During January this year, nuclear contributed about 62TWh of the electricity generated in the EU while in June this had fallen to 43.7TWh - about a 30% decrease. The deficit was largely filled by a surge of solar generation as well as burning more gas.
The drop was due to both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. There is no such thing as a non-intermittent source - even without unscheduled outages, a typical nuclear plant spends over 4 weeks offline a year. You need to be able to handle that also - i.e. with redundancy and backup.
Also because nuclear (like coal - the other thermal steam generation tech) requires huge scale to be profitable, it requires huge transmission investment. Contrast this with solar, for example, which is economic to scale down and can deployed in a more distributed pattern.
First, overall consumption is smaller in June than in January, when days are shorter and heating is on. So I don't see how comparing these 2 numbers makes a relevant argument.
Second, you can't compare technical (planned) maintenance with the uncontrolled intermittence of wind or solar. Not having sun or wind during peak demand is the actual problem. In Europe, peak demand is 6-8pm in winter: no sun, no wind.
The last problematic preventive maintenance, mandated by the supervising agency, which forced France to import MWh for a few months was in 2022. Anything human-made can have a downtime. It was actually a voluntary (although mandated) downtime in this case.
Moreover, you may not know that nuclear is forced to reduce output when intermittent energies increase their output. There is no good technical reason for this, it is just how the regulation has been made (you can imagine lobbying entities asking for it). You may have noticed more sun in June than in January, so yes nuclear may have had to reduce output. Not due to the technology.
Yes consumption varies by month but that's not why nuclear output fell by 30%.
There was wide scale unscheduled reduction in nuclear generation this Summer: in Hungary (Paks - reduced to 10% output), Romania (full shutdown of Cernavodă), France (5 plants fully shutdown, 2 curtailed) and Switzerland (Beznau operating at 50% then shutdown). All due to weather (lack of water for cooling).
I clearly distinguished scheduled from unscheduled downtime and am talking purely about nuclear intermittency caused by unscheduled downtime. And even if I didn't/wasn't, your original claim:
> Nuclear power plants are expensive, but that's because they are big. For the amount of electricity they generate, they are cheap.
Not according to the standard statistic for electricity generation cost - LCOE which amortizes capital costs.
> They are also quite cheap to run. As far as I know, there is no cheaper source of electricity than a nuclear power plant that has paid off its construction costs.
The are not cheap to run. Indian Point closed ahead of end-of-life because it couldn't support its operational costs - about $31 per MWh - about $500m per annum. Average wholesale prices at the time were around $28/MWh.
> Not according to the standard statistic for electricity generation cost - LCOE
According to the IEA it is. If you think nuclear LCOE is high, then you probably looked at the Lazard data. But Lazard themselves say that their figures for nuclear are not representative and that they did not try to make them representative.
“We do not, in this study, try to cost out new nuclear” (2:35)
“We think nuclear will be a big part of the future” (2:47)
“the costs of nuclear should go down “ (12:54)
“next five to 10 years the nuclear bar the one that's most likely to change the most in in terms of cost reduction” (14:06)
If you look at other sources than Lazard, for example the IEA, you will find that even nuclear LCOE is low.
However, LCOE is actually not the correct metric, as it only covers the cost of producing electricity from that source. It doesn't capture the cost of intermittent sources, which have very high system costs due to their intermittency.
Levelized Full System of Electricity (LFSCOE) is what you need to look at that, and there nuclear does well and intermittent are generally horrible, and they get worse the more of them you have. So you need to balance intermittent with stable providers like nuclear. And no, batteries are not sufficient, except maybe in the Sahara.
Here is the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
I don’t agree. The technical device we use for creating clear boundaries, useful abstractions and managing dependencies in monolithic code is the function/method/procedure call.
The history of distributed software is littered with the corpses of attempts to make the RPC look like a function/method call (I worked for a CORBA vendor decades ago). But these two techniques are so different on a fundamental level they are not substitutable except in the most trivial cases. The compute and elapsed time RPC overhead which makes perfectly good local abstractions completely impractical across a network. And then there are the differences in terms of failure modes, concurrency and synchronicity.
So even a beautifully designed and layered piece of “monolithic” software with a code base costing of coherent and clean abstractions will not be easy to port to a microservices/distributed architecture.
> Somebody kicks in your door with a pump action and starts shooting- There are _some_ jurisdictions that require you to try and flee. You kill them and they werent bodily blocking your car in? Murder charge.
Which jurisdictions? Is this in the US? I’ve lived in a bunch of European countries and in none would you be charged with murder in that situation.
Germany has had some weird court decisions in that regard, in general the law does say flee and not shoot back if this is an option. But mostly courts are reasonable and do not punish the victim. Only if the victim decides to use violence after the threat is over
But there was even a case, where a hells angel shot a police officer in his home who were doing a raid - and got free (because they did not identify themself as police).
