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I always wonder where we would actually be at as a civilization if it weren’t for fuckass lobbyists and money hoarding greedy assholes. This is a perfect example. If we’d learned from our mistakes and actually improved on nuclear energy there’s no telling where we’d be at this point.
But the profits!
Anon is dumb. Anon forgets the nuclear waste. Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive. So much that energy won by these rocks is more expensive than wind energy and any other renewable.
The costs used for wind/solar energy never included the cost of the required buffer storage, and even the rare few people who include that never factor in frequency stability which to this day is maintained by the giant steam turbines everyone wants to get rid of. It will not be trivial to solve the frequency stability problem; it will likely require massive investment in pumped water storage, flywheel storage, or nuclear energy, and these costs once finally included in the real cost of wind/solar will hurt its value prospect considerably.
As for nuclear waste: the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste generated over the lifetime of a reactor is stored onsite. Only the smallest amount of material is what will actually remain dangerous for a long time, and many countries have already solved this problem. It’s a seriously overstated problem repeated by renewable-purists who usually haven’t even considered how much frequency stability and grid-level storage have and will add to the cost of renewables, meaning they have not given a full accounting of the situation.
The costs used for wind/solar energy never included the cost of the required buffer storage
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost
And even if we just buried all of it, all nuclear waste ever produced could easily be buried in one square mile.
We need a fitting location to safely bury it in. Otherwise it can pollute the ground and water. In Germany for example we dont have such a location. That and the issue of cost, no one wanting to build it, no one wanting to insure it, no state wanting to offer the space and no energy company wanting this energy led to us making the correct decision in moving away from it
We don’t add that level of scrutiny to coal ash which there is much more of and equally dangerous forever. Nuclear is the the only power source expected to address 100% of problems at any point in the future before it can even start construction.
Anon forgets the nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste is pretty tame. Compare gloves that were used once to turn valve on pipe in reactor room to shit from coal in your lungs. Even most active kind of waste everyone thinks of - spent fuel - consists from about 90% of useful material.
Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive.
Actually not. Especially cost of energy compared to one of coal.
What nonsense is this?
Compare gloves that were used once to turn valve on pipe in reactor room to shit from coal in your lungs.
No shit, Sherlock… The reactor room is shielded by the water. Something you had in there once shouldn’t be overly radioactive and the fact that it isn’t doesn’t say anything about the dangers of radioactive waste.
Even most active kind of waste everyone thinks of - spent fuel - consists from about 90% of useful material.
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the dangers of radioactive waste?
Actually not.
new nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh […]. Nuclear takes 5 to 17 years longer between planning and operation and produces on average 23 times the emissions per unit electricity generated […].
Something you had in there once shouldn’t be overly radioactive
It still counts as radioactive waste. It was example of something regular people don’t associate radioactive waste with, but still counts as one.
Something you had in there once shouldn’t be overly radioactive and the fact that it isn’t doesn’t say anything about the dangers of radioactive waste.
“This waste shouldn’t be overly dangerous and the fact that it isn’t doesn’t say how dangerous it is”. Wow. How did you do this?
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the dangers of radioactive waste?
Did you read what I write?
I will rephrase you:
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the amount of radioactive waste?
“This waste shouldn’t be overly dangerous and the fact that it isn’t doesn’t say how dangerous it is”. Wow. How did you do this?
Here I thought you’re just slow and didn’t read what I wrote so I was already preparing to just explain what I said.
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the dangers of radioactive waste?
Did you read what I write?
I will rephrase you:
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the amount of radioactive waste?
This is where I realised you’re just trolling.
Anon isn’t dumb, just simple. Nuclear energy can be the best solution for certain situations. While renewables are the better choice in every way, they’re effectiveness isn’t equally distributed. There are places where there just isn’t enough available renewable energy sources year round to supply the people living there. When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer. It shouldn’t be the first answer people look to but it is an answer. An expensive answer but sometimes the best one.
Also nuclear waste doesn’t have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it’s expensive.
When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer.
Obviously, the best answer is to improve energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Why would we waste hundreds of millions on a stupid toy power plant when we could spend 10% of that money on just running decent underground cables.
Because superconductors are even more expensive than breeder reactors.
and breeder reactors are more expensive than faerie magic, I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real
I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real
Wake up, 80-ies were 40 years ago!
USSR figured it out long time ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor
You do realize that all that is also expensive, and limited? We haven’t invented room temperature superconductors yet, and battery technology is far from perfect. There is only so much lithium and cobalt in the entire world. Yes we can now use things like sodium, but that’s a technology that’s still young and needs more research before it’s full potential is realized. There is also a reason we have overground cables and not underground. Digging up all that earth is hella expensive.
You really don’t understand how expensive underground cables are. You know those big, huge steel transmission towers that you see lined up, hundreds in a row?
Those towers costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each. And the reason they’re used is because that’s way cheaper than underground.
Shit - just the cable is a couple million per mile per cable.
Are you fucking serious? Nuclear power plants cost way fucking more than some cables. You people are fundamentally so unserious. Pull your head out of a reactor for ten seconds and take reality as it exists
Yes. They cost more than some cables. But we aren’t talking about wiring a stereo.
A new nuclear unit (4 billion-ish) costs about as much as 2,000 miles of transmission-grade cable (about 2 million per mile). Considering that there’s about 30 cables on a tower run, you’re looking at around 65 miles’ worth of cable for the cost of a nuclear unit.
And that’s just the cost of the wire. No towers, no conduit, no substations, no land acquisition (aerial easement and underground are very different things), no labor.
mmmm sounds like someone has zero concept of the scale of the problem: ie how much cable we’d need to bury. Simmer down Tony Snark, you’re demonstrably less clever than the rest of the species’ experts in this.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. shut the fuck up, you pretentious cunt.
I think you need to touch grass. You sound very angry about some cables.
Maybe take a break from the doomscolling/doomposting and try to relax.
Also nuclear waste doesn’t have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it’s expensive.
But it is a problem. Finding a place that can contain radioactive waste for millions of years is incredible difficult. If you read up on it, you get disillusioned pretty fast.
There is a huge lobby of pro-nuclear think tanks who try to astroturf pro-nuclear shit onto social media. We, scientifically literate, rational people, need to counteract these harmful narratives with some facts.
