171–180 of 598 posts
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Just buy solar and wind, avoid both.
You're never going to have a powermix that's 100% renewables. There will always be a few power plants to pick up the slack if weather conditions are unfavorable for a long period of time. Should these plants use coal, gas or nuclear?
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I’m guessing that is because nuclear is often framed as a solution to the climate disaster. If the discussion was simply: “see how cool of a technology nuclear power is; see how nuclear powers the latest mars rover” I would not guess there would be a lot of backlash. However in this thread you see a lot of: “wind and solar has some problems too” , or “nuclear waste is better then the warming of the planet” . The prob…
Huh? Nuclear is an existing solution to climate change, though. More existing than wind and solar. It provides more electricity in the US than wind and solar combined. The problem of climate change would already have been worse without it. So it already is part of the solution. It doesn’t have to be and isn’t the entire solution. But no activist calling for the end of nuclear electricity is doing any favors to climat…
So the nuclear from 1970 may still be operating, and operating somewhat cheaply, but that doesn't mean that nuclear as a technology still matches the technological productive capacity of our economy.
The thermal conversion of steam to electricity used to be considered dirt cheap, as far as the overall cost of electricity: low capital costs that last a good amount of time. The primary expense was fuel.
Zero-fuel electricity generation capital costs are starting to eclipse the thermal conversion capital costs. This has huge implications for what we should think of basing our future grid upon.
Take natural gas for example. Turbine-driven generators followed by a steam cycle-combined cycle- have completet obsoleted thermal-only gas plants. It's why coal is so much more expensive than gas.
The world is different, and nuclear only seems like a solution because we paid massive capital costs at a time when the competitive environment was entirely different. We no longer live in that world.
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I’m guessing that is because nuclear is often framed as a solution to the climate disaster. If the discussion was simply: “see how cool of a technology nuclear power is; see how nuclear powers the latest mars rover” I would not guess there would be a lot of backlash. However in this thread you see a lot of: “wind and solar has some problems too” , or “nuclear waste is better then the warming of the planet” . The prob…
Huh? Nuclear is an existing solution to climate change, though. More existing than wind and solar. It provides more electricity in the US than wind and solar combined. The problem of climate change would already have been worse without it. So it already is part of the solution. It doesn’t have to be and isn’t the entire solution. But no activist calling for the end of nuclear electricity is doing any favors to climat…
I don’t see the debate as existing nuclear vs. new wind and solar, but as new nuclear vs. new wind and solar.
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…
> China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. They have brought 15 GW online the last 5 years, and they have another 15 GW under construction. How is that pulling back? https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
From your own link:
The 13th Five-Year Plan formalized in March 2016 included the following nuclear projects and aims: ... Reach target of 58 GWe nuclear operational by end of 2020, plus 30 GWe under construction then.
China actually has 47.5 GWe operational now. See table "Operable nuclear power reactors" in your link. They fell short of the 2020 target and with only 15 GWe under construction they're not catching up with their original goals either.
But that said, something else has happened in the last five years that has made me a bit ... cautious about being decisive on nuclear. And that is general global instability. E.g., things sure feel like they've come off the rails recently and things I used to take for granted: that competent people would generally be in charge, has been challenged.
So to me, the biggest risk with nuclear isn't the technology itself. In isolation I see it as a great solution to one of the key challenges of climate change. To me, the biggest risk is political stability. It's a technology that requires constant competence.
All that said – I aim to be open-minded. If the new breed of reactors can safely shutdown under neglect, if they can't be weaponized if society breaks down – awesome. I'd love to hear more about it.
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Huh? Nuclear is an existing solution to climate change, though. More existing than wind and solar. It provides more electricity in the US than wind and solar combined. The problem of climate change would already have been worse without it. So it already is part of the solution. It doesn’t have to be and isn’t the entire solution. But no activist calling for the end of nuclear electricity is doing any favors to climat…
I always took it as: As the nuclear plants from the 70s and 80s are getting decommissioned because of age, there is no plan to replace them with new nuclear. So they should be replace them with wind and solar, because wind and solar is a cheaper, quicker, and more reliable alternative then new nuclear (as this tread demonstrates). I don’t see the debate as existing nuclear vs. new wind and solar, but as new nuclear v…
(The US has mostly been doing a pretty good job of this, upgrading and maintaining the existing fleet and even adding a reactor here or there, although we have had some unforced errors like how some nuclear power plants in California were shut down early.)
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Prove to me that these pro nuclear activists actually truly care about the land use from solar and wind power.
Why do you think I’m saying it’s an either or? Wind and solar are an important part of the energy mix. But if you truly care about minimizing the impact our energy use has on the world around us, you have to take a mix of all of it. Wind and solar alone will never rid us of fossil fuels on their own. Nuclear has lots of important properties that make it a much better overall true replacement for our fossil fuel depen…
Germany, 2010:
Coal+Oil+Gas 55%
Nuclear 25%
Wind+Solar+Hydro 13%
Coal+Oil+Gas 36%
Nuclear 12%
Wind+Solar+Hydro 41%
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Compare your best estimates of land usage to the amount of land the US uses to grow corn for ethanol. 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…
Nuclear is actually intentionally crippled through legislation under over-hyped concerns over dirty bombs accidents (for the right and left politically inclined respectively). Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other…
Nuclear power plants have zero tolerance for serious accidents. And zero-tolerance is never a good margin to operate on.
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Compare your best estimates of land usage to the amount of land the US uses to grow corn for ethanol. 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…
It's not that nuclear cannot be built. It's that America is incapable of building... Pretty much anything in the 21st century. If the interstate system were to disappear tomorrow, for example, we simply wouldn't be able to rebuild it. It's not because concrete is some arcane technology that isn't cost effective, or doesn't work. It's because we just aren't very good at building things anymore.
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…
This completely ignores scenarios of extended cloud cover, cold temperatures and low wind (somewhat like we just saw in Texas) where properly winterized baseline power would be the only way to keep everything up the whole way through.
Barring future unknown tech, we will always need either nuclear or natural gas if we want five nines of uptime in our electrical power. There is just no practical way currently to build enough storage across the grid to maintain 100% uptime during a week or more of reduced renewable generation.