Nuclear Investing?

While it has many of the characteristics you quote, it simply is not feasible everywhere for baseload energy. Without nuclear to replace fossil fuels for base flow where solar/wind etc is not feasible, you are talking about 50% of the US covered.
 
joejetski said:
While it has many of the characteristics you quote, it simply is not feasible everywhere for baseload energy. Without nuclear to replace fossil fuels for base flow where solar/wind etc is not feasible, you are talking about 50% of the US covered.
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Yea, alternative/renewable energy advocates pretty much ignore (or to be charitable - are ignorant of) baseload and grid stability. But I guess we'll find out how that works out in a few years. The Diablo Canyon shutdown will be a huge test, especially considering California already has rolling brownouts when it is hot.
 
USGrant1962 said:
Yea, alternative/renewable energy advocates pretty much ignore (or to be charitable - are ignorant of) baseload and grid stability. But I guess we'll find out how that works out in a few years. The Diablo Canyon shutdown will be a huge test, especially considering California already has rolling brownouts when it is hot.
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Had to google that. Holy Cow!

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/02/why-is-california-closing-diablo-canyon-nuclear-plant.html

Diablo Canyon is the state’s only operating nuclear power plant; three others are in various stages of being decommissioned. The plant provides about 9% of California’s power, according to the California Energy Commission, compared with 37% from natural gas, 33% from renewables, 13.5% from hydropower, and 3% from coal.
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CA has been facing intermittent shortages, they want more EVs drawing on the grid, and they shut down a plant that provides 9% of their energy, nearly pollution free.

“The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is an incredible, marvel of technology, and has provided clean, affordable and reliable power to Californians for almost four decades with the capability to do it for another four decades,” Ed Halpin, who was the Chief Nuclear Officer of PG&E from 2012 until he retied in 2017, told CNBC.

“Diablo can run for 80 years,” Halpin told CNBC. “Its life is being cut short by at least 20 years and with a second license extension 40 years, or four decades.”
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Europe is seeing problems, and I suspect CA's will get worse. Maybe this will open up people's eyes that renewables/green is great, but we can't just do it because we want to, we need a transition plan that supports a stable grid.

-ERD50
 
Well.....short of the big reveal on Zero Point energy, I believe cold fusion will come shortly. A major aerospace company has developed a technology in cold fusion which they have stabilized for a more than a few seconds. Now, for whatever dark secret reason, this company is soliciting the sale of this technology. My well connected friend has offered to let me in on review of the tech offering. He may be investing with a group of players which many of you would know, well ingrained in the nuclear fields. This is a big investment and a large leap to get a stable plasma field to contain the reaction.

I have but peanuts to invest compared to those in the consortium, so I will likely get passed by. I was instrumental in building major gas fuel power plants, and know a bit about the power and energy business. I have worked contracts with the major energy companies, including my lucky avoidance of the Enron defaults.

As to the posted question, I believe cold fusion will soon be a viable safe form of energy, the technology to harvest and distribute this as electricity is straight forward. The opportunity to clean up waste is a gift. However we do not know what the the few know in regards to other sources. Why would this aerospace company willing to sell it?
 
Markola said:
^^^^ I know nothing about cold fusion but I remember the excitement 30 years ago. Your post prompted me to see if Wikipedia had anything new about it. It does, but I’m afraid I saw nothing encouraging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
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Yeah, every few years, someone announces "we're almost there with cold fusion." YMMV
 
Christine said:
I believe solar will replace all other energy sources over time.


* The cost of solar is going down and down.
* It does not leak radiation like the quite expensive to run nuclear plants
* It does not pollute like the coal, gas and oil plants
* It does not explode now and then like hydrogen filling stations and production plants do
* It is not costly to maintain like wind power stations
* They can be located on roofs and be almost invisible unlike wind mills and nuclear plants
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I want renewables to be successful, but I think it's time to drag out the David MacKay TED talk about reality of replacing fossil fuels. YMMV

 
I'm far from an expert on these things.

I've always been a fan of nuclear but I Fukoshima and a better understanding of Chernobyl have dramatically lowered my enthusiasm. The risks are infrequent but potentially destructive on a scale to impact 10s-of-millions when they happen. Its so big as to be un-insurable. To quote Jurrassic Park: "God help us, we're in the hands of engineers."

As an investment, it is just such a political minefield that I would fear to tread there. Or if I did it would be for trading, not investment. Feels like something that could be bought/sold counter-cyclically with the news. To quote Caddyshack: "They're all buying, then sell sell! They're all selling? Then buy buy!"