FACT: Renewable sources of energy are as cheap or cheaper per kwh than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are faster to provision than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are as clean, or cleaner, than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are much more flexible and responsive to energy fluctuations than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables will only get cheaper. Nuclear will only get more expensive, because uranium mining will get harder and harder as we deplete easily accessible sources.
I hate this thread.
I bet you’re working for BP and Exxon, shill.
Lol yeah I get paid $30 an hour by Exxon to comments on Lemmy
In Soviet Lemmy this thread hates you
It has some interesting discussion, although it also shows how US-centric Lemmy is. Much of the EU has understood why nuclear energy is inherently incompatible with renewable energy and has therefore rightfullly dismissed it.
“Most of the EU”
actually talking about Germans, as everybody else disagrees
I feel this is all moot. When we run out of fossil fuels and go off the energy cliff, the nuclear facilities will basically build themselves, assuming there will be anyone around that will even know how to build a nuclear reactor
What if fire burned down everything in a 10 km radius when there’s not enough water around the specific area the fire was ignited at?
It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.
Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?
Not sure I get what you mean by “slow”.
And it’s not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we’ve been building and less of the one we stopped building.
Hey now, someone who knows almost nothing is just asking questions here.
You are saying we should be kinder to the less fortunate & uneducated?
That’s a nice thought.
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.
produces amounts of waste orders of magnitude lower than any other means of energy production
reliable when done well
it shouldn’t be replaced with renewables, but work with them
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.
Nuclear energy indeed has very high energy per mass of fuel. But so what? Solar and wind power doesn’t even use fuel. So the energy density thing is a bit of a distraction.
just compare 1 ton of fissile fuel and 1 ton of Silicon or steel. how much power do you get out of it ?
What are you trying to say here? Are we still talking about fuel types here?
Again, let me point out that solar power does not consume any fuel. The materials used to construct the solar panels are not having any power extracted from them. And secondly, nuclear power plants require construction materials too. … So I really don’t know what kind of comparison you are asking for here.
yes it does, but indirectly : making solar panels comes with the cost of dumping them after they’ve been used, because they’re not fully recyclable. (which comes after 15/20 years if not earlier). plus they use vast amounts of land when much power is needed.
so yeah, energy density is relevant when comparing technologies. otherwise, why aren’t we all cycling to power our toasters / ovens / refrigerators ? because the energy yield is bad.
so no, you shouldn’t dismiss nuclear, because it’s insanity powerful for its cost.
solar and wind are great, but insufficient on their own.
The cost of constructing and decommissioning power plants is important for sure; but it has nothing to do with energy density - which is what we were talking about before. It’s true that building solar panels takes energy and resources, and the panels don’t last indefinitely. So there is a lifecycle cost to using them. But the same is true for all forms of power generation.
A common way to compare these costs is to look at the ‘payback time’ of each form of power generation. The payback time is the amount of time it would take for the power plant to produce enough energy to pay back the lifecycle costs required to build, operate, and decommission that type of plant. It’s basically how long it takes for the construction to have been ‘worth it’.
In terms of payback time, wind power is by far the best; typically taking less than 1 year to pay itself off. Solar is pretty good too, but is highly dependent on where it is used. And nuclear… is not good on this measure. It takes decades for a nuclear power plant to pay itself off, because the plants are very expensive to build and decommission.
Obviously there are other things to consider in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of power generation. But you’ve been talking about the cost of materials and construction as though it is a weakness of renewables, and it really really isn’t. That’s in fact one of their strengths, and a major weakness of nuclear. Its strange that you say nuclear is ‘insanity powerful for its cost’, because its cost is the greatest weakness of nuclear power. Its much cleaner than coal, but much more expensive, even though it uses so little fuel. And it is not cleaner than solar or wind, but it is still more expensive.
Your point about land usage is a stronger point in favour of nuclear power… except that depending on what country you are talking about, that could easily swing the other way. Solar and wind do take up more space than nuclear, that’s for sure. But nuclear requires certain geological conditions for the safe operation of the plant, and the storage of waste. So depending on where you live, finding unused land suitable for renewables can be much easier than finding a suitable location for a nuclear power plant and waste containment facility.
agreed and thank you for the detailed response 🤝
Who cares? We use economics to sort out the relative value of radically different power sources, not cherry-picked criteria. Fission boosters can say that nuclear has a small footprint. Solar boosters can say that solar has no moving parts and is thus more mechanically reliable. Fission boosters can say fission gets more power from the same mass. Solar boosters can point to the mass of the entire fission plant, including the giant concrete dome that needs to be strong enough to survive a jumbo jet flying into it.
In the end, none of this shit matters. We have a way of sorting out these complex multi-variable problems. Both fission and solar have their own relatives strengths and weaknesses that their proponents can cherry pick. But ultimately, all that matters in choosing what to deploy is cost.
And today, in the real world, in the year 2024, if you want to get low-carbon power on the grid, the most cost-effective way, by far, is solar. And you can add batteries as needed for intermittency, and you’re still way ahead of nuclear cost-wise. And as our use of solar continues to climb, we can deploy seasonal storage, which we have many, many options to deploy.
The ultimate problem fission has is that it just can’t survive in a capitalist economy. It can survive in planned economies like the Soviet Union or modern China, or it can run as a state-backed enterprise like modern Russia. But it simply isn’t cost effective enough for fission companies to be able to survive on their own in a capitalist economy.
And frankly, if we’re going to have the government subsidize things, I would much rather the money be spent on healthcare, housing, or education. A lot of fission boosters like fission simply because they think the tech is cool, not necessarily because it actually makes economic sense. I say that if fission boosters want to fund their hobby and subsidize fission plants, let them. But otherwise I am adamantly opposed to any form of subsidies for the fission industry.
But it’s not done well. Just look at the new built plants, which are way over budget and take way longer to build then expected. Like the two units in Georgia that went from estimated 14bn to finally 34bn $. In France who are really experienced with nuclear, they began building their latest plant in 2007 and it’s still not operational, also it went from 3.3bn to 13.2bn €. Or look at the way Hinkley Point C in the UK is getting developed. What a shit show: from estimated 18bn£ to now 47bn£ and a day where it starts producing energy not in sight.
