Utopia Talk / Politics / For Nim: nuclear supply chain

Seb Member	Fri Feb 23 14:13:10 http://twi...?t=IyzvZsmvIiVx8BYz2xc59w&s=19 This is interesting not properly digested this yet but these are the kinds of things that will effect viability of nuclear scale out. Not deregulation.
Seb Member	Fri Mar 08 07:39:50 http://twi...?t=M-9tLsP9rNCj1cjeQGIucA&s=19 See how much LCOE is capex? It's about interest rates.
jergul large member	Fri Mar 08 07:42:29 State owned and operated answers the capex problem. I never understood the privately owned critical infrastructure fetish. Some things are too big for private hands.
williamthebastard Member	Fri Mar 08 08:28:20 The privately owned fetish is singularly invented and issued by companies that want to own every part of society. So they made up this utterly transparent nonsense that freedom means we're all free to compete with them and own nuclear plants, which while theoretically true, is an insanely stupid belief to think that will ever happen in practice.
williamthebastard Member	Fri Mar 08 08:31:08 They've managed to fool millions of very thoughtless people into accepting their sales pitch as their lifestyle ideology
murder Member	Fri Mar 08 13:09:43 "I never understood the privately owned critical infrastructure fetish." Private enterprise is more efficient!
Seb Member	Fri Mar 08 14:02:14 Jergul: Govt also has borrowing costs, so it would wind up say 30% (let's imagine govt cost of capital is half private) say. But you are competing with other borrowing priorities. And the govt ends up with the risk, and the problem with 2GW reactors with no real track history etc is that the rush is substantial so finance ministries are wary. The solution is smaller cheaper reactor designs that pay off their capital investment faster. But the main point I was making here is that this is at a time where historically, interest rates are low. What killed nuclear industry was the high interest rates to tame inflation following the oil shock combined with the state stepping back from utilities. Where that *didn't* happen, the 250-500mw plants worked. The 1-2gw are too big even for medium sized states to back. Maybe the US, EU, China, India etc could repeat the French program. But the EU would never accept joint borrowing and making power production an EU competency instead of market regulation. The US is ideologically opposed. In reality the best bet is SMEs which I think are arguably a better technology than 2gw mega reactor squeezing out maximum thermal efficiency.
murder Member	Fri Mar 08 14:43:27 "The 1-2gw are too big even for medium sized states to back." Would you trust those states (or even smaller ones) to secure their reactors or even their nuclear waste?
murder Member	Fri Mar 08 14:47:24 And why stop at small? http://inl.gov/trending-topics/microreactors/
Seb Member	Sat Mar 09 16:20:33 Medium sized states = Germany, UK,Japan, France so... Yes.
murder Member	Sat Mar 09 17:33:59 I was thinking more backwards ... but I see that some of them already have nuclear reactors or are building some. It's a miracle there hasn't been a much bigger catastrophe. But what am I saying ... the US is an unstable shithole and we have tons of them.
williamthebastard Member	Sat Mar 09 19:09:43 The nuclear cat is out of the bag by now and the world will soon be littered with various kinds of nuclear installations and assemblies.
jergul large member	Sat Mar 09 19:37:13 Seb One of the problems with leaving this to private industry is fragmentation. Same thing in the UK really. A 6x1 gw nuclear site would not cover London's needs. Even including exploiting thermal energy. SMEs are fine for smaller settlements with limited power/thermal/salination needs. But there are always advantages to scale if your industry is capable of scale. Perhaps CSS is the best way forward for the UK and leave nuclear power to the pros?
Seb Member	Sun Mar 10 07:55:09 London uses about 37,000 GWh so maybe 5 plants. But 5 with a 60 year life span isn't a sustainable industry, so you have immediate problems if you are trying to transition from other sources. 130,000 GWh is London's total energy consumption (building and transport, electricity and fossil fuel). Maybe with full electrification. But GW blocks are I think too big to be build an industry and supply chain around to get decent costs and low risk.