I'm no genius on baseload, but my gut says that some combination of multi-source renewables, distributed energy generation, storage and gas generators that come up to supplement renewables when necessary will end up being the answer...punctuated by occassional electrical shortages. Though even those may be offset vs. natural events that take the grid offline. When a tornado ripped up our town, the people with solar panels kept on going.

A carbon tax will ultimately tip the scale because the above will be a better financial arrangement than running fossil fuels 24x7 and paying the tax.
 
Closet_Gamer said:
I'm far from an expert on these things.

I've always been a fan of nuclear but I Fukoshima and a better understanding of Chernobyl have dramatically lowered my enthusiasm. The risks are infrequent but potentially destructive on a scale to impact 10s-of-millions when they happen. Its so big as to be un-insurable. To quote Jurrassic Park: "God help us, we're in the hands of engineers."
......
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Fukoshima was not a design fault of the power plant, but a result of the tsunami that hit it.

Nobody stopped drilling for oil due to the Deepwater horizon oil spill, the largest spill in history by BP. Only part of it ever got "cleaned up", the rest is just distributed all over and not talked about.
 
Closet_Gamer said:
I'm far from an expert on these things.

I've always been a fan of nuclear but I Fukoshima and a better understanding of Chernobyl have dramatically lowered my enthusiasm. ...
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WADR, I will question your understanding of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was a design that no one else in the world used. Why is that? From what I understand, I wouldn't even consider Chernobyl to be a nuclear power plant, and its failure should not be counted against nuclear power plants. Chernobyl was a weapons grade plutonium plant that produced electricity as a side benefit. It lacked some of the containment features that every other nuclear power plant in the world has, because that allowed them to more easily remove the products for producing weapons grade plutonium.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-702/chernobyl-25-years-later/

The Chernobyl reactors were a special design using highly enriched uranium in a graphite moderator-and as we learned from studying the event-the accident could only have happened with this type of design. The reactors were created to produce weapons grade plutonium for the Soviet military forces along with electricity for commercial use. They were difficult to operate and required constant adjustment to remain stable.
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Closet_Gamer said:
... As an investment, it is just such a political minefield that I would fear to tread there. ...
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Agreed, unfortunately.


Closet_Gamer said:
... I'm no genius on baseload, but my gut says that some combination of multi-source renewables, distributed energy generation, storage and gas generators that come up to supplement renewables when necessary will end up being the answer...punctuated by occassional electrical shortages. ...
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OK, but those solutions could be very expensive, and have their own consequences. We really don't have a good answer for storage, even being realistically optimistic on future improvements.

We may soon get a taste of how accepting the public is of wide scale occasional brown/black-outs.

Closet_Gamer said:
... A carbon tax will ultimately tip the scale because the above will be a better financial arrangement than running fossil fuels 24x7 and paying the tax.
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Perhaps, but w/o a plan for storage, we'll see just how accepting the general public is. As much as I'd like to see green energy, I suspect the general public will lose some of its enthusiasm if having their power cut becomes anything more than a rare event..

Maybe the real investment play is smaller scale personal storage - the stuff the rich can afford so they aren't as affected by the brown/black outs?


Sunset said:
Fukoshima was not a design fault of the power plant, but a result of the tsunami that hit it.

Nobody stopped drilling for oil due to the Deepwater horizon oil spill, the largest spill in history by BP. Only part of it ever got "cleaned up", the rest is just distributed all over and not talked about.
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I'll disagree a bit on Fukoshima - yes, the Tsunami hit and did a lot of other damage to systems like their trains (with loss of life), and we don't hear clamoring for trains to be eliminated.

But, as I understand it, the generators could/should have been placed such that they were not as susceptible to flooding. I know, hindsight is 20-20, but with that much concentrated power, this stuff has to be considered. The fact that it wasn't does give some reasonable ammunition to the anti-nuke crowd, and I sure wish Fukoshima would have been built to that level of fault tolerance.

And I also wish that the US would have followed France's lead, and had a standard design that was replicated, so that operation and improvements were more transferable. France gets ~ 80% of its power from Nukes, and I've never heard of an incident there.

The Deepwater observation is a good one. Other forms of energy are far more dangerous than Nuke, relative to power produced, even solar is more dangerous. But those don't get the attention. I understand, a mass event of a scale of 100 is more newsworthy than 100,000 isolated ones, but it doesn't change anything for those affected (or their loved ones).

-ERD50
 
Now to my point, why are they willing to sell this? The video is pretty clear they think they have a path forward. I know it will take big bucks and this is an opportunity to invest.
 
