121–130 of 247 posts
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Where are you from that has no wind or sun?
Renewables are cost-competitive, but not by an order of magnitude. If wind and solar net 1/3rd each of CA, it no longer makes economic sense to build them.
That's why I was surprised. I wanted to know where the economics didn't work.
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Ironically many countries are considering underground storage of CO2 to combat climate change.
Is carbon sequestration even remotely realistic though (beyond PoC, and at scale)?
The trick will be to make sure economic incentives don't lead to people simply building so many incinerators that you end up emitting more than before anyway...
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Elon didn't make any grid-scale energy storage . The largest grid battery installation in the world can only supply power for a couple minutes – that's a buffer at most. Edit: removed first sentence.
It's hours, not minutes. Elon Musk ships MWH solutions conveniently packaged as in container form. The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GW setup in Australia. That's a big buffer. Demand for solutions providing power for days simply does not exist currently. Hours is good enough. This business is about providing lots of power quickly. You are right that they typically are only used for a few minutes to…
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In the short term nuclear is undoubtedly expensive, but when the debt from construction is payed off, it becomes an incredibly cheap and reliable source of energy. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
As far as I'm aware, dealing with the waste has cost taxpayers in Germany quite a lot over the last couple of decades, and all of the really hot stuff is sitting in glorified warehouses with no end in sight. I have a feeling this may still become a very significant part of the overall costs. Has any other country actually solved that problem?
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> Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. Texas has demonstrated that you can have blackouts and expensive at the same time if only you cut enough regulations. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why...
Funny, everyone was happy about how Texas scrapped so many coal plants and built so many windmills until it reached a cascade failure point and then the narrative shifted to "OMG, look at all the deregulation!"
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Elon didn't make any grid-scale energy storage . The largest grid battery installation in the world can only supply power for a couple minutes – that's a buffer at most. Edit: removed first sentence.
It's hours, not minutes. Elon Musk ships MWH solutions conveniently packaged as in container form. The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GW setup in Australia. That's a big buffer. Demand for solutions providing power for days simply does not exist currently. Hours is good enough. This business is about providing lots of power quickly. You are right that they typically are only used for a few minutes to…
Apparently "Total electricity generation in Australia was estimated to be 265,117 gigawatt hours (GWh) in calendar year 2019"[1], which works out to about 30 gigawatts continually for a year.
So a 1.2GWh battery could power Australia for about two minutes (...at average use. Longer in the middle of the night).
Maybe a hundred installations like that could buffer the fluctuations in renewables in Australia. Plus thousands or tens of thousands more worldwide, while building enough batteries to replace all the cars with electric.
I guess it's doable in a decade or two, if Musk and other manufacturers can really produce TWh's of capacity each year.
1: https://www.energy.gov.au/publications/australian-energy-sta...
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Is it particularly noteworthy that an anti nuclear article was written by an anti nuclear author or am I missing something?
Yes, as it establishes the potential bias of the article author. If this article was written by typically a pro-nuclear author it would be much more noteworthy.
>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. >The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastr…
To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?
Notice how they're right on the river right upstream from St. Louis.
But we also had much worse things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weldon_Spring_Ordnance_Works (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5670478/), Sauget Superfund (https://old.post-gazette.com/pg/06276/727066-28.stm), Monsanto Headquarters, https://www.builtstlouis.net/ammo.html
Now I live in Seattle. I'd much rather that Callaway plant was where the Handford site is than have the Hanford Site there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
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What about the hidden cost of nuclear? The waste storage. The security measures (can't have terrorists walking off with the nuclear waste). The constant need for inspections, audits, etc. And that's before you consider the corruption and the gravy train that is basically associated with funding existing plants using massive amounts of public funding. Nuclear being too expensive is the main point of this article. That…
> What about the hidden cost of nuclear? The waste storage. The security measures (can't have terrorists walking off with the nuclear waste). The constant need for inspections, audits, etc. And that's before you consider the corruption and the gravy train that is basically associated with funding existing plants using massive amounts of public funding. Nothing wrong with pointing out issues/costs with nuclear, in fac…
That kind of is my point: countries are doing this and without blackouts and it's actually fine. You seem to be claiming nuclear is needed to provide an unspecified base load at an unspecified cost. Other people are pointing out that it is about 3x more expensive and just not generally worth investing in at that cost difference.
Your points about mining are a bit beside the point. I don't actually disagree that the mining sector needs to be cleaned up. But our economy generates demand for lots of things we dig up out of the ground. If anything, it seems that the likes of Tesla are vaguely being responsible here and are actually making efforts to clean up that part of their business by working to source what they need in a sustainable way.
You seem to imply that a scale change is needed on the mining front to bootstrap renewables. I doubt that that's as big of a deal that you seem to imply. Also, you could make the point that with clean energy, resources locked up in that become available for recycling at the end of their life. So, things like lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, etc. actually can be reused. And there are also some efforts to replace some of these minerals with more readily available alternatives. E.g. cobalt free batteries are a thing. Finally, we can offset that by no longer digging up coal, drilling oil, or fracking gas. The difference is that absolutely zero percent of that gets recycled because we burn it.
And lets not forget that uranium mining is probably one of the dirtiest forms of mining. That's just a really nasty business mostly happening under exactly the kind of circumstances you point out. Nothing clean about it. Lots of pollution, radioactive waste, and health issues. And you need to mine a lot of rock to extract very little uranium.
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Is there an argument to be made about volumes? Eg let’s say it is 5x worse than mining coal, but you need 100x less of it, is it net less bad? I clearly made up the numbers, just curious.
I'm not sure how directly comparable they are. How do you compare radioactive and chemical contamination to the kind of contamination from coal mines? Pollution isn't always a thing you can measure on a scale from bad to less bad. There's long term systemic effects from the countless contaminants released by industries around the world we barely have any idea about. I realize economic models, and fairly frighteningly…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...