Seb Member	Mon Mar 11 06:25:38 Or to put it another way to kick start an industry, you want an order book of say 6 plants. If it turns out they are shit and have shorter than expected lifespans or lots of unplanned outages than expected, it's really hard to absorb that in an economy the size of the UK. What you squeeze out of opex and overnight capital with 1.5-2GWth (1-1.5GWe), you push into cost of capital (private) and risk (public). Smaller cheaper units are way more viable and attractive programmatically even if looking purely at a given reactor, a big honking one looks more efficient in isolation when risk isn't factored in, and that's before learning curves. Another benefit of smaller reactors operating at lower temps and pressures is the cooling requirements become much less and you can rely on air cooling.
jergul large member	Mon Mar 11 06:41:31 Seb None of the above is the better option for the UK. It would do better developing green hydrogen to supplement, then replace natural gas. Smaller reactors would be better for places like Norway.
Seb Member	Mon Mar 11 08:32:23 Green hydrogen is an energy vector and speaks to distribution, not generation. Where's the energy green hydrogen going to come from? The point about SMRs is they are small enough to build "production line" and ship to their location rather than needing to assemble on site; not that you put them all over the place. You have 10s of SMRs in a single plant rather than one or two giant EPRs. SMRs is a technology the UK actually has an industry to build and maintain that can be scaled up. Green hydrogen OTOH needs a lot of investment and while it might replace gas, will need a large amount of industrial grade heat or electricity at very high power density (major grid upgrade to pull electricity from wind and solar to hydrogen production to feed an upgraded gas grid). So... Nuclear!
jergul large member	Mon Mar 11 09:51:53 Seb Green hydrogen is a product of green energy production. Nuclear is not going to work in a UK context. But sure, since we are dreaming: Fusion!
Seb Member	Mon Mar 11 13:48:20 Jergul: Power density isn't nearly high enough from solar and wind to efficiently replace gas with green hydrogen: given the amount of H2 too need to produce you need efficiencies and for that you need to concentrate all that wind and solar electricity to existing points in the gas network, which adds to the infra upgrades needed. There's no particular reason why nuclear "wouldn't work" in a UK context (and last year, weren't you saying green hydrogen was nonsense, and we should just use heat pumps?)
jergul large member	Mon Mar 11 16:59:54 Seb Heat pumps is definitely something you should be working on. Green hydrogen into the mix is something I highly favoured then. Solar and wind deployed in appropriate volume will have excess electricity production quite frequently. Green hydrogen stored within the UK gas grid is a good way of storying periodical excess energy. There are tons of particular reasons for why nuclear will not work in the UK. The not in my backyard problem on its own would block any meaningful buildup of smaller nuclear power plants. The only thing SMRs resolve is the mass production aspect. Each units output is so small that you would need many of them produced over many years. You may want to read up on what net zero means btw. Carbon emissions are still allowed, they just have to be balanced with carbon sinks.
Seb Member	Tue Mar 12 09:21:49 Jergul: "Solar and wind deployed in appropriate volume will have excess electricity production quite frequently." Yes. As I explained, that's not the limiting factor. Also given UK gas consumption is 900 TWH for heating etc (so excluding that consumed in generating electricity) compared to total electricity consumption of 300kwh, it's not at all clear there is anything like enough renewable capacity to replace gas with hydrogen. You'd need nuclear. "There are tons of particular reasons for why nuclear will not work in the UK. The not in my backyard problem on its own would block any meaningful buildup of smaller nuclear power plants." I addressed this already. Your assumption appears that you distribute the modules - but that's not how you'd deploy them at all. You would concentrate them say existing power plant sites. Big plants, with many small reactors. Try again, next reason it wouldn't work? "Each units output is so small that you would need many of them produced over many years." You can produce them in parallel, and the rate is relatively high if the order book is such. If instead of ordering 3 EPRs for c 4.5 GWe, you ordered 30 SMRs you are likely to have the SMRs deployed before the EPRs and you'll be able to scale production lines for SMRs. Yes, you want sustained production of many units with multiple production lines during roll out, scaled down in steady state. "You may want to read up on what net zero means btw. Carbon emissions are still allowed, they just have to be balanced with carbon sinks." Again, not sure why you think this is relevant unless you are super ambitious about steam reforming and carbon capture - but then as I said, sources of high grade industrial heat need to come from somewhere too.