There are lots of new ideas that are gaining acceptance that will help the energy problem.

In CA most new homes have solar panels and lots of older homes are being retrofit. As they acquire EVs, they will be using their own generated electricity to charge their vehicles. There is a lot of debate around battery storage at home, with some utilities fighting it. Actually, these home batteries (and vehicles) may become a large-scale solution for offline energy storage, among others, that can help balance the power grid to avoid redundancy.

California's goal is to have 50% of energy from renewables by 2030 and they are on track to make that goal. This progressive state has the political power and will to make it happen. The same can not be said for other states, especially those with large energy producing sectors heavily invested in fossil fuels.
 
ERD50 said:
And I also wish that the US would have followed France's lead, and had a standard design that was replicated, so that operation and improvements were more transferable. France gets ~ 80% of its power from Nukes, and I've never heard of an incident there.

The Deepwater observation is a good one. Other forms of energy are far more dangerous than Nuke, relative to power produced, even solar is more dangerous. But those don't get the attention. I understand, a mass event of a scale of 100 is more newsworthy than 100,000 isolated ones, but it doesn't change anything for those affected (or their loved ones).

-ERD50
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+1 on France. There are some new reactor designs coming online that promise to simplify and improve the construction of nuclear plants. My understand is that are easily scalable now or in the future. The French also process the used fuel to produce new fuel for further use in the plants.

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-the-nuclear-fuel-cycle-what-can-oui-learn

To manage the nearly 1150 tonnes of spent fuel it produces every year, France, like several other countries, decided early on to close its national nuclear fuel cycle by recycling or reprocessing spent fuel. In doing so, the French nuclear industry can recover uranium and plutonium from the used fuel for reuse, thereby also reducing the volume of high-level waste.
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In regards to the danger of other types of energy, I remember reading that burning coal puts more radiation in the atmosphere than a modern nuclear plant. It seems that coal contain minute amount of radioactive material, but is burned in such huge volumes that the total emitted radiation adds up fast. I assume they mean radiation released into the environment, not the total radiation in the nuclear material itself. Or maybe not?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.
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Last edited:
Happyras said:
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html

SKUNKWORKS a pretty compelling ad to JOIN the TEAM!
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First thing, that's not cold fusion - it is a fusion microreactor concept. It is plain old hot fusion.

The design is conceptually similar to fission microreactor designs like Westinghouse (eVinci), BWXT (BANR), and Xenergy (XE-mobile) in the Army's Project Pele at INL.

But the top nuclear physicist and engineers in the world have still not cracked the nut of sustained, controlled nuclear fusion (they figured out non-sustained, uncontrolled fusion a long time ago, BOOM). There are no fusion power plants, let alone transportable ones. NIF at Livermore just recently achieved breakeven power output after a couple of decades of development. ITER is supposed to be the first fusion reactor and it is years from operation (and cost $22 billion). So this skunkworks project is extremely speculative, which they pretty much admit in the video.

To invest in microreactors, one would have a better chance with Brookfield (Westinghouse) or BWXT, I don't believe Xenergy is public. Then there is the whole field of small modular reactors (SMRs) which are the next size up. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr.html

But even if LockMart could pull this off, it is not obvious that WEC, BWXT, GE-H, Holtec, Xenergy, Nuscale, etc. couldn't also produce similar fusion reactors. While LM can patent a machine, I don't think they can patent physics. So which to invest in?

We'll get to fusion reactors some day, which will be amazing, but investing in one company now could be like deciding between Compaq, Atari, Gateway, Commodore, IBM, Dell or Apple stock 30 years ago, which one to pick? Hindsight is great.
 
On Sunday, August 8th 2021, the National Ignition Facility appear to have triggered fusion ignition in the laboratory for the first time in the 60+ year history of the ICF program.[210][211] The shot yielded 1.3 Megajoules of fusion energy, an 8X increase over tests done in spring of 2021 and a 25X increase over NIF 2018 record experiments.[212] Early reports estimated that 250 kilojoules of energy was deposited on the target (roughly 2/3 of the energy from the beams), which resulted in a 1.3 Megajoule output from the fusing plasma.[213]
 
I think French-style nuclear and natural gas are the only way out of this mess!

Sadly, politicians will find a way to mess it up.
 
Happyras said:
On Sunday, August 8th 2021, the National Ignition Facility appear to have triggered fusion ignition in the laboratory for the first time in the 60+ year history of the ICF program. The shot yielded 1.3 Megajoules of fusion energy, an 8X increase over tests done in spring of 2021 and a 25X increase over NIF 2018 record experiments. Early reports estimated that 250 kilojoules of energy was deposited on the target (roughly 2/3 of the energy from the beams), which resulted in a 1.3 Megajoule output from the fusing plasma...
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250 KJ in, 1.3MJ out. That appears to show a large net gain of energy. However, it's not true because it takes a lot of energy to create that 250 KJ of laser power.


