Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling and maintenance over their lifespans making them a poor fit for base load without extremely costly redundancy in a small country.
A couple points. No, entire plants aren't taken offline at once typically, individual reactor cores are, and modern designs work to minimize that. They still maintain extremely good uptime, especially if you're comparing them to intermittent renewables. Secondly, Italy isn't super tiny, and you need redundancy for outages and such in any grid regardless of its components.
Cutting out the “and maintenance” bit is misleading.
It’s commonplace for maintenance issues at non CANDU reactors to extend the “refelling” downtime. So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues. The major benefit is when manufacturing plutonium due to shorter fuel cycles, but overall CANDU reactors are less cost effective which is why adoption fizzled out.
> So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues.
There are several situations:
* refuelling occurs
* maintenance and/or inspection needs to happen
* refurbishment may be desired
Some of these things take downtime, some do not, depending on the design of the reactor and other factors. A blanket statement of "refuelling forces a downtime" is incorrect in many situations. Depending on the maintenance (or inspections) needed, this may or may not need downtime. Refurbishment generally means tearing things apart, so usually means downtime, but if a site has multiple reactors they can be done one at a time, e.g.:
Eh, again, I disagree. As an example: Many CANDU reactors have insanely high availability. Example: Qinshan CANDU Unit 1 only had a planned outage of less than 27 days in 2023. There are many other examples. That is crazy uptime in the world of electricity production. And to be clear, if you come at me with "Oh, what about the major maintenance required every 10+ years?". Thermal (coal/gas) has the same issue.
I had a discussion with ChatGPT about this concern. When comparing a modern EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) to a modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant, the required maintenance cycles look fairly similar. For the nitpickers/tomato throwers (I see you!): I am using EPR because it is state-of-the art for nuclear power, and I am specifically using the term "modern" for thermal power plant because the newest ones (China, Japan) are nearly at the frontier of efficiency possible for that type of electricty production.
Roughly: EPR runs for 18 months, then requires 1-2 months of maintenance (which includes refuelling about one third of its fuel assemblies). A modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant runs 12-18 months, then requires 1 month of maintenance.
Next, I could not resist as other commenters already mentioned it. You wrote: "small country". As the Aussies say: Yeah, no. Italy is 300,000 sq km. That is not small. If compared to the United States, it would be the fifth largest state.
Finally, why does it seem that all discussions about electricity production on HN always devolve into the "Base Load Wars"? For me, it is starting to feel like a meme. (Are there LLM troll bots trained to enter HN discussions and make a bunch of "base load" arguments?) Seriously, can someone please create a text-based role playing game that revolves around a future society locked into eternal "Base Load Wars"? (See: PhD Simulator[1])
But is this the intended maintenance duration, or the actual one? Because the construction of every EPR project has been a disaster. Construction took 20 years in Europe and 9 years in China.
Well, there are only four EPRs in the world. It is too early to say. Frankly, as a non-expert "armchair observer", Finland was dumb for starting the EPR project before the design was finalised.
From what I read no further EPRs are planned and they fully want to go ahead with a streamlined EPR2 design.
I think the problem of the Finns was that they really wanted energy independence and tge inly ones that were on the market were the french. No doubt the frenched used much diplomatic muscle to attract them as a first experiment.
That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.
In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.
Also the case of 'learning that someone did updates directly on AWS console instead of terraform and losing 0.5 or more days cleaning up the resulting mess'
The energy density of specific compost heaps varies by several orders of magnitude it’s not a single number. Volume, moisture content, internal temperature, external temperature, materials being composted, etc all play a significant role.
There’s often more ambiguity than that. “Died of a COVID linked complication with COVID and other issue that is also linked to that complication.” You can’t spend endless resources deciding if something is or isn’t responsible.
Systems use arbitrary buckets like if someone commits suicide in less than six months from coming home after a war might count it, while excluding every case after six months. That’s going to misclassify cases in both directions but means you don’t need to track millions of people for decades or look through mental health details.