jergul large member	Tue Mar 12 11:02:45 Seb 780 TWh is total natural gas. 35% of that goes to electricity production. Heh, it turns out both heat pumps and hydrogen are part of your government's 6th carbon budget. Point of net zero is that the UK can still emit considerable greenhouse gases. Those just have to be compensated for by natural and man made carbon sinks. Ie, you can always keep some natural gas, for as long as it is compensated for. Your current net zeor plan is to reduce natural gas consumption by 75% for example. Ie to stop using it for heating purposes. Green hydrogen plays a part in that planned reduction. So your plan is to ineffectivly distribute the modules by concentrating and take increased transmission losses to customers in addition to the loss of efficiency inherent to smaller units? You are nerfing one of the main advantages (SMR can also provide district heating in addition*.) Mkay, this plan is getting better and better. *The Akademik Lomonosov can produced 30 MW of electricity and 60 MW of thermal power via pipelines for example.
Seb Member	Tue Mar 12 12:32:35 Nope, that's specifically heating - net electricity production.
Seb Member	Tue Mar 12 13:02:00 Jergul: "So your plan is to ineffectively distribute the modules" Power is already produced centrally and distributed through the grid. The costs of distributing SMRs with small inefficient steam turbines locally, plus the planning issues you mention more than outweigh grid losses. SMR output it's typically 200-300MW (Th c. 150MWe) 10-100 MW is typically referred to as a micro reactor. BAe's plant design calls for two reactors for 470MWe, over the size of two football pitches. "in addition to the loss of efficiency inherent to smaller units?" The loss of efficiency in conversion of heat to electricity isn't a problem. Opex and fuel costs are negligible - what matters is capex (and that's dominated by cost of capital), scalability of production. I appreciate your engineering mindset is looking to squeeze maximum efficiency and utility out of each unit, but that's why the industry is currently in a dead end. Cheap and plentiful to get the costs low, and eat the transmission losses and wate heat. Though centralisation of reactors in large plants and co-location with other industrial facilities that require high levels of heat help. Like steam reforming natural gas or biological materials to hydrogen, for example.
Seb Member	Tue Mar 12 13:12:53 BTW steam reforming natural gas is "blue" hydrogen with carbon capture. Green hydrogen needs to be steam reforming biomass or electrolysis. To be efficient processes requires high grade heat, and if that's coming from electricity it needs enormous power consumption, which means drawing a lot of power from the grid and access to the feedstock - so inherently centralised and needing grid upgrades to allow solar and wind power to be brought to the site at high power density, so transmission looses etc but also grid upgrades. Also yes, I know that the UK plan is: Heat pumps, blue hydrogen with CCS and renewables. I also think we are going to not be able to implement it fully, and SMRs are likely more feasible. But it needs the state to be the seed customer to get the order book going.
jergul large member	Tue Mar 12 14:27:10 BTW Do you have to be so Cpt Obvious with your BTWs? BTW Hydrogen derived from electrolysis using sun or wind power is "green" hydrogen. A simple process primary school pupils are often subject to trying out by their chemistry teachers. 50% energy retention give or take. It is a way of storing excess energy produced by wind or solar.
jergul large member	Tue Mar 12 14:44:12 hmm, 5 million tons of pure oksygen are produced in the UK each year, so there seems to be a partial market for the byproduct too.
Seb Member	Tue Mar 12 15:38:39 You talk about green hydrogen earlier, but it's clear you are talking about blue hydrogen.
jergul large member	Tue Mar 12 16:26:58 Seb It is clear that I am talking about green hydrogen. As I said, appropriate upscaling of wind and solar will give periodical excess production of energy that needs to either be stored or will go to waste. Green hydrogen is an elegant way of storing surplus electricity production.