The law says your are allowed to stand your ground. You don't have to flee.
> But there was even a case,
I don't know the details of the case, but if somebody thought some criminals are raiding his house with guns and it's reasonable the he thought that, then he's fully within his rights to defend himself and, depending on the necessities, by shooting at them.
> Allerdings gilt besonders hier der Grundsatz, dass das Unrecht dem Recht nicht zu weichen braucht. Man darf sich zur Wehr setzten und muss nicht flüchten.
Translation:
> However, the principle that wrongdoing need not give way to what is right applies here in particular. One is allowed to defend oneself and is not required to flee.
I believe that's pretty common and a sane approach.
"In bestimmten Situationen kann das sonst umfassend geltende Notwehrrecht eingeschränkt sein. Dies ist dann der Fall, wenn die Verteidigung außer Verhältnis zum Angriff steht."
"Besonderes gilt bei dem Einsatz von Schusswaffen."
"Auch wird das Notwehrrecht eingeschränkt, wenn der Angriff von schuldlos Handelnden wie Kindern, Betrunkenen oder Geisteskranken ausgeht. Hier muss zunächst versucht werden, dem Angriff auszuweichen. Erst wenn ein Ausweichen nicht möglich ist, ist eine Notwehrhandlung geboten"
In other words, my statement above was in those words indeed not exact correct - you don't must flee before shooting, but germany does not has a "home is your castle" law.
Sure, there are sane guardrails in place. Your are not allowed to shoot at somebody who steals a bottle of water from you or makes a picture of you against your will. You also correctly mentioned kids or sick people that do not have a criminal intend in a narrow sense.
Generally however, you don't have to flee and the defence doesn't need to be proportionate to the attack or what you are defending.
You just generally have to choose the mildest defence available to you that you can reasonably know having under an ongoing or imminent attack - you don't have to "take your time and look around" if some milder defence is around the corner.
"Anthony Edward Martin was an English farmer who shot two burglars in his home [...] was convicted of murder, which was later reduced to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility"
> The prosecution accused him of lying in wait for the burglars and opening fire without warning from close range, in retribution for previous break-ins at his home.[13]
No warning shot.
He also llegally bought a semi-automatic pump shotgun, possibly with the explicit plan to kill the intruders (as he got robbed in the past).
He also shot at them while they were fleeing.
So, yeah, in this particular case the judge decided that what he did was not covered by the law.
Examples? Maybe it’s true but I’d be surprised. Like I said from experience of living under a number of jurisdictions, none will charge a person with murder in those circumstances. Everywhere I’ve lived, if your life is directly threatened like that, you are absolutely allowed to defend yourself with violence commensurate with the threat.
They may have been confusing or deliberately conflating things with the fact that in most western jurisdictions, you are not allowed to kill, for example, a fleeing trespasser or burglar. This is viewed as an entirely different situation from one where you are being threatened directly with immediate physical violence.
If someone comes through your home door guns akimbo in the US, blasting back is fine
US Supreme court has often leaned heavily on right to protect self in one's own home in ruling against local and state laws that might ban ridiculous things.
I’ve had the same reaction. We’ve seen this play out in other language eco-systems (Java - JAXP, javax.validation, JPA, etc all ended up with a de facto single implementation) and the idea of pluggable implementations sounds appealing but rarely pays off. The price that Rust paid for this abstraction - which in fact ended up not being useful as tokio is the only reasonable choice - was high in terms of requiring ugly (to my eyes) changes to its type system.
There is no price to pay on the type system that was imposed by tokio. I assume you're saying something like "I have to add 'static in generics" or something?
It has absolutely paid off, there are many people not using tokio.
Large scale civil engineering projects will always cost more than simply installing stuff that comes almost fully assembled from a factory (solar, wind, battery or small/medium gas turbines). Opex will always be much higher for a generation facility which requires 850 FTE specialist employees to operate (US average per plant) compared to the minimal requirements for on-site employees for utility scale solar or wind facilities. Generation tech which requires no fuel or hazardous waste handling and storage also has an obvious cost advantage. None of these factors have anything to do with “need to believe”.
I don't think I get your point. A project will not be approved and funded if the local population does not believe it is safe, so safety must be demonstrated through a variety of means, including some you mentioned. This is directly tied to the high costs involved.
> To sum up, since the early 1970s, the cost of constructing nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been steadily rising. This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction. The regulatory environment is partially a reflection of the fact that nuclear power and the risks of radiation had become increasingly controversial, and that early understanding of the likelihood of a nuclear plant accident was often inadequate.
Nuclear in this millennium is not competing with nuclear or other tech from the 1970s - it’s competing with newer technologies (solar, wind, batteries and gas turbines) which do not require 5 to 10 year huge civil engineering works. All these alternative technologies benefit from mass production in factories. While civil engineering does not get cheaper over time - not just for nuclear plant but all large infrastructure construction.
And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.
Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.
It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.
