RULES

As the question says, I would be interested in getting more information on how good are Nuclear Power plants at load-following and dispatching power on demand and on short notice, from a purely operational point.
Is this easy to do? Does this waste fuel? Does this affect the plant's working life?

I hear a lot about nuclear bein usable to cover solar/wind/tidal intermittent output but it is not very convincing from an economic standpoint as NPPs are full CAPEX. However it would be interesting to know whether there are plant designs that are actually good at this from a merely operational standpoint.

Papers and articles about this are surprisingly rare.

Source: https://images.thedailystar.net/business/news/power-and-energy-system-designed-corruption-3766336

"The unit cost of Rooppur stands at stands at $5,500/kWe, which much higher than a similar power plant in India's Kudankulam, the unit cost of which is $3,350/kWe, the report said."

The assertion that the Rooppur NPP will cost $12.65 billion is incorrect. The final cost will be established upon project completion. By July 1, 2025, the estimated cost will be around $9 billion, mainly funded by an $8.1 billion Russian loan. We will only repay the amount we spend, not $12.65 billion.

"In the name of fuel diversification, the choice of nuclear was a misadventure. With the same kind of investment, 6,000 to 8,000 MW of renewable, gas or coal power plants could be installed," the report observed.

The report argues that funds could have been allocated to constructing 6,000-8,000 MW of coal, gas, and solar power. However, it subsequently criticizes the government's excessive reliance on fuel imports, which is contradictory.

The white paper argues that govt should have invested in renewables instead of nuclear. It fails to mention that in order to generate the same amount of electricity with renewables the govt would have to spend on 8600-10000 MW of solar which would cost about the same and require at least 24 times more land.

The report states that Bangladesh has 20 percent more installed capacity than required. However, the new government's proposal to add 4,000 MW of new solar energy by 2030 is not an issue. In other words, while excess capacity is generally a concern, it does not apply to solar energy.

So I’m currently in a sustainability class at my university and I feel like my teacher really is passionate about the topic but never give a decent solution to creating clean power. He will talk about wind like it’s the next best thing so I crunched the number and this is what I came up with

I know it's more expensive initially to produce a nuclear power but the output of power dwarves wind by miles, when considering the life span of both a wind turbine and a reactor. A wind turbine being 20 years according to the EPA while a nuclear power plant is licensed for an initial 40 years and can apply for a 20-year extension (88 of Americas reactors have received approval approval) according to the US. department of energy. at this point I would say it's fare that the operation life span on a nuclear reactor is 60 years. So, let's say based off plant Vogle that started operation in 2023 it cost approximately 15 billion to build with a rated capacity of 1117MW and knowing that most reactors run at 90 to 95% capacity we will assume 90% that would mean 8,806,158 MWh per year the equation being (1117MW * 24 * 365 = 9,784,620 MWh per year divided by the 90% capacity so .90 = 8,806,158 MWh per year) this would equate to 287 10mw turbines which if you do the math its 1.3 million per kilowatt for on shore turbines that would be 3.731 billion dollars for 287 10mwh turbines x3 would equal 11.2 billion dollars, and while this shows a lower number than the reactor you have to remember that this would assume a constant wind blowing for the turbines to turn 24/7/365 running at full capacity. If we calculated its capacity as we did for the nuclear reactor it would be much more. turbines usually run between 35 and 40% capacity so to account for this factor then it would be 821 turbines at the 35% equaling out to 10.67 billion dollars but then we have to multiply that by 3 to get to 60 years of wind turbines assuming they only last 20 years as mentioned above, this would be 32.02 billion dollars just to build them. Thats enough to build 2 of the plant mentioned above. Proving that nuclear is more efficient by far and it isn't only more affective in generating the power straight up. but when considering the land mass needed to create both facilities and the average wind farm uses 12000 to 37000 acres a power plant only uses 2200 acres of land mass. Based on these numbers it's hard for me to see why these aren't being built more and discussed more by the people who signed the Paris agreement. if they really wanted to make a difference when it comes to power generation it should be nuclear as it's the only one that can compete with fossil fuel plants as they produce similar outputs of energy a large fossil fuel plant being between 7.3 MHw to 11MHw per year.

I just wanted your thoughts on this.

I've had trouble trying to find a satisfying answer to this question so I thought I'd ask here, although its entirely possible I'm just not framing the question correctly. For reference, this question pertains to CANDU closed loop demineralized service water systems, but might apply to PWR's as well.

How is radiation and activation inside of closed loop service water systems that have a very close proximity to high neutron and gamma dose managed? I'm thinking of the liquid zone control water in the calandria, as well as end shield cooling water, moderator pump motors and HX's, etc. My thinking is that the proximity to such high neutron and gamma dose, the chances of radionuclides in the water would be pretty high, but is this mitigated by the chemical composition/demineralization of the water? Or is the half life of whatever radionuclides are present short enough that the radioactivity of water never increases past a certain threshold while the reactor is at full power, and decreases when it's powered down?

Edit: This sub rules. You guys are so helpful and generous with your knowledge.

German Greens accused of spending £200,000 on 'biased' nuclear study

IAEA chief says German return to nuclear power is 'logical' – DW – 11/14/2024

Welcome to the r/nuclear weekly discussion post! Here you can comment on anything r/nuclear related, including but not limited to concerns about how the subreddit is run, thoughts about nuclear power discussion on the rest of reddit, etc.

I'm wondering if anyone knows how CANDU reactor can reduce the time and money spent on refurbs? I know Bruce was using a robotic arm that apparently improved their productivity by a lot but I can't find any info besides a short blurb on their website.

I feel like these long and costly refurbishments are the Achilles heal of CANDUs so I'm interested in learning about how "short" these refurbs can get in the future, and also how they can improve the design to last longer between refurbs.

https://www.nucnet.org/news/amazon-agreement-could-see-up-to-12-reactors-at-columbia-nuclear-site-in-washington-state-11-4-2024

Why Amazon needs Expensive HTGR's ?

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/gle-acquires-land-for-laser-enrichment-facility

I'm from México and deeply interested in the energy sector. Considering we barely have any hydro and geothermal (specially hydro has tanked in production thanks to droughts), the only alternative to help solar and wind in a quest to decarbonize is nuclear (at least that's what I thought).

Recently the new president announced that my country wouldn't be building more nuclear plants, and the government, in their brilliance, made up another solution. They intend to replace the natural gas used in combined cycle power plants (which make up the majority of electricity generation) with green hydrogen starting in 2032. I am just in complete shock as to why no one in my country is talking about how this is complete nonsense, and I mean no one. Do we just not want to phase out fossil fuels?

Even a Civil Society called "Iniciatva Climática de México" (Mexican Climate Iniciative, for which I currently work for) presented at COP 29 a so called "strategy" for México to reach net zero by 2060 that used, you guessed it, green hydrogen to replace natural gas in CC plants. No one ever mentions nuclear which is better in every way than green hydrogen for electricity generation, which is extremely inefficient (~38%) and expensive (which by the IEA's best estimates, won't drop from 2$/kg by 2030 and quick maths using hydrogen's HHV of 142 MJ/kg would mean a price of at least 133$/MWh just in production).

I am just in a starting position but I really want to talk to my superiors for them to seriously reconsider their "strategy" because they actually have some say in climate politics in the country. What do you guys recommend? How insane is using green hydrogen to generate electricity? Is there any hope México can decarbonize using this strategy?