The same problems faced the oil industry too, with their drilling rigs & refineries (over budget and over schedule, with gov money grants and subsidies), it’s just less in the media & more spread out (more projects).
Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things - we have the money, we just don’t tax profit enough. And we don’t talk about how the whole budget gets spent (private or public), where all the money actually goes, instead we get the highlighted cases everyone talks about. But not about the shielded industries when they fuck up.
Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things -
Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.
That sentence shows that you really aren’t thinking about this as a practical means of power generation. I’ve found that most fission boosters don’t so much like actual nuclear power, but the idea of nuclear power. It appeals to a certain kind of nerd who admires it from a physics and engineering perspective. And while it is cool technically, this tends to blind people to the actual cold realities of fission power.
There’s also a lot of conspiratorial thinking among the pro-nuclear crowd. They’ll blame nuclear’s failures on the superstitious fear of the unwashed ignorant masses or the evil machinations of groups like Greenpeace. Then, at the same time, they’ll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear’s failure: it’s just too fucking expensive.
Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.
I’m thinking in practical terms how that still doesn’t happen that often, humans allocate assets, humans don’t behave logically (behavioural economics).
Nothing ever is going to be perfect and efficient, solar panels might get through vast price volatilities as well, installation costs hand already soared.
Then, at the same time, they’ll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear’s failure: it’s just too fucking expensive.
So why did we subsidised so much expensive oil infrastructure. And at higher cost of life.
Oil rigs can go into billions of dollars (and thats not even the total cost), nuclear plants tend to have the total running cost up-front (with decommission costs after the planned decades).Humans don’t make economic decisions rationally.
Well if we had no alternative I would agree with you and I would be okay if we had to subsidize nuclear (which isn’t emissions free due to the mining and refining of uranium bye the way). But if a country like France, which has a pretty high rate of acceptance regarding nuclear, can’t get it to work, who will? Apart from maybe authoritarian countries. Just think about the amount of plants we have to build to create a significant impact, if hardly any plant has been built in a relative short timeframe. I’d say put money in research yeah but focus on renewable, network, storage and efficiency optimization for now.
Do you know WHY they went over budget?
That’s for the nuclear industry to figure out. But the fact that companies from different companies originating in entirely different countries suggest that it’s a problem with the tech itself.
The hard truth many just don’t want to admit is that there are some technologies that simply aren’t practical, regardless of how objectively cool they might be. The truth is that the nuclear industry just has a very poor track record with being financially viable. It’s only ever really been scaled through massive state-run enterprises that can operate unprofitably. Before solar and wind really took off, the case could be made that we should switch to fission, even if it is more expensive, due to climate concerns. But now that solar + batteries are massively cheaper than nuclear? It’s ridiculous to spend state money building these giant white elephants when we could just slap up some more solar panels instead. We ain’t running out of space to put them any time soon.
Who gives a fuck about energy density beyond some physics nerds? Unless you’re planning on building a flying nuclear-powered airplane, energy density is irrelevant. This is why solar is eating fission’s lunch.
Energy density is a useless bullshit metric for stationary power.
Produces more waste than almost all of the renewables.
Reliable compared to… … … ok, I’m out of ideas, they need shutdowns all the time. Seems to me it’s less reliable than anything that isn’t considered “experimental”.
And it can’t work with renewables unless you add lots and lots of batteries. Any amount of renewables you build just makes nuclear more expensive.
They are an interesting technology, and I’m sure they have more uses than making nuclear weapons. It’s just that everybody focus on that one use, and whatever other uses they have, mainstream grid-electricity generation is not it.
Yes, but energy density doesn’t matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.
the waste it produces is highly problematic.
It’s a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
85% of used fuel rods can be recycled to new fuel rods. And there’s military uses for depleted uranium too. So, essentially every bit of the waste can be recycled. Can’t say the same for fossil fuels.
“85% of used fuel rods can be recycled” is like “We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means”.
In theory it’s correct. In reality it’s bullshit that will never happen because it’s completely uneconomical and it’s just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
Yeah, you’re not making any sense. How is the recyclability of nuclear fuel rods an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels? That’s a massive leap in logic that demands an explanation.
They’re saying that plausible uses don’t necessarily translate to real world use, in practice. I have no stake in this, just translating
While I understand where they’re coming from, it should be noted that they’re likely basing their experience with recyclability on plastic recycling which is totally a shit show. The big difference comes in when you realize that plastic is cheap as shit whereas uranium fuel rods are not.
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
Recycling nuclear waste is one of those problems that should be easy but nobody knows what the easy way looks like. It’s impossible to tell if some breakthrough will make it viable tomorrow or if people will have to work for 200 years to get to it. But yeah, currently it’s best described as “impossible”.
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
What?
For starters, carbon capture takes an insane amount of power. And to follow up: we couldn’t even build the facilities is “a few decades” even if we free power and infinite money.
Yep, “insane amounts” of power like you what you get by investing something like 1% of a few countries’ GDP in PV panels.
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat, its just the reactors make use of an actual reaction that nuclear waste can’t do anymore. Yever watch the Martian, he has a generator that’s fuel is lead covered beads of radioactive material, it doesn’t generate as much as reactors but it’s still a usable amount.
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat
That’s an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don’t use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.
The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (238Pu, usually as PuO2), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can’t be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (210Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can’t be extracted.
90Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn’t used as RTG fuel today.
Right now we probably use more energy to produce antimatter than getting it back
certainly
Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. Renewables are great and cheap, but they aren’t a complete solution without grid level storage that doesn’t really exist yet.
Thats a chicken/egg peoblem. If enough renewables are build the storage follows. In a perfect world goverments would incentvice storage but in an imperfect one problems have to occure before somebody does something to solve them. Anyway, according to lazard renewables + storage are still cheaper than NPPs.
Imagine this (not so) hypothetical scenario:
Yellowstone or another supervolcano erupts and leads to a few years of volcanic winter, where there is much less sunshine. This has historical precedent, it has happened before, and while in and of itself it will impact a lot of people regardless of anything else, wouldn’t you agree it would be better to have at least some nuclear power capacity instead of relying solely on renewables?