murder Member	Tue Mar 12 20:21:08 Don't make me separate the two of you. >:o(
Seb Member	Wed Mar 13 06:28:01 I don't really see how you get from green hydrogen to supplement and replace natural gas to talking about net zero allowing carbon provided it is sunk. Using excess electricity from green to electrolysis water isn't ever going to replace current gas demand - and it would be more efficient to replace the use of gas for heating with electricity at the consumption end. It can be a form of storage I suppose. Now excess heat from something like nuclear to steam reform biomass or natural gas and blue hydrogen makes a lot more sense.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 13 07:53:18 Seb Ah, I see your trouble. Replace "some" of current NG. The some was inferred. Heat pumps replace "some" also. "Some" NG is covered by carbon sinks for net zero. Argument to the ludicrous is the debating fallacy you are employing BTW.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 13 07:55:15 What happened with "air cooled"? It seems to have morphed into "super heated steam" somehow.
Seb Member	Wed Mar 13 08:09:54 Jergul: You seem to have confused temperature and heat. Air cooling with high temperatures that can generate superheated steam is fine. I used to work next to a site that did just that. It's when you have a lot of heat to dissipate that you need something with higher heat capacity than air (e.g. water) to cool.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 13 09:41:24 Seb Oh just wow. I am bailing out of your bad faith stupidity now.
Seb Member	Wed Mar 13 10:21:33 Jergul: Nothing bad faith at all. It's very simple - big nuclear reactors need nearby water sources due to the need to remove large amounts of high grade heat in an emergency shut down scenario to stop their cores melting down. Big cooling towers using condensation from an open loop or heat exchange to an open body of water required. SMRs produce high temperature steam, but the power density is low enough that: a. They don't melt down even on scram b. They can rely on passive cooling to air on their closed secondary/tertiary loops without need of heat exchange to a body of water as a heat sink. There is no contradiction at all between using an SMR to generate high temperature steam for industrial purposes if you want, and it still being able to use air cooling.
Seb Member	Wed Mar 13 10:27:31 Either you dissipate waste heat through a radiator with air blowing over it, or you can add a heat exchange to an open loop fed with water to provide high grade steam for an industrial purpose over the fence. The choice is yours. This is different from e.g. an EPR where you absolutely have to have some means of dissipating a LOT of waste heat either through multiple large condensation cooling towers or into an open body of water as a heat sink by heat exchanger. You can't feasibly do it to air - not enough thermal mass in the air to dissipate enough power fast enough without an unfeasibly large area of land use.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 13 11:25:37 Seb Superheating air to superheat water as a design features is simply stunningly inefficient. You are just tossing in an adhoc double down on stupid idea. Rational use of SMRs would at least use cogen (electricity + district heating, alternatively electricity + thermal desalination). In any event, nuclear power for days when the sun dont shine and the wind don't blow cannot possibly be economical. The core problem is really what to do with overproduction of electricity when the sun and wind shines and blows a lot. http://en....ording_to_data_from_Lazard.png
Seb Member	Wed Mar 13 18:33:24 Jergul: "uperheating air to superheat water as a design features is simply stunningly inefficient." Can you explain to me how you managed to arrive at the conclusion that you would use "superheated air" to super heat water is a reasonable interpretation of the following: "Either you dissipate waste heat through a radiator with air blowing over it, or you can add a heat exchange to an open loop fed with water to provide high grade steam for an industrial purpose over the fence. The choice is yours." The above does not involve super heated air at *any point*, nor heat exchange from air to water. I genuinely do not know where you come up with such stuff.
Seb Member	Wed Mar 13 18:34:19 Your statement is factually correct, but not even a straw man - rather the gentle burbling of someone disengaged from their interlocutor and perhaps intoxicated.