Obviously people with more data to work with can make a convincing case you’re wrong, but higher levels accuracy get expensive. In the end we know more than 1 million Americans died of COVID for example, how many more isn’t precisely known but ~1 million is plenty useful for decision making around the next pandemic.
> “Died of a COVID linked complication with COVID and other issue that is also linked to that complication.”
Where people refused to acknowledge the "linked complication" part of it at all. Many people refused to consider a death as being due to Covid unless the person literally suffocated, ignoring Covid's clear links to many other cardiovascular conditions.
People have multiple motivations at the same time. Many OSS contributors have moved on after LLM’s and that’s completely consistent with their motivations.
Some of the major OSS licenses require attribution when someone copies the work in question, AI companies fail to do so. People getting annoyed when others break the social contract has nothing to do with any other motives they can always benefit the world by doing something else.
You may prefer someone continue maintaining infrastructure you use but they could be just as happy delivering food to the elderly. The desire for people to continue helping you is little more than entitlement here.
In theory sure, in practice programmers are often making a large number of such decisions because nobody else in the org is as invested in the specifics.
I think it might be even worse than that. In tech you get ahead by gaming the system.
The last product I helped launch, I raised concerns about the long term maintenance cost of some unnecessary bells and whistles that early access customers didn’t even like. The product owner actually let their mask slip as directly told me that that wasn’t their problem. They’d have questions to answer if they yanked features that had already been prototyped, and besides, as soon as the product ships they would move on to a new initiative and any ongoing maintenance burden would be some less senior PM’s problem.
Being unsustainable isn’t the same as breaking within the lifetime of the people making the decisions. The average US senator is 66, and that’s young compared to the current Supreme Court or the sitting President.
Maybe Trump is secretly for "the green agenda" and this was all part of the plan to stop oil.
He had that big falling out with Elon so that he can't be accused of pandering to him when electric car sales go through the roof.
I have also heard that this is really "big oil's" plan, they always manage to cause a huge price spike just when green energy is about to take over the market, somehow this stops the green revolution and forces everyone to go back to using fossil fuels.
You can’t tile circular objects at 100% efficiency and you definitely don’t want these tanks to touch.
You further need space between them with each other and the edge of your property for a host of other reasons such as being able to inspect and paint each tank. Thus looking at actual facilities is going to give you vastly more resources options than just looking at the footprint of each tank.
You have a point. However, the requirement estimate of 45000 acres is off by 10 times ! I have seen some of these tanks - even accounting for spacing between them; at best one needs maybe a total of 5000 acres.
It doesn't really matter. 45,000 acres for a tank farm, or multiple tank farms, would be basically free by the standards of this project. Yes it's "an area the size of Washington DC" but it wouldn't be in Washington DC, where rent is expensive, it would be on some low-value desert land that the military might otherwise use as an artillery range.
Storing it in underground salt caverns is more secure, not necessarily cheaper.
As the article points out fire is a real concern here, which is one of many reasons making salt caverns so appealing. But it’s also a major driver for distance between each above ground tank, you want to isolate risks so a single failure doesn’t propagate across the facility.
Even with the existing spacing tank farms have a nasty habit of catching a large portion of their tanks on fire at once when a fire breaks out in one. It's really hard to contain and extinguish the amount of oil in one of those huge tanks.
Just looking at the tanks ignores the support and access areas around the tanks. Yes they wouldn't scale exactly linearly together but taking an existing farm and multiplying it up to get the capacity is better than just looking at the raw area taken up by the tanks. There's all sorts of pumping and piping that goes into these farms you'd have to route into the above ground mega tank farm version of the SPR.
We're decades away from the point we could have even possibly built 100 miles squared of solar farm much less the batteries to store it and replacing all the uses of fossil fuel that aren't just electrical generators. Even if we snapped our fingers and magically replaced every extant car, plane, truck and train with an electric equivalent and had all the infrastructure there's still industrial uses of petroleum that would drive a desire for strategic reserves of the stuff.
reply