Sure, such a scenario is not probable, but it pays to stay safe in the case of one such event. I would say having most of our power from renewables would be best, having it supported by 10-20% or so nuclear with the possibility of increase in times of need would make our electric grids super resilient to stuff
Yeah let me imagine a supervolcano explosion of that scale to effect global weather patterns. What do you think will happen to your reactors? No, they are not indestructable just because they can handle an earthquake of normally expected proportion.
Nature catastrophes are the top 1 danger to nuclear energy. See Fukushima.
And the real question here would be a comparison between risk of a nuclear accident event and a renewables-impacting climate event.
Let’s be clear, the only reason grid-level storage for renewables “doesn’t exist” is because of a lack of education about (and especially commitment to) simple, reliable, non-battery energy storage such as gravitational potential, like the ARES project. We’ve been using gravitational potential storage to power our mechanisms since Huygens invented the freaking pendulum clock. There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
How about basic maths? I
Scale is a huge fucking issue. The little country of the Netherlands, where I happen to live, uses 2600 petajoule per day. So let’s store 1 day of power, at 100% efficiency, using the tallest Alp (the Mont Blanc).
Let’s round up to 5000 meters of elevation. We need to store 2.6e18 joules, and 1 joule is 100 grams going up 1 meter. So to power a tiny little country, we need to lift roughly 5e13 kilos up the Mont Blanc. To visualize, that’s 1.7 billion 40ft shipping containers, or roughly 100 per inhabitant.
Using 555m blocks of granite, you’d need 166 million of them (9 for every person in the country). Assuming a 2% slope, you’d need to build a 250.000m long railway line. And if you lined all those blocks up, with no space in between, you’d need 3328 of those lines (which then couldn’t move, because they fill the entire space between the summit and sea level).
And that’s just 1 small country.
And hey, you know what, that’s almost got a point. Firstly, I’m in the US, and I’ll freely admit that my comment was highly US-normative. However, I believe my comment on government corruption stands for the US case, where there is an insane amount of space that is already partly-developed in random bits of desert.
Now, let’s get into your claims against the Netherlands case. Let’s do some “basic maths”:
- Unless the IEA is very, VERY wrong, your claim that the Netherlands consumes “2600 petajoule per day” is INSANELY high. Every statistic I can find shows electricity consumption being between 113 [2] and 121 [1] Terawatt-hours per annum. Let’s divide that larger value by 365 (assuming uniform seasonal demand), then convert that into joules, and we get 1.19 Petajoules per day. more than a THOUSAND times smaller than your number.
- Secondly, this “just 1 small country” bit is spurious, since your “small country” is the 33rd-greatest electricity consumer in the world for the 77th highest population [2]
- The assumption that you must store an entire day’s worth of energy demand is ludicrous. Let’s be generous and assume that you have to store 50% of the day’s energy demand, despite the fact that the off-hours are during the night, when electricity demands fall off.
- Next, let us point out that we don’t need to abandon literally every other method of energy generation. From wind energy to, yes, nuclear, the Netherlands is doing quite well for itself outside of solar. Let’s assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let’s assume 50%.
- Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
- Because I neither want nor need your supposedly-charitable assumptions, let’s use the actual numbers from ARES in Nevada:
- Their facility’s mass cars total 75000 tons in freedom units, or about 68040000 kg. [3]
- They claim 90+% efficiency round-trip [4], but let’s assume that your condescending tone has made the train cars sad, so they’re having a bad day, and only run at 80% efficiency, despite the fact that we’ve known how to convert to and from GPE with insane efficiency ever since Huygens invented the fucking pendulum clock.
- Now, is this perfect for everywhere? Of course not. Not everywhere has the open space necessary. The ARES site requires a straight shot about 5 miles long, but they managed to find one that, in that distance, drops 2000 feet (~610 m) [5]
- Now, let’s do the math together: 475000000000J / 10m/s^2 / 68040000kg / 80% Efficiency = 880m total elevation needed
- Thus, unless my math is quite off, we would only need 2 of the little proof-of-concept ARES stations running at 80% efficiency to more than cover the energy storage needs required for your country to completely divest from fossil fuels and go all-in on solar for the remainder of your needs.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/the-netherlands [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption [3] https://aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/ [4] https://aresnorthamerica.com/gravityline/ [5] https://energy.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/energynvgov/content/Programs/4 - ARES.pdf
ETA: rectify a quote (“just 1 small country”), and make it more civil in response to the prior commenter removing some of their more condescending language.
You’re right in that I used yearly numbers and wrongly used them as daily numbers. The stats are from the central statistics bureau, and unfortunately it auto translates poorly https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/83989NED
The numbers include use of gas and coal for heating and industry, which often get ignored by people (mostly because it makes us look fucking terrible in renewable power stats).
- The assumption that you must store an entire day’s worth of energy demand is ludicrous.
It is, in fact extremely generous, if you’re using the solar+storage method. But let’s go with this and I’ll demonstrate what it means in practice.
Let’s assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let’s assume 50%.
You just made the switch from “energy used” to “electricity generated”. For a country that still does most of its heating with imported gas, that’s a big difference. The real amount of non-fossil energy is about 18%, call it 80% fossil.
- Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
So it’s 50% of 80% of 2600/365, or 2.8 petajoules. So that’s only 10 of those facilities. Not great, not terrible. But that’s not the point. Nor is it important that their demo facility has a height difference twice that of the whole country.
Let’s stick with the “one night of power store is plenty”.
That’s true, but only if you can use solar to power your whole day. In other words, to make do with only 1 night of storage, you need to generate all your power for 24 hours in December during December daylight hours. Assuming it doesn’t snow, one solar panel produces about .15kwh on a december day (working off of 2% of yearly production happening in december, and 300Wattpeak panels), or 540kj.
So you’re right, we only need to build 10 facilities twice the height difference of the entire country, to save one night of energy use. Unfortunately in order for that to be true, we would also need to cover about 960.000 hectares in solar panels, which is roughly twice the total built up area in the country, including roads.
And that’s assuming you keep a perfectly level energy use throughout the year, and a perfectly level production during December. Neither of which is true, and generally the worst days for solar production are the worst ones for use as well.
