81–90 of 598 posts
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Solar doesn't provide off peak power without storage. So comparing nuclear directly to solar in the way you've done makes no sense.
I believe solar and wind can provide for ALL power. Same as nuclear. That is the basis for my comparison.
i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. its just not an ideal situation. the government cant ev…
> bumbling bureaucrats Sounds like a government problem, not a nuclear problem.
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Princeton did a study, and found to get to net zero by 2050, the US could do it with only renewables (the "E+ RE+" scenario). To accomplish that: > Cumulative total wind and solar farm area in E+ RE+ by 2050 is ~1 million km^2, or roughly an area the size of AK, IA, KS, MO, NE, OK, and WV combined (with an additional 64,000 km^2 of offshore wind); directly impacted lands total 70,000 km^2, an area larger than WV. * P…
i dont want to be contrarian, but this is wrong. you get 150-100 w per square meter. what am i missing?
* https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/experts
I'm just copying and pasting the December 2020 report.
Off the top of my head, renewables (in the US) only produce electricity about 30% of the time, so you have to 'over build':
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
They have energy storage experts, so I'm sure batteries and such are taken into account.
i just dont buy it. hypothetically, there is a nuclear power plant design that is perfectly safe in that it will never melt down. but there is no nuclear power plant that produces no waste. as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. its just not an ideal situation. the government cant ev…
> as long as you are producing waste, you are depending on bumbling bureaucrats to properly dispose of that waste and manage the waste often for extremely long periods of time. The entirety of nuclear waste ever produced by humanity can fit in a football field. This is without even considering fuel recycling. Acting like this is a problem has to be the most absurd (and I might add politicized) argument ever made agai…
Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…
I'm squarely of the opposite opinion. There are 2 main concerns I think "only renewables" solutions miss: 1. Impact on land usage. The sheer amount of land required to provide 3-4x global use is impractical and has major environmental consequences. It's not free to pave over large areas with solar panels or make huge swaths of air unsafe for birds. 2. Cost of storage is usually projected using current prices with som…
Or compare it to the amount of land used for parking. Or for roads. Or for roofs of buildings.
I've never, not once, ever seen a comparison of this sort that sounded the least bit scary.
2. I'm a bit flabbergasted that you think we can scar nuclear production to what we need. We can't even scale nuclear production to hit replacement rate of our existing reactors. Nuclear does not scale, because it can not be built.
And I'm similarly flabbergasted that you think storage would hit scaling problems, when we build new factories for storage all the time, use new chemistries all the time to reduce the use of limited input components.
Storage production is growing at a massive pace, problems are getting solved all the time. Nuclear is shrinking all the time, gets more expensive all the time, and we can't even figure out basic concrete pours and welding. These industries are hugely contrasting, but I don't know how you can reach your conclusions when looking at the reality of storage and nuclear as they are in the real word.
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A grid that relies on transmission to that degree will require unifying some disparate grids won't it? Also it seems horribly vulnerable to attacks digital or physical.
If you're worried about attacks, you should be even more worried about nuclear.
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The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel…
The issue for me is not quantity but time. 1000-10,000 (or even much longer) years for decay is an incredible amount of time for the human race. Written language only appeared ~5500 years ago. Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?
Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…
I worked in nuclear. There's definitely no way now to insure a new plant and make money. Try as they may, even Duke couldn't break ground on any new US project because there hasn't been money in it for about 40 years. The economics kill it and there aren't going to be anymore PWR/BWRs, with the possible exceptions of BCH, 2 PWRs at Turkey Point, and 1 ESBWR at North Anna. Renewables will likely undercut them all to c…
e.g., "China Tariffs Blocked Bill Gates’ Plan for Safe Nuclear Power"
https://futurism.com/trump-china-tariffs-bill-gates-nuclear-...
also, SpaceX managed to make reusable rockets, I just have to imagine we could make nuclear energy feasible if we approached it from first principles and took a hard look at the entire process.
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This assumes that larger investment in nuclear won’t yield reduced costs, just as larger investments in solar did.
It would, but not as much as solar did. But people don't include recycling cost in PV, as well as electrical grid maintenance, impossibility to work as a baseline, no pilotability. Solar is good if the population is mature enough to accept the cost of sending PV to a recycling plant. And as long as it doesnt go past 50% of the energy production (you NEED a baseline of 30 to 40% at the very least)