Seb Member	Wed Mar 13 18:40:49 To make it even more explicit: The relatively (in comparison to larger plants) low thermal power outputs mean that it is possible to dissipate the heat produced by SMRs by simply passing a stream of ambient air over a radiator in thermal contact with the last closed coolant loop of an SMR. This results in a large volume of hot but by no means superheated air, which then dissipates by mixing with the atmosphere. For larger reactors, while this approach is feasible in principle, in practice it involves infeasibly large areas or high flow rates of air over the radiators; and instead condensing cooling towers with associated water source, or a large body of water to act as a heat sink. This creates constraints on site locations (and also operation, cf. france). Alternatively, you can use the last closed loop of an SMR to heat water and generate a stream of super heated steam for industrial purposes. In this case you do not need to worry about air cooling, because your heat is going over the fence to some industrial process that will dissipate it for you. Or you can run mixed mode. I hope that clears things up, it really should be impossible to misunderstand this.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 13 18:42:36 "Air cooling with high temperatures that can generate superheated steam is fine." I was going to say the same. I genuinely do not know where you come up with this stuff. I blame the British drinking culture. After a few rounds with the lads, you think your brainfarts are gold, and not the turds that they are. Solar+wind+green hydrogen (as a storage medium for periodical overproduction of wind and solar electricity) is the answer you are looking for. New nuclear is stupid for the UK.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 13 19:32:42 What is incidentally your preferred solution to the periodical overproduction of electricity inherent to mass deployment of solar and wind?
Seb Member	Thu Mar 14 06:58:18 Jergul: If it helps: "Air cooling with high temperatures that can *alternatively* be used to generate high grade stream" You do one or the other. What matters for whether air cooling is possible is not the temperature, its the total power you need to shift.
Seb Member	Thu Mar 14 06:59:17 I was super explicit and explained at length, so trying to hang it off a miss reading that doesn't make sense in context of that rather belaboured explanation is silly.
Seb Member	Thu Mar 14 07:05:59 "What is incidentally your preferred solution to the periodical overproduction of electricity inherent to mass deployment of solar and wind?" Whatever works, but I'm not wildly convinced any technology would allow the replacement of the entire primary energy demand with renewables in a cost effective manner. And all things being equal I think a mature SMR making up something like 80% of demand, plus electrification, would be the best thing environmentally and economically. But that's a longer term goal, sort term you need to pull all the levers, and if turns out on 20 or 50 years time replacing existing wind turbines doesn't make sense because nuclear that's fine.
jergul large member	Thu Mar 14 09:54:15 Seb Miswriting and misreading by you. You wrote what you wrote and I was super clear that I thought using air as an intermediary medium was super crazy. Good that you finally got around to saying that is not what you meant to write. Who knows what things will look like in 50 years.
Seb Member	Thu Mar 14 10:39:30 jergul: Except the line you are quoting to suggest I implied air as an intermediary occurs AFTER you asserted that I implied air was an intermediary. And then you persisted with the belief there was a contradiction even after I explained at length. The conversation went: S: "Now excess heat from something like nuclear to steam reform biomass or natural gas and blue hydrogen makes a lot more sense." J: "What happened with "air cooled"? It seems to have morphed into "super heated steam" somehow." s:"You seem to have confused temperature and heat. Air cooling with high temperatures that can generate superheated steam is fine." i.e. you can indeed use air cooling with a reactor core that is hot enough to generate superheated steam. It would be very strange to read this instead as: "cooling with air that is hot enough to generate super heated steam" - it almost requires bad faith given you know my technical background and it is obvious to anyone with high school physics that it makes no sense to move heat from your heat source to a working fluid with high thermal mass via something with very low thermal mass, not least when you could transfer it direct to the working fluid.
jergul large member	Thu Mar 14 12:55:28 Seb The only wierd thing here is your earlier suggestion the SMRs should be air cooled. Your modus here is to toss out poorly thought through ideas. Anything goes. Incidentally, superheating air does produce some NOx as nitrogen and oksygen in the air react at high temperatures.
Seb Member	Thu Mar 14 17:43:24 You know what an air cooling tower Vs a condensation cooling tower actually looks like? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Didcot_power_station.jpg The six big cooling towers that look like the power station from the Simpsons are condensation cooling towers. Can you spot the air cooling towers used by Didcot B?
Seb Member	Thu Mar 14 17:45:09 You know what an air cooling tower Vs a condensation cooling tower actually looks like? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Didcot_power_station.jpg The six big cooling towers that look like the power station from the Simpsons are condensation cooling towers. Can you spot the air cooling towers used by Didcot B?
Seb Member	Thu Mar 14 17:46:12 Seb: "superheating air does produce some NOx" That's very interesting, but no air gets superheated as I've made abundantly clear.
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