On the bright side, if we can put down two extra cities worth of solar panels for every city, we’ll probably have no issues building 600m tall hills by hand as well.
Alright, now we agree: solar isn’t for everywhere, and the gravity storage method won’t work in most places. You need preexisting slope, and my original comment was highly US-normative. As such, yes, we would need huge swathes of solar and wind collection sites, passive wave generators, pumped hydro and, yes, perhaps nuclear. Not everything will be “on” all the time. As far as the energy vs. Electricity numbers, while I vacillated between different terms, I WAS quite careful to only include electricity numbers throughout my stats and, again, none of my points were trying to prove that solar, specifically, is the right answer for the netherlands in exclusion of all else, but only that a significant energy storage problem can be solved with gravitational potential, and that the solution IS scalable if sites are selected carefully, and the fact that this has not been tried at scale anywhere in the world is due to government corruption. Still a US-normative idea, which I’ll grant, but still true, when you have places from morocco to the Gobi, to the outback to the western US, all with significant natural elevation change, significant open areas, and excellent prospects for renewable energy sources of ALL kinds.
Also, as far as solar panels go, remember that actual diode solar panels are NOT the only way to harvest solar energy (let alone the cheapest). Mirrors can easily be used to boil water, and this plan was nearly attempted throughout egypt a hundred years ago (see Frank Shuman’s solar thermal generators). However, I’m not about to argue that we should put giant solar collectors in one of the countries that is simultaneously the most population-dense (3rd highest in europe, IIRC) AND in a climate where large-scale solar is somewhat inefficient, ESPECIALLY when you have so much available wind power.
Solar with Battery grid storage is now cheaper than nuclear.
Would love to see a source for that claim. How many 9’s uptime to they target? 90%, 99%
This is old news now! Here’s a link from 5 years ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/
This is from last year: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
As to uptime, they have the same legal requirements as all utilities.
I was pro nuke until finding out solar plus grid battery was cheaper.
Source (1)
Later this month the LA Board of Water and Power Commissioners is expected to approve a 25-year contract that will serve 7 percent of the city’s electricity demand at 1.997¢/kwh for solar energy and 1.3¢ for power from batteries.
The project is 1 GW of solar, 500MW of storage. They don’t specify storage capacity (MWh). The source provides two contradicting statements towards their ability to provide stable supply: (a)
“The solar is inherently variable, and the battery is able to take a portion of that solar from that facility, the portion that’s variable, which is usually the top tend of it, take all of that, strip that off and then store it into the battery, so the facility can provide a constant output to the grid”
And (b)
The Eland Project will not rid Los Angeles of natural gas, however. The city will still depend on gas and hydro to supply its overnight power.
Source (2) researches “Levelized cost of energy”, a term they define as
Comparative LCOE analysis for various generation technologies on a $/MWh basis, including sensitivities for U.S. federal tax subsidies, fuel prices, carbon pricing and cost of capital
It looks at the cost of power generation. Nowhere does it state the cost of reaching 90% uptime with renewables + battery. Or 99% uptime with renewables + battery. The document doesn’t mention uptime, at all. Only generation, independant of demand.
To the best of my understanding, these sources don’t support the claim that renewables + battery storage are costeffective technologies for a balanced electric grid.
It looks at the cost of power generation
Yes.
But then you added the requirement of 90% uptime which is isn’t how a grid works. For example a coal generator only has 85% uptime yet your power isn’t out 4 hours a day every day.
Nuclear reactors are out of service every 18-24 months for refueling. Yet you don’t lose power for days because the plant has typically two reactors and the grid is designed for those outages.
So the only issue is cost per megawatt. You need 2 reactors for nuclear to be reliable. That’s part of the cost. You need extra bess to be reliable. That’s part of the cost.
But then you added the requirement of 90% uptime which is isn’t how a grid works.
I’m referring to the uptime of the grid. Not an individual power source.
Assume we’ve successfully banned fossil fuels and nuclear, as is the goal of the green parties.
How much renewable production, and bess, does one need to achieve 90% grid uptime? Or 99% grid uptime?
If you want a balanced grid, you don’t need to just build for the average day (in production and consumption), you need to build for the worst case in both production and consumption.
The worst case production in case for renewables, is close to zero for days (example). Meaning you need to size storage appropriatelly, in order to fairly compare to nuclear. And build sufficient production so that surplus is generated and able to be stored.
If we’re fine with a blackout 10% of the time, I can see solar + bess beating nuclear, price wise. If the goal instead is a reliable grid, then not.
As an example: take Belgium. As a result of this same idea (solar/wind is cheap!) we ended up with both (1) higher greenhouse gas emissions and (2) costlier energy generation, as we now heavily rely on gas power generation (previously mainly russian, now mainly US LNG) to balance the grid. Previous winter we even had to use kerosene turbine generation to avoid a blackout.
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
So it’s flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.
Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn’t take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.
The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.
For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.
So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that’s when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let’s sick with 14.
For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW “storage” for 24hrs.
So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.
The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don’t think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it’s mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.
So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
That’s stored energy. For example: a 5 MWh battery can provide 5 hours of power at 1MW. It can provide 2 hours of power, at 2.5MW. It can provide 1 hour of power, at 5MW.
The max amount of power a battery can deliver (MW), and the max amount of storage (MWh) are independant characteristics. The first is usually limited by cooling and transfo physics. The latter usually by the amount of lithium/zinc/redox of choice.
What uptime refers to is: how many hours a year, does supply match or outperform demand, compared to the number of hours a year.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This is incorrect. Under the assumption that nuclear plants are steady state, (which they aren’t).
To match a 1GW nuclear plant, for one day, you need a fully charged 1GW battery, with a capacity of 24GWh.
Are you sure you understand the difference between W and Wh?
My math assumes the sun shines for 12 hours/day, so you don’t need 24 hours storage since you produce power for 12 of it.
My math is drastically off though. I ignored the 12 hrs time line when talking about generation.
Assuming that 12 hours of sun, you just need 2Gw solar production and 12Gw of battery to supply 1Gw during the day of solar, and 1Gw during the night of solar, to match a 1Gw nuclear plants output and “storage.”
