 solar and wind will be flooding the market with electricity at half the price of electricity today.  Yes there will be timing issues but the markets can still make use of that electricity and demand smoothing is a real thing.  So nuclear power construction is based on an assumption about price that wont be real by the time it's done.  And a few years later the price will keep going on.  If in 2035 the price of electricity is down at 2 cents a kilowatt and you can't even cover your operating costs.  And then taxpayers get to pick up a multi-billion dollar bill for a plant that took longer to build then it ran for.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Now I'm sad. I did a report back in high school on the ITER, when it was just breaking ground. Now I've finished college and construction is not only not finished, but it won't be finished until 2019 and won't fuse until 2027. And ITER itself is just a staging ground for DEMO, which if everything goes according to plan will be the first true and used fusion reactor from which regular use will follow.

This would all be so much god damn easier if we just had more time to master fusion. Oh well. Maybe we'll manage not to commit planetary suicide for a while and it'll work out.

[Rolepgeek]

Nuclear's probably only really feasible as an option where solar and wind aren't available. Which is the case in some places, but....

And as ways to fill in when demand and availability don't match up because of fluctuations, until we have more effective means of energy storage (massive flywheels are the solution, obviously)

[Dostoevsky]

How is it that the party which is supposed to be trying to get us away from oil is so utterly fucking stupid regarding the best immediate option, and the long term needs for our existing waste?

It's a bit of a simplification, but once a sufficient number of influential/voting Nevadans found out about Yucca they got their elected reps to oppose it. As I understand it Sen. Reid (current Senate Democratic leader, so a powerful fellow) led the charge on that front, so perhaps his retirement will weaken congressional opposition enough to bring back funding. Of course, considering the uptick in environmental protests that seek to block construction projects I would expect local opposition to the project to get difficult.

And as to what others have said, nuclear power is indeed not cheap. As a carbon-free baseload source it has advantages compared to renewables (as Rolepgeek says better energy storage could change the dynamics there), but in the American power markets nuclear is struggling against both fossil fuels and renewables.

[Reelya]

Well idk, I think long-term solar and similar will be more useful than fusion. All techs will increase over time, so saying fusion will be ready by somesuch date, we need to assume all other energy techs will have improved by that date. The thing about fusion is that it appeals to people who want mass-scale centralized energy generation. But that brings with it energy transmission waste/heat and other diseconomies of scale (nuclear plants are very inefficient if not running at peak). Modern cities pump out quite a bit of heat, and almost all of that is probably wasted energy. Generating and storing energy exactly where it's needed and used can reduce waste.

In full sun, you can safely assume about 100 watts of solar energy per square foot. If you assume 12 hours of sun per day, this equates to 438,000 watt-hours per square foot per year. Based on 27,878,400 square feet per square mile, sunlight bestows a whopping 12.2 trillion watt-hours per square mile per year.

[Max™]

I heard that Ken Bone was polling better than Stein in Florida, 4% vs 1% and that is amazing.

best immediate option

I'm sorry, you were talking about nuclear, the only power source where you have to plan in decades, and then you started talking about "immediate option".  What is this immediate option you are talking about?

Immediate option as in "one which should have been pushed for since people started realizing dependency on fossil-fuels was a mistake" but it could also be a much shorter process if it wasn't for all the ridiculous NIMBY legal hoops to jump through.

Building coal and natural gas plants takes time, but the legal minefield is much easier to navigate.

I wasn't assuming fusion plants, they're still too far out for a baseload system, but using nuclear to provide on-demand and put extra capacity into storage/distribution mechanisms with local assistance from solar seems like a good long term plan.

I wish people had spent more time pushing it as "radioisotope powered steam generation" or "hot rocks boiling water" instead of letting the "ZOMG IT IS NUCLEAR, THAT MEANS BOMBS" people win out by trying to be reasonable and fight with facts.

Modern plant designs exist which can recycle waste, plants exist which could be planned and built in much less time, talking 5 to 7 years to get them built and ready to start running, but you have to go through ridiculous steps to get a single plant built, and it winds up being extremely outdated by that point. The first few reactors of a given design cost more, building them out more reduces the costs, but people have been fighting it so long on this moral crusade that it just doesn't happen.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Also, for some fucking reason (I guess whatever their usual one is) Gawker sites have embarked on a character assassination campaign against Ken Bone because he used his normal reddit account for an AMA and that included the comments he'd made on porn subreddits.

Keep in mind when I say that, I don't mean stalking people on porn subreddits or advocating pedophilia or any of the other things that are implied but not actually said in these articles because he didn't actually do any of those things. Normal (for the territory) comments like "that's so hot" and such.

