111–120 of 567 posts
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Nuclear waste storage isn't a technology issue: we know how to store it safely. It's an issue of political obstructionism.
If that’s true why would be this obstructionism be there? It does not make any rational sense if we can use nuclear to win us time until we have working fusion and/or wind/sun/etc energy implemented.
The short answer is the oil lobby.
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Is it grade 7-9 physics, though? I learned about power grid structure (base load, etc.) and such at the university. To the down voters: just because you learn about electricity in secondary school, it doesn't mean that the second or third level effects are obvious and that you immediately understand what their impact on a power grid is. But hey, maybe some people were super interested in power grids or just super gif…
You're not wrong, but I honestly think most don't really even understand the difference between power and energy. If you don't understand that, trying to explain base load is an uphill battle.
Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the producer side since the cheapest power plants were also inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load providers, although it was purely an economical coupling leading to a term existing.
Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are the new base load providers, but it also brings new challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more variability in the supply. This is our current world were the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally. This is unless they can find a way to get their prices below renewables, but that is getting more and more unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.
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> Base load is just a made up convention. Seriously.
Ok, bad wording. How about: It emerges from conventional fixed supply. In any case it's no law of nature. So not a concept that is necessarily relevant in the furure.
> In any case it's no law of nature.
Yes it is. It's a law of human nature :-)
I hope that in the future we will seriously consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium: - produces significantly more energy per ton - produces significantly less waste - the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)
You can make your own thorium battery. [0] [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_battery
They produce very little power (W).
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Fukushima cleanup costs will be between $470 and $660 billion. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi... US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level. That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone. And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more exp…
> And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind. Where can I find a source confirming that ?
Wind $26-$54 Nuclear $129-$198
There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a l…
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Either? The problem is that combusting it produces CO₂.
Methane is going to come out of sewage whether we process it or not, and methane itself is a greenhouse gas. It's not going to come out of the ground without help (in the quantities we are using).
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Base load is just a made up convention though closely related to traditional fixed rate prices, and may become increasingly fictional in the future as demand adapts to more variable supply and dynamic pricing.
> Base load is just a made up convention. Seriously.
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As far as I know there are also economic problems with nuclear. Nuclear power plants are enormous investments, then take decades to build and eventually decomission. If renewable energy gets efficient enough, nuclear is not worth the effort.
This is the real issue. It's 3x as expensive as other renewables. Every dollar of subsidy producing 1 MWh of nuclear could provide 3 MWh of solar or wind. Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins). It's got real lo…
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Yes, but compare their CO2 footprints to nuclear. Have you a source that shows Nuclear is better? I hunted around a while back and got a large range of answers, but nuclear seemed consistent worse. Eg see page 29 of this link. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
The error bars make that graph unusable for this purpose.