Seeing as those recent projects put that nuclear output at 17 bil dollars and a 14 year build timeline, and they put the solar equivalent at roughly 14 billion(2 billion for solar and 12 billion for storage) with a 2 - 6 year build timeline, nuclear cannot complete with current solar/battery tech, much less advancing solar/battery tech.
Assuming that 12 hours of sun, you just need 2Gw solar production and 12Gw of battery to supply 1Gw during the day of solar, and 1Gw during the night of solar,
Again, I think you might not understand the difference between W and Wh. The SI unit for Wh is joules.
When describing a battery, you need to specify both W and Wh. It makes no sense, to build a 12GW battery, if you only ever need 1GW of output.
If the demand goes up I have some doubt, also, mining for Lithium is far from being clean, and then batteries are becoming wastes, so I doubt you would replace nuclear power with this solution
I guess in some regions it could work, but you’re still depending on the weather
you know that grid storage does not always mean “a huge battery”, you can also just pump water in a higher basin oder push carts up a hill and release the potential energy when you need it…
Pumped storage is a thing yeah. But might just as well go full hydro, if you’re doing the engineering anyways.
I feel like we’re missing the part about “push carts up a hill”, which involves virtually no serious engineering difficulties aside from “which hill” and “let’s make sure the tracks run smoothly”. See: the ARES project in Nevada
Yeah, that’s 50MW, storing power for 15 minutes, so 20MWh. (1).
There’s also a similar company: gravicity.
They’re a fun academic endeavour. But if gravity provides the potential, water beats them per dollar spend. It’s not even close.
So do regular batteries.
Yeah, lithium mining and processing is extremely toxic and destructive to the environment. On one hand, it’s primarily limited to a smaller area, but on the other hand, is it sustainable long-term unless a highly efficient lithium recycling technology emerges? And yes, I know there are some startups that are trying to solve the recycling problem, some that are promising.
They’re currently bringing sodium batteries to market (as in “the first vendor is selling them right now”). They’re bulky but fairly robust IIRC and they don’t need lithium.
If you’re thinking of the portable battery marketed as ‘solid state’ then that was a scam - a teardown revealed it was just lithium cells
You don’t need lithium. That’s just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.
Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn’t care if the building houising the batteries weighs 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).
PS: And the materials can also be recycled. Funnily there’s always the pro-nuclear argument coming up then you can recycle waste to create new fuel rod (although it’s never actually done), yet with battery tech the exact same argument is then ignored.
Density doesn’t matter much when it comes to grid scale, indeed.
What battery technologies are you thinking of? Zinc-ion? Flow batteries?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/24/power-grid-battery-capacity-growth
US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years
This argument again?
Yes, it’s called reality. I know it’s an ugly thing that just doesn’t go away no matter how hard you want it to.
Dude, thorium reactors will be ready any day now, along with mini reactors! Everything will be super cheap and all the waste will be reused and we won’t be dependent on any fuel sources from Russia and all our problems will be gone!
/s, in case it’s not obvious
You go on thinking renewables are ever going to replace fossil fuel while we charge full tilt to our doom
Renewables once surpassed fossil fuels, until some brave knight killed all the windmills.
Step 1: Get magic rocks.
Step 2: Now design the rest of the nuclear reactor.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.
yes
Step 5: Bury cursed stuff somewhere and forget about it.
Also see: asbestos.
We never tried to figure out a way to safely regulate & use it. It’s a magic workable material that can’t burn and is durable af. That’s amazing!?
Well, you see, the “Anti Magic Rock” Lobby has immense amount of power because of the money of the still lucrative “burning stuff and pollute everything” business.
That, and the green parties (at least in EU).
The “green” parties 💵💵
I feel like people are interpreting your comment with an American context. As a fellow European I agree, NGOs like Greenpeace are also to blame, and I don’t think those are financed by fossil fuel lobbies.
I hadn’t made that connection. Thank you
Yeah, oil oiled the “green” anti-nuclear protests.
You can tell that’s how it was because the cops didn’t beat them as much (or in some big cases at all) as they do even the most insignificant anti-oil protesters.
Nuclear isn’t in competition with fossil fuels, it’s in competition with renewables. Renewables are better than nuclear by pretty much every conceivable metric. So fuck nuclear power, it’s a waste of money and time.
Are you sure renewables don’t require more extracted resources and more land usage per quantity of energy produced?
yes
You may be incorrect
Fact: that is a fake statement.
Nuclear is not renewables competition.
Nuclear provides a base line energy production.
Both renewables and fossils produce a variable production line.
So within a rational production scheme the choice is nuclear+renewables or fossils+renewables. As renewables by themselves cannot work. Because there is months over the year when it’s not sunny, not rainy and not windy enough, what do we do for those months? We close humanity during those months because some political dogma says so?
Since we are talking hypotheticals, an ideal scenario would be a nearly completely renewables approach where each household is its own self contained energy production center equippef with solar arrays, wind turbines, thermoelectric generators. Various means of production. And have either propane or diesel generator as a backup. You know your average overall watt-hour usage for the household and try to have enough battery capacity to satisfy it for a week or two of bad weather.
Most household electrical wiring is redone for DC transmission and all consumer appliances possible are run straight on DC for optimal efficency. Energy efficent heat pumps for cooling and heating. energy efficent cooking appliances like induction heaters. Electric cars that act as backup battery banks would be awesome.
Industrial zones would be much harder as you need huge solar panel or wind turbine arrays to get the megawatt and gigawatts needed to run a factory. Most factories are decades old running on the most energy ineffient assembly lines you can think of. A energy mandate that calculated and taxed total energy efficency compared to national average for factory size and the would be a start.
Humanity simply does not “stop” because we go through an energy crisis. We did fine enough before the industrial revoltion and renewables + energy efficent consumer devices have improved a bunch. The economy would tank and what renewable energy made would be a premium commodity and the system would adapt to use it best as possible. But things would go on.
It’s the “Burning other magic rocks” party.
“are we retarded?” yes, Trump got re-elected, which is proof most of us really are retarded. I’m pro nuclear, just not the form we widely use now, and not in the hands of retarded people. And again, most of us clearly are, and one of the worst is going to be president, again.
So I think the best thing we could do is start a nuclear war which will wipe out the human race. Nature will hopefully recover in about 100.000 to 1 million years. Hopefully dolphins will develop less retarded then us dumb monkeys.