Oh ok, yeah I think we agree. the original quote I was responding to was "the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost." I was simply trying to say that safety and cost are not independent. Safety is a massive reason why nuclear costs so much.
NuScale's putative safety improvement came from considerably larger cost. Safety and cost may not necessarily be related, but in NuScale's case they certainly were.
Looks like there's contact between the outer diameter of the sun-gear and a surface close to the center of the planet-gear? The link arm is pulling them together and this contact keeps them apart I guess. The rotation speeds are different so you'd need a bearing? I dunno tbh - I'm not sure what the colors represent and I'm not even sure if I'm using the correct words to describe what I see.
But to be serious, there's endless evidence that it's going on, and if you don't believe it I'm not the one with my head in the sand. (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)
> (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)
It's even worse than "not paying attention". It's knowing the truth of the situation and actively avoiding acknowledging it to yourself or anyone else. Hiding your head in the sand and shouting "It's not really happening, it's not really happening!" despite knowing that it is indeed happening.
Don't make insinuations you aren't willing to back with evidence. We've had guidelines against this for years, precisely because these claims make for such repetitive and empty discussion, and this subthread is a perfect specimen of that. Any time anyone provides us with evidence of manipulation of the site, we investigate it and take action.
We – of course – care about manipulation on HN; the only reason this is a site people come to for discussing so many different important topics is that so much effort has gone into ensuring integrity in the content that can be read here. It's just not that easy to engage in astroturfing, shilling, brigading, etc without setting off alarms either in the software or in the many HN users who have finely honed bullshit detectors, because organized, manipulative participation looks and feels so clearly different from earnest participation.
I invite you to do your own research. I'm not going to argue for every uncontroversial claim. If you believe it's controversial, see my first sentence.
We are monitoring for manipulation all the time; we're highly motivated to do so, because the fastest path to the decline of HN is the one where people lose trust in it. Thus every one of our moderation decisions begins with community trust. People who care about the health of HN point out evidence of manipulation when they see it. Commenting like yours is a form of trolling.
Why does it matter where on the planet the fossil fuels are extracted in terms of dealing with global climate change?
The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.
We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.
It doesn't work like that. If the US and Canada stopped extraction of oil and gas for the most part that shortage would be made up in other places. As we remove our supply from the markets prices would rocket up and countries like Russia and Saudi would make immense profits while making up for most of the losses and not moving the demand needle as far as you think it will move for the environment. There will also be a move back to coal where that's an option (some power stations).
And that's ignoring the consequences of that on e.g. people in cold climates that rely on gas for heating or people that rely on gasoline for getting to work. The correct approach is to reduce the usage of fossil fuels which will lead to reduced extraction naturally.
You're not 100% wrong but the impact is marginal. Partly because some energy markets are a cartel. The prices aren't strictly governed by supply and demand but rather supplies are throttled to drive prices.
This is why that's the wrong thing to focus on. If we (e.g. Canada and the US) have strong economies that allows us to do more. Both internally and by influencing others. For example I can afford to drive an EV and use a heat pump because the Canadian economy does well, despite those not being economical options. Many early adopters of solar and EVs and other environmental approaches were only possible because we have strong economies, and those drive down prices for everyone.
Prices would increase making the alternatives more attractive.
Oil and gas production is relatively in elastic taking years to expand.
The extra installed solar and wind generation - as a reaction to increased fossil fuel costs and supply disruption - permanently displaces fossil fuel consumption. No matter what fossil fuel prices do subsequently. Like the massive growth in nuclear generation immediately after the 1970s oil crisis.
Championing the continuing extraction of fossil fuels to be sold for combustion given what we know they do to the planet is not balanced in terms of morality by you driving an EV sorry. We have to abandon fossil fuels for energy asap and we practically can - the tech is available and affordable. The current reliance on fossil fuels - outside of some niches - is a political choice backed by inertia and established and powerful financial interests.
A long time ago, I had to write SQL parsers (for 3 of the most popular DBs at the time). It is a surprisingly difficult language to parse and disambiguate - particularly when having to deal with the warts of its variants. Sure it's not quite C++ but it's was easily the most annoying parser work I ever had to do. And in my experience, the trickier it is to parse a particular language, the more difficult it is to provide feedback to users in the form of helpful parse errors.
During January this year, nuclear contributed about 62TWh of the electricity generated in the EU while in June this had fallen to 43.7TWh - about a 30% decrease. The deficit was largely filled by a surge of solar generation as well as burning more gas.
The drop was due to both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. There is no such thing as a non-intermittent source - even without unscheduled outages, a typical nuclear plant spends over 4 weeks offline a year. You need to be able to handle that also - i.e. with redundancy and backup.
Also because nuclear (like coal - the other thermal steam generation tech) requires huge scale to be profitable, it requires huge transmission investment. Contrast this with solar, for example, which is economic to scale down and can deployed in a more distributed pattern.
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