Just character assassinating a meme famous American man in 2016 for the crime of...watching pornography? Never change, Gawker, by which I mean immediately shut down and never publish anything again.

[Max™]

Well, reddit is a shithole, and I think it was people in the AMA bringing up other posts while uh, pointbombing... however it works, the other comments too, which is rather amusing.

Though now I wonder if those polls vs Stein were before or after people found his comments on the Katniss anatomy.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Reddit being a shithole is certainly a known value. I'm more focused on Gawker's insistence on inexplicable and borderline criminal behavior even after getting chokeslammed by Hulk Hogan hard enough that it still might do them in for good.

At first I thought it was because they were a new frontier for drama fodder sites, which they are, but between this and their owner's behavior at the Hogan trial I'm starting to wonder if Gawker's management isn't seriously divorced from reality.

[alway]

It's also incredibly generous to nuclear to allow them to assume an extremely long payback period when the cost of solar and wind is dropping so fast.  It's like trying to justify buying a super expensive PC by saying that you are going to keep using it for ten years.  Sure you could keep it running for ten years but that is just not economically sensible when way cheaper computers will deliver the same performance in three years.

If we start planning a nuclear plant today and things go smoothly it might open by 2025.  By 2025 solar and wind will be flooding the market with electricity at half the price of electricity today.  Yes there will be timing issues but the markets can still make use of that electricity and demand smoothing is a real thing.  So nuclear power construction is based on an assumption about price that wont be real by the time it's done.  And a few years later the price will keep going on.  If in 2035 the price of electricity is down at 2 cents a kilowatt and you can't even cover your operating costs.  And then taxpayers get to pick up a multi-billion dollar bill for a plant that took longer to build then it ran for.

This is why there is no new nuclear and will never be new nuclear again.
Big banking investment groups have essentially put out warning saying "Investing in big long term electricity projects is a really bad idea right now because renewable prices are dropping so fast that many of them will be non-viable within 10 years and you will be left holding the bag."
Take Max's aforementioned 5-7 years, for example. Based on the rate at which solar PV costs have fallen, if you started construction on a nuclear plant today, somehow magicking away all opposition and schedule overruns, by the time it was turned on, solar energy would cost half as much as it does today. These plants are then meant to last 50 years or so to recuperate costs enough to be economically viable.

As far as I can tell, wind and solar are already competitive with nuclear, or will be within that range of 5-7 years. As such, building new nuclear, assuming shovels put into the dirt today, is a terrible, money losing proposition.

[Reelya]

I wasn't assuming fusion plants, they're still too far out for a baseload system, but using nuclear to provide on-demand and put extra capacity into storage/distribution mechanisms with local assistance from solar seems like a good long term plan.

But France, which relies on nuclear is have the exact problem that it's not "on demand". The efficient way to run those plants is 100% all the time. So they're exporting electricity at off-peak times, and importing electricity at on-peak times. The problem is that off-peak is a lot cheaper than on-peak, so the French spend billions a year topping up their all-nuclear system, even though they import/export roughly the same amount of power. Unless you mean something radically different with "on demand" than "when it's needed".

There's also the fact that almost all nuclear countries hide the costs by passing them onto the taxpayers through various means. e.g. 75% of France's science budget is just handed over to the nuclear industry, so it's not counted as a "cost" to the consumer. And that's by far not the only subsidy / assistance the nuclear industry receives in France.

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nuclear-power-subsidies-report

Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away, according to a February 2011 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
...
While the exact value of these subsidies can be difficult to pin down, even conservative estimates add up to a substantial percentage of the value of the power nuclear plants produce—approaching or even exceeding 100 percent in the case of legacy subsidies and subsidies to new privately-owned reactors (see chart).

[alway]

According to the internet, some nuclear plants can increase/decrease on demand, it's just that the marginal cost is 0. So if you can generate excess power and sell it at 50% your normal rate, then buy power at peak demand, it's cheaper than building an extra plant and spending just as much idling it all the time as the plant running at 100%. Unlike a natural gas peaker plant where you're spending money on fuel when running but saving it on maintenance and operating costs.

[Reelya]

See the link I added as well. The total amount of taxpayer subsidies is greater than the total market value of the power generated, basically the point is that the US taxpayer would be financially better off if the American government had just bought electricity on the open market then given it away to consumers for free, rather than backing nuclear.

We really don't see people trying to build nuclear plants in places that don't have a high-spending government with strong revenues. Sure, the nuclear industry claims that red-tape is the barrier in places like Australia, but do we ever actually see companies trying to build nuclear plants in those places with "low red tape"? Well no, because they need that red tape scenario to pump subsidies into the industry. If they just stuck a nuclear plant somewhere unregulated, things would go to shit really fast.