He should, reason they ditched them for coal and gas was because big daddy Exxon and BP are pushing for it so they don’t go out of bussiness. FUCK BP AND EXXON!
OUR Energy Sector…?
Funny how nuclear power plants are taboo, but building thousands of nuclear warheads all over the globe is no issue.
Funny how building nuclear power plants that can only (if you have dipshits running them) kill a nearby city is taboo, but climate change that will kill everyone is acceptable to the moralists.
Funny how solar, wind, and batteries are way cheaper and faster to build yet people are still talking about nuclear.
Stopping nuclear from being built is the problem.
We would have had a lot more clean energy than we do by now if we let the nuclear power plants that “would take too long to build!” be built back then, because they’d be up and running by now.
More letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Nuclear may have been good 10 years ago, but it isn’t really good anymore. This is like saying “if I had bought a PS2 in 2002 then I would have had fun playing Final Fantasy XI Online. Therefore, I should buy a PS2 and FFXI Online so I can have fun in 2024”. That ship has sailed
You can still play FFXI in 2024 officially on PC. Just don’t need the PS2.
and we can have 100% clean, renewable energy in 2024, we just don’t need the nuclear reactor
Solar and wind are cheaper yes. Batteries, no. If batteries were that cheap and easy to place we’d have solved energy a long time ago. Currently batteries don’t hold a candle to live production, the closest you can get is hydro storage, which not everyone has, and can’t realistically be built everywhere.
Look at the stats. The second largest battery storage in the US (and the world) is located near the Moss Landing Power Plant. It proves a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned. That sounds like a lot, but it’s located next to San Jose and San Fransisco, so lets pick just one of those counties to compare. The average energy usage in the county of San Clara, which contains San Jose (You might need to VPN from the US to see the source) is 17101 GWh per year, which is about 46.8 GWh per day, or 46800 MWh. So you’d need 8 more of those at 6000 MWh to even be able to store a day’s worth of electricity from that county alone, which has a population of about 2 million people. And that’s not even talking about all the realities that come with electricity like peak loads.
Relative to how much space wind and solar use, nuclear is the clear winner. If a country doesn’t have massive amounts of empty area nuclear is unmissable. People also really hate seeing solar and wind farm. That’s not something I personally mind too much, but even in the best of countries people oppose renewables simply because it ruins their surroundings to them. Creating the infrastructure for such distributed energy networks to sustain large solar and wind farms is also quite hard and requires personnel that the entire world has shortages of, while a nuclear reactor is centralized and much easier to set up since it’s similar to current power plants. But a company that can build a nuclear plant isn’t going to be able to build a solar farm, or a wind farm, and in a similar way if every company that can make solar farms or wind farms is busy, their price will go up too. By balancing the load between nuclear, solar, and wind, we ensure the transition can happen as fast and affordable as possible.
There’s also the fact that it always works and can be scaled up or down on demand, and as such is the least polluting source (on the same level as renewables) that can reliably replace coal, natural gas, biomass, and any other always available source. You don’t want to fall back on those when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. If batteries were available to store that energy it’d be a different story. But unless you have large natural batteries like hydro plants with storage basins that you can pump water up to with excess electricity, it’s not sustainable. I’d wish it was, but it’s not. As it stands now, the world needs both renewables and nuclear to go fully neutral. Until something even better like nuclear fission becomes viable.
Ok let’s compare real data then. Vogtle 3&4 are the latest nuclear plants to be completed in the US. They cost over 30 billion dollars for a capacity of 2.106GW. That’s >14.2 dollars/watt. Let’s be generous and assume nuclear has a 100% capacity factor (it doesn’t).
I can’t find real numbers for Moss Landing specifically, but NREL has data on BESS costs up to 10 hr storage at $4.2/watt. Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet.
Utility scale solar has well known costs of ~1 dollar/watt. Let’s assume a capacity factor of 25%, so for equivalent total energy generation we are looking at $4.
$4 for solar, $4.2 for BESS, and since you’ll complain about not having 24hr baseline let’s add another equivalent 10hr storage system at $4.2. that’s a total of $12.4, compared to Vogtle’s $14.2.
Add in that the solar plus BESS would be built in 1-2 years, while Vogtle took well over a decade.
Also consider that BESS systems have additional value in providing peaking ability and frequency regulation, among other benefits.
Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.
2.160 GW is it’s rated capacity. I’m not sure how you got from there to 14.2 dollars per watt, but it completely ignores the lifetime of the power plant.
Vogtle 3&4 are really a bad example because unit 4 only entered commercial activity this year. But fine, we can look at what it produces just recently.. About 3335000 MWh per month, or about 107 GWh per day. We can then subtract the baseline from Reactor 1 & 2 from before Reactor 3 was opened, removing about 1700000 MWh per month. Which gives us about 53 GWh per day. The lifetime of them is expected to be around 60 to 80 year, but lets take 60. That’s about 1177200 GWh over it’s lifetime, divided by the 36 billion that it cost to built… Gives you about 0.03 dollars per kWh. Which is pretty much as good as renewables get as well. But of course, this ignores maintenance, but that’s hard to calculate for solar panels as well. As such it will be somewhat larger than 0.03, I will admit.
Solar panels on the other hand, often have a lifetime of 30 years, so even though it costs less per watt, MW, or GW, it also produces less over time. For solar, and wind, that’s about the same.. So this doesn’t really say much.
But that wasn’t even the point of my message. As I said, I agree that Nuclear is slightly more expensive than renewables. But there are other costs associated with renewables that aren’t expressed well in monetary value for their units alone. Infrastructure, space, approval, experts to maintain it.
Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet.
Because they cannot. They can’t do it because there’s not enough capacity. If the sun is cloudy for a day, and the wind doesn’t run. Who’s going to power the grid for a day? That’s right. Mostly coal and gas. That’s the point. Nuclear is there to ensure we don’t go back to fossils when we want to be carbon neutral, which means no output. If you are carbon neutral only when the weather is perfect for renewables, then you’re not really carbon neutral and still would have to produce a ton of pollution at times.
