Comments by "Archangel17" (@MDP1702) on "Is Nuclear Energy Green?" video.

  1.  @mytech6779  Well, it depends. Maintenance still cost money and especially with older nuclear plants this can quickly increase. Also after some time you need to upgrade things, which again cna be costly. At that point they might make the decision to shut it down instead of doing this extra investment. Also the ones shutdown in the US in the last 20 years all were between 40-50 years old (except San Onofre). At the time of construction a lifetime of 40-50 was actually the envisioned lifetime usually. so it isn't exactly that in the US nuclear powerplants have been shut down en masse due to the anti-nuclear sentiment, just reaching end of life with expensive upgrades being needed to extend the lifetime. And if you meant it failed before/during construction, then there might be your answer, they might have had to just cut their losses due to problems (financial or otherwise. And yes, investment insurance is high, but that isn't abnormal with something as expensive upfront as this.
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  2.  @mikicerise6250  That project had a lot of problems, but there have been other succesfull concentrated solar plants which uses salt as a storage device.
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  3.  @JayVal90  Actually it is the opposite. There are reasons to believe a lot of LCOE numbers brought out by nuclear energy companies might be significantly lower than for example Lazards estimated LCOE exactly because they underestimate decommisiong costs. In France the fund for the decommisioning of the the plants also is woefully underfunded, only a 1/3rd or less of what it should be. And overall renewables (wind and solar at least) are fairly easy to decomission in comparison. Maybe with the exception of the wind turbine blades (which is being worked on). Also subsidies aren't calculated in, LCOE cost of a large project (like offshore wind turbines) are used to calculate the necessary subsidies (though currently they'll overall be dissapearing if not happened already). Batteries are indeed still expensives, though it is expected that grid storage (through many different options), will be cost-competitive in around 10 years. Currently full 100% renewable grid, thus including storage, is around twice as expensive as a 100% nuclear grid. However as time passes this gap will decrease, considering both the costs of grid storage and renewables are coming down and nuclear costs or not, the opposite for now.
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  4.  @scottdorfler2551  The highest average monthly temperature in Baltimore isn't higher than 90°F, so how often is it that temp at night? And if you mean that they run it during the night so it is colder during the day, that is fine, that is essentially using your house as a battery by using your AC more efficiently at night and spreading out the load on the grid.
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  5.  @rey_nemaattori  Usually nuclear powerplants are decommisioned in either of 2 ways: 1) letting it sit a few decades (ofcourse after securing it), to let the radiation go down and be able to do a more easy clean up or 2) they clean it up immediately but at a pretty high cost and going a lot slower. Reusing it isn't really that interesting. No, radiation will not have impacted the general structure, but time has. Usually you'll not want to build a new power plant in such an old structure. And why would you? Most of the equipment etc will need to be upgraded anyway (unless there had been a recent upgrade not long before). So the only advantage would be the structure, but there is also a chance you'll have huge spiking maintenance costs on it well before the end of life of you new powerplant.
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  6.  @JayVal90  I just plain don’t believe that they aren’t hiding costs with those renewable numbers And I can say the same about nuclear. Do you have any proof that they hide costs? Or is it just your oh so reliable gut feeling? AND assuming that grid storage via battery becomes a thing Actually grid storage isn't likely going to use batteries, at least not for anything but shortterm (quick responses). Grid storage is most likely going to be dominated by physical system using temperature differences. Though there are also batteries that might be usefull as gridstorage too. So it likely will be a mix. But definitely not Li-ion batteries. investing the same effort and regulatory favoritism towards nuclear with take us WAY further than renewables in terms of cost reduction and greening the energy supply. That is far from certain. There is already being don't a lot of research and investment in improving nuclear, possibly as much as the most likely gridstorage possibilities currently, if not more. Btw, for large scale nuclear you'll also need some gridstorage. For example France now at 70-80% is using hydrostorage and essentially its neighbourse as 'batteries' during low demand times. If they didn't, their nuclear plants wouldn't operate as much at max capacity and thus produce more expensive power. Nuclear will need grid storage at aroung 75-80% or higher of the grid mix, for renewables it is a bit earlier at around 50-60% of the grid (depends on the kind of renewable though, hydro can go 100% without grid storage). Towards your point about decommissioning, I’ll point out again that if you keep nuclear power plants online and/or retrofit them, you save a TON on both construction and decommissioning costs. I think you underestimate the cost of upgrading old nuclear plants. Here operators said they'd need subsidies to extend the nuclear powerplants past their set decommisioning date by 10 years. I am definitely in favor of using nuclear power if it makes economic sense, however often (and currently especially for new plants) it doesn't really.
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