Conventional Nuclear (AKA Nuclear Fission) a thread for discussion of the pros / cons.

Quote from Wyttenbach

This is the official, very detailed Swiss calculation from 1970. At that time it was 4.6 years with water cooling and no de-construction.

It seems extremely unlikely to me that the energy needed to build a nuclear reactor is equivalent to the energy needed to run a large city for 5 years. I think you need to check those numbers, and do a "reality check." Ask yourself if the construction of something like this takes as much energy as 760,000 houses use for 5 years.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Jed you mix up ROI and return on energy invested. You cannot mix apple and potato....

I am not mixing them up. The energy invested is returned in about 3 months. The financial ROI (money invested) will be returned on a schedule selected by the Public Service Commission, which sets electric power rates. If they raise rates a lot, it will pay back quickly. If they raise them only a little, it will take a long time. The decision is political.

They have already raised the rates to pay for the reactor, years ago. They will have to raise them more to cover the gigantic cost overruns in the last several years.

It would be possible for the Commission to deny the power company request to raise the rates. It could tell the power company to pay for the $33 billion itself. But that would bankrupt the power company and disrupt people's electricity. That would never be acceptable to the public. So, the public (electric power customers) will have to pay the $33 billion sooner or later.

Quote from Wyttenbach

This is wrong thinking. By not starting the waste nuke, you can save billions for decommission. (Like Austria once did)

Decommissioning is paid for with a surcharge on the electric power. The more power a plant produces over its lifetime, the more money is available to decommission. Decommissioning costs in the U.S. are $544 to $821 million according to one source, and $300 to $400 million according to the NRC. Unlike construction costs they are predictable and have not had cost overruns. There has been no problem paying for decommissioning so far.

Nuclear Decommissioning: Decommission nuclear facilities - World Nuclear Association

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/decommissioning.html

Quote from Wyttenbach

Let's the investors bleed! (Same will be seen in UK!)

The problem is, the customers will be without power.

Quote from Wyttenbach

The investors will loose all money. All the equipment will go into a new company that does continue to produce and supply power.

It would not work that way in Georgia. The power companies are a legal monopoly. There is no competition and no mechanism for them to go bankrupt. In Texas and other places, there is now competition in electric power. The customer can pick one power company or another. They work this by making the distribution network and power generation separately owned. You can pick a power company, but you are stuck with the Transmission and Distribution Utility (TDU) that serves your house. Obviously, they cannot install multiple different power lines.

Texas Electric Utility Providers

quickelectricity.com

In Atlanta, telephone and internet companies such as Google are now installing multiple duplicated distribution networks, often on the same telephone polls. It is somewhat chaotic and inefficient. The telephone polls are crammed with equipment. One of the Google distribution hubs is close to my house. The cables coming out of it are underground. They must come up somewhere, but I do not know where. It took them months to bury the cables.

This is the Google fiber optic cable hub. It does not look like much. It is a small building. Somehow they got permission to put it in a public park.

Measuring on the Google map, I determined that building with the fence is around 45 feet by 45 feet.

Quote from Shane D.

Is Nuclear Power Green? - YouTube

I think there some technical errors in this presentation. Mainly these two:

Wind power does not take up a lot of space. That is, area on the ground. The cross section of a wind turbine tower is small, and the land around it can be used for crops or grazing animals. The diameter the tower base is 4.2 to 6.2 meters, or 20 m^2. It produces ~1 MW. Natural gas plants are 20 to 40 acres in size. One estimate is that the land area is 0.343 acres per megawatt. (https://docs.wind-watch.org/US-footprints-Strata-2017.pdf) That's 1,388 m^2, about 70 times more space than a wind turbine. Natural gas plants also require pipelines, which take up some land space, and preclude the use of land for some other purposes. Wind farms as a whole take up a lot of space but most of it is in the air, where the turbine blades move. Wind turbines at sea take up no land space.