I’m glad batteries and all are getting cheaper. They are definitely needed, also for nuclear. But you must also be aware of just how damn dirty they are to produce. The minerals required produce them are rare, and expensive. Wind power also kills people that need to maintain it. Things aren’t so black and white.
Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.
This is not true, and it should be obvious when you think about it. Since this data fluctuates all the time. Nuclear has been more expensive in the past, before getting cheaper, and now getting more expensive again. Solar and wind have had peaks of being far more expensive than before. These numbers are just a representation of aggregate data, and they often leave out nuance like renewables being favored by regulations and subsidies. They are in part a manifestation of the resistance to nuclear. Unlike renewables, there are many more steps to be made for efficiency in nuclear. Most development has (justifiably) been focused on safety so far, as with solar and wind and batteries we can look away from the slave labor on the other side of the world to produce the rare earth metals needed for it. There is no free lunch in this world.
For what it’s purpose should be, which is to provide a baseline production of electricity when renewables are not as effective. A higher price can be justified. It’s not meant to replace renewables altogether. Because if renewables can’t produce clean energy, their price might as well be infinitely high in that moment, which leaves our only options to be fossil fuels, hydro, batteries, or nuclear. Fossil fuels should be obvious, not everyone has hydro (let alone enough), batteries don’t have the capacity or numbers at the scale required (for the foreseeable future), and nuclear is here right now.
Would battery companies allow the price to go down? They are quite greedy as well.
There is competition in battery production. Pretty much all of society would be better off with better batteries, so price gauging in an industry like that is quite hard. And if it was, it would not go unnoticed.
The problem is simply the technology. There’s advancements like molten salt batteries, but it’s practically in it’s infancy. The moment a technology like that would become a big improvement over the norm, it would pretty much immediately cause a paradigm shift in energy production and every company would want a piece of the pie. So you’ll know it when you see it. But it might also just start off very underwhelmingly like nuclear fission and very gradually improve with the hope it can scale beyond the current best technologies for batteries.
All we can do is wait and hope for breakthrough, I guess. Because cheap and abundant batteries could really help massively with reducing our carbon output.
You know why people who live near wind power hate wind power?
It’s because their neighbour got paid to host a turbine, and they did not. It is envy.
I’m sure such cases exist, but where I’m from people don’t really get paid to host turbines, maybe companies at times. They dislike them because it affects the view in the area, and especially if you live very close to them the blades can cause noticeable flickering shadows. That latter point has a lot more weight to it in my eyes, but people do really care about the former as well, and it’s kind of hard to push on people when they live there and not you.
If only people weren’t fearmongering about nuclear 50 years ago we’d have clean energy today.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best is now”
That saying works for trees. We didn’t make trees obsolete with better technology.
Reliable clean energy isn’t a solved issue today either. Until we have grid-level storage we need something that can provide a reliable base and had enough mass/momentum to handle grid fluctuations.
A nuclear power plant cannot destroy a city.
I guess destroy != Make unlivable
People don’t put reactors next to cities for a reason. Meaning this scenario wouldn’t happen. Nuclear is also one of the safest energy sources overall in terms of deaths caused. It’s safer than some renewables even, and that’s not factoring in advances in the technology that have happened over the decades making it safer. This kind of misinformation is dangerous. It’s also not a good reason not to do nuclear. The reason why renewables are used more (and probably have a somewhat larger role to play in general) is because they a cheaper and quicker to manufacture. Nuclear energy’s primary problem isn’t safety but rather cost. It’s biggest strength is reliability and availability. You can build a nuclear plant basically anywhere where there is water.
Depends on where you live, Germany that gets the beating for phasing out nuclear, is so densely populated that these remote areas hardly exist!
That’s actually an interesting point. Maybe we shouldn’t put nuclear reactors in Germany.
I know nuclear is super safe but we have actual examples of accidents happening and making cities unlivable, you can’t deny that.
Which cities? I haven’t heard of any cities being made unlivable, only towns and villages.
🙄 I’m sorry, I was unaware of the population requirement
And that cannot happen. It’s a fear people have because they equate a nuclear power plant with a nuclear bomb. That is as wrong as considering the earth flat.
Fukushima?
Fukushima, in 2024,is a city of 272569 inhabitants. If that’s unlivable, I’m fine with it. Hiroshima, Nagazaki and Chernobyl are all inhabited too.
Saying that nuclear stuff makes places unlivable is plain wrong, it’s anti-science. It’s comics level of bullshit science. Travel in time is a more serious theory than nuclear stuff destroying the planet.
Chernobyl
But that was a really old tech, the plants built after 1990s shouldn’t allow this scale of pollution even if all the stops are pulled and everything breaks in the worst way possible
Chernobyl yes, let’s talk about it : after the catastrophy, 2 reactors were used until very recently (like until 10 or 20 years ago).
After the catastrophy, Chernobyl was made into an exclusion zone where people wouldn’t be allowed to live. But people came back 10 years after and it’s a small village now.
BTW even Hiroshima and Nagazaki that were annihilated with atomic bombs, that is weapons meant to destroy whole cities, were quickly inhabited again.
So much for the permanent destruction and millions of years of contamination. CO2 is a far more deadly compound for mankind than any radioactive material. Anti-nuke militants are merely ignorant fanatics.
Funny how whataboutism makes your audience defensive.
Funny how being polite didn’t convince you so now you’re trying to sell that being mean is going to stop you. You were always useless.
Hey, I hear you, life is stressful and there’s a lot going on. It’s okay to be upset, I hope whatever you’re going through gets easier.
Misanthropy doesn’t require anger. It’s a philosophical position not a mood ring.
I’m not lashing out, my “audience” is full of genuinely, aggressively, useless people who think stupid shit like “trump is better for Gaza” or “nuclear power is not a required part of the climate change solution”.
Is there a particular reason you think everyone, here specifically, believes those things?
Edit: I absolutely share your passion about climate change, as a preface. Calling someone, who agrees with you or not, “useless” makes them dismiss your opinion. It just means we can’t engage in any meaningful discussion and others are less likely to take action.
I’m in Missouri so apparently I’m surrounded by silos
How many fingers do you have?
It’s because there’s no opposing corporate interest to building nuclear weapons. The way the world works is: profitable shit happens, no matter what the hippies think about it. See: every other environmental issue.
