181–190 of 285 posts
Astounds me how so many people can be pro nuclear in opposition to fossil fuels - the instant impact is obviously much better, but the risk if something goes wrong is so catastrophically higher that the increased risk with each plant seems a huge gamble. Where do people think all that nuclear waste goes?
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But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence)... It does not seems wise to bet that SMR will be cheaper than renewable in 10 to 20 years and wait and pray... SMR is not a viable option right now. That is an interesting possibility we should study and work on, that could be a good surprise later on,…
> But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence) The cost of solar and wind energy when the sun shines or the wind blows has certainly decreased a lot in recent years, you're right about that. But decreasing cost of managing intermittence? I haven't heard of any big recent advances in that (aside fro…
They're still not cheap enough to make solar + batteries price-competitive in most markets, but their cost absolutely has been decreasing fast.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/04/powering-the-ev-revolut...
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The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.
> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you n…
This is the worst argument I've ever read for renewables.
With renewable and storage, you need to build at the very least 7 times the capacity. Maybe as much as 40 times the capacity. Because of the low load factor, the fact that it's pretty common to have a full week without wind or without sun, etc.
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Why? This article even explains why? It isn't an either or situation. You need a well diversified portfolio of zero (operating) emission technologies. Nuclear is one of those, along with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal.
It IS an either-or situation. Nuclear is terrible for backing up renewables. We don't need a diversified portfolio, we need a sufficiently reliable portfolio at minimum cost. This will likely involve no new nuclear plants; they're too expensive.
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> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you n…
The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents…
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The US isn't the largest CO2 emitter, though it used to be. China's emissions are approximately double the US's and growing.
China's per capita CO2 emissions are still 1/2 that of the U.S. More importantly, neither the Chinese government nor powerful Chinese politicians deny anthropogenic climate change. And they've recently recommitted to nuclear energy expansion despite growing public fear after Fukushima and a subsequent rise in costs as Chinese regulatory policies became more strict. Part of the reason for the gap in nuclear constructi…
The earth has a carrying capacity, locally, regionally and globally, and a high population density does nothing to increase it.
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> But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence) The cost of solar and wind energy when the sun shines or the wind blows has certainly decreased a lot in recent years, you're right about that. But decreasing cost of managing intermittence? I haven't heard of any big recent advances in that (aside fro…
Battery storage has got way cheaper. 4x cheaper per kWh since 2013, according to [0]. They're still not cheap enough to make solar + batteries price-competitive in most markets, but their cost absolutely has been decreasing fast. [0] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/04/powering-the-ev-revolut...
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The US isn't the largest CO2 emitter, though it used to be. China's emissions are approximately double the US's and growing.
Are you seriously proposing that CO2 be capped per country, as opposed to per capita? That's a fascinating proposal. I don't think that will be particularly favorable to the US, though. There are 195 countries in the world, yet the US accounts for 14% of all of the world's emissions.
Country borders mean nothing to the planet in ecological terms. How about looking at emissions per square kilometer as a target, but focusing treaty efforts on the largest CO2 emitting countries (or coalitions of countries that can be dealt with as a block)?
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The cost of wind turbines has little to do with the cost of ensuring that the power plant will provide a set amount of 100% renewable energy all the time . Because when the wind is not blowing the plant has either to provide energy from a storage system or source it somewhere else, again with 100% reliability.
You didn't look at that link, did you? It has models using predicted costs for wind, solar, nuclear, batteries, and hydrogen storage, and computes the minimum cost system to produce reliable baseload power using real historical weather data (at 5 minute intervals). You can alter the assumptions and see what the costs optimize to. Nuclear is "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced settings.
I gave it a quick look, but frankly it would take me a lot of time to check if the model and assumptions make sense (it also seems to reply "job failed" whenever it doesn't have a cached answer). But I think real costs can be estimated only from working plants. Do we have, now, renewable energy plants that are capable of delivering a constant amount of energy by storing the excess production? How many have been built around the world? Why aren't we building more if they're so cheap?
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> If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price We keep thinking of "building renewable power" as "we can produce this amount of watts at peak". What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7". There is a big difference. We're ending up in a situation where we can "build renewable power at a fraction of the price" for half of the time. For the othe…
This is a solved problem, particularly in the UK. Battery prices are constantly dropping and pumped storage is a proven solution. It requires investment, but far less than fission plants.
There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables, which is why they continue to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more production shifts in that direction.