Nuclear power is not "on demand." It can only be used for baseline power generation, which is to say power generated 24 hours a day at 100% capacity. It cannot be turned off for two reasons:

1. It takes days to shut down and cool the reactors. They can be cut off in an emergency SCRAM but that does not actually save energy.

2. Nuclear power plants are very expensive per unit of generating capacity. The fuel cost is low but the reactor is expensive. They have to be run all the time to be economical. When the plant is turned off for refueling or maintenance, the power company has to pay interest on a large capital investment with no return on investment, so they turn it on at full power and leave it on as much as possible.

Quote from GRMattson

Anyone that thinks you can take energy out of the air stream without consequence is fooling themselves.

A wind farm removes a tiny fraction of energy from the air stream. The worldwide energy of wind equals the energy of solar power. (They are one and the same.) The sun delivers 173,000 terawatts. That is roughly 10,000 times more than all human energy use. Wind power is only a small fraction of that, so it is roughly a million times less than wind power. Looking at the wind locally, most of the moving air is high in the atmosphere. The tallest towers reach 280 m. The wind is from the ground up to ~15 km, with highest, most energetic winds in the jet stream (8 to 15 km). A wind farm taps into and slows down only a tiny fraction of the total. A few miles beyond the farm, the effects cannot be detected. It is not like a dam on a river that intercepts all of the moving fluid.

Natural features such as forests, grassy plains and waves intercept much more wind than wind turbines do. Orders of magnitude move. All those waving branches in a forest on a windy day, or whitecaps on the ocean, have far more power than all human generation combined.

Note that friction in the air and the natural features such as forests and waves stop all of the wind. Every moving particle of air soon stops. If the sun went out, wind would stop within hours, as soon as things cool down. So, the earth itself already stops all 173,000 TW of wind power very quickly, converting it to waste heat. Wind turbines stop a tiny fraction of that before air friction or trees get around to stopping it, but it all comes to a halt. So the consequences of taking energy out of air stream are the same as they ever were. That is not the situation with removing energy from a river. Because you intercept the entire body of water in a river, it has a larger effect on the surroundings and ecosystem. I suppose if you could stop all of the air from the ground up 15 km, for distance several kilometers across, that might have a dramatic effect on the surroundings. A large city with buildings will intercept a lot of wind and change the surrounding weather, similar to the way a small mountain range does. The building in a large city intercept far more wind than all wind farms combined. Tall buildings and bridges have to be very strong or they will be blown over.

Quote from Dr Richard*

Hopefully in the future these expensive gas-powered stations can be converted to LENR - generated power.

Do you mean natural gas powered electric generators? Not a chance. The technology is completely different. There is no way you could retrofit a combined cycle gas generator with cold fusion. It might be possible to retrofit a coal fired plant, but that would be more trouble and expense than just scrapping the whole plant. More to the point, it will never make economic sense to generate electricity with large cold fusion generators and then distribute it. That would cost far more than generating where it is needed, in houses or large buildings, with co-generators ranging from 10 to 100 kW. Or eventually, generating it inside the device you want to power. Large scale generators and distribution with cold fusion would cost 200 times more than small ones from the get-go, and later thousands of times more. See:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusionb.pdf

Quote from JedRothwell

It can only be used for baseline power generation, which is to say power generated 24 hours a day at 100% capacity. It cannot be turned off for two reasons:

I don't mean it is physically impossible to turn off a nuke. They are often run at low power during start-up or after maintenance. I mean it is not economical to run one at low power, or to ramp the power up and down in response to demand. As I said, the reactor is expensive but the fuel is cheap, so it is best to run the plant at full capacity for as long as you can, before stopping to refuel and do maintenance. It is more economical to produce power on demand from a low-cost generator such as gas turbine, even though natural gas costs more than uranium (per unit of energy). Small, megawatt scale Diesel generators have the lowest cost per unit of generator capacity, and the highest cost of fuel. So they are used for short periods during peak demand. They can be turned on quickly, run for a while, and turned off. It would be crazy to run one continuously but it makes good sense to run one a few hours a day. You see them in small buildings in the middle of nowhere in rural Virginia.