On 8 August 2021, preliminary experimental results suggested that fusion was achieved. The yield was estimated to be 70% of the laser input energy.
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Even if the yield is more than 100%, meaning they get a net gain of energy, turning this into a commercial power plant still takes tremendous work.
 
Starsky said:
... California's goal is to have 50% of energy from renewables by 2030 and they are on track to make that goal. This progressive state has the political power and will to make it happen. The same can not be said for other states, especially those with large energy producing sectors heavily invested in fossil fuels.
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Are they? And I mean, without creative accounting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

CA is closing a nuke plant that supplies 9% of their electricity. So to get to 50%, they also have to backfill that 9%.

Also, CA imports ~ 32% of their electricity. Those states are also closing coal plants and moving to renewable, which means that in low wind/solar and/or high demand times, their supply will be lower and unavailable for export.

I doubt they are on target, and I suspect there will be lots of black outs along the way if they push to meet that goal. Storage just isn't there to support intermittent renewable supply.

-ERD50
 
Sunset said:
Fukoshima was not a design fault of the power plant, but a result of the tsunami that hit it.

Nobody stopped drilling for oil due to the Deepwater horizon oil spill, the largest spill in history by BP. Only part of it ever got "cleaned up", the rest is just distributed all over and not talked about.
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I disagree.

When siting major facilities -- particularly a nuclear reactor -- the selection of the site is part of the design. As is the level of protection built around it.

Tsunamis are not new to Japan.

I can't imagine they failed to consider tsunamis at all.

Which means somewhere in the process someone made an explicit decision to build it strong enough to withstand tsunami "size a" but not tsunami "size b". That was a flawed decision. It might have been statistically sensible, but the edge case happened.

In terms of clean-up, the results of a major oil spill versus a serious radiological disaster are not even on the same stage. The long term damage to the gulf is not anything close to the area around Chernobyl.
 
Closet_Gamer said:
Which means somewhere in the process someone made an explicit decision to build it strong enough to withstand tsunami "size a" but not tsunami "size b". That was a flawed decision. It might have been statistically sensible, but the edge case happened.
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They also ameliorated w/ seawalls, which were insufficient in the end.
 
If climate change is the existential threat of our time, than there are ways to push renewables far and wide very quickly. Federally subsidized residential solar. How about that for infrastructure? Pay for 100% over 10 years with tax credits. Not as much need for large capacity storage. A system on my house (sunscore = 78) would cost $47k and I would get a measly $2500 credit. Sorry Charlie, no dice. But give me a $4700/year tax credit? Definitely would think about it. It would supply ~80% of my annual usage. There could also be opportunities to net metering to supply back to the grid where there are surpluses to sweeten the pot where I could get a credit for when I did need to tap the grid. Also in the US there are places where nuclear could work, but those in the risk areas need to be compensated.

I did a little math to support my argument. We have given $110 Billion in unemployment this year for people to not work. If we used that money for residential solar, that is 2.2 million homes at $50k system per home. The cost per year is a paltry $11 Billion. I rest my case.
 
ERD50 said:
WADR, I will question your understanding of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was a design that no one else in the world used. Why is that? From what I understand, I wouldn't even consider Chernobyl to be a nuclear power plant, and its failure should not be counted against nuclear power plants. Chernobyl was a weapons grade plutonium plant that produced electricity as a side benefit. It lacked some of the containment features that every other nuclear power plant in the world has, because that allowed them to more easily remove the products for producing weapons grade plutonium.

[
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You know more about it than I do...but I think the point stands.

When something goes wrong with a nuke plant it has the potential to disrupt 10s-of-millions of people and make the land inhabitable for generations. Chernobyl may have been the worst designed, quasi-nuke plant imaginable...but no one knew it until it was too late.

The Soviets were guilty of massive malfeasance...but that doesn't preclude a design flaw in a western reactor that we haven't found yet. And its just a different problem than failing to find a design flaw in conventional fossil systems.

My energy-engineer neighbor told me that if the giant LNG tower they use for peaking load in our area ever blew up, it would go off like a small nuke. Probably obliterate the town next to it, the freeway and the nearby bridge.

But five years later there would be a town, a bridge and a freeway.

The area around Chernobyl is expected to be un-inhabitable for up to 20,000 years.
 
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