131–140 of 632 posts
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> solar/wind could serve both factors well Not 24/7.
Sure, but let's build 150% of total needed capacity as renewables, and burn coal for the 5 days a year we still need to.
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Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks ahead of time. Bitcoin mining is commonly promoted as this kind of ideal electricity consumer. Hydrogen production could be another. However, I think more interesting for this community would be to build some kind of demand response general computing d…
> Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks ahead of time. I think you misunderstood. The parent comment implied that excess electricity could be use to produce synthetic fuels (via carbon capture) to power conventional airplanes, ships or other machinery.
What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.
And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
I'm pro-nuclear, but having been following this for a long time and it's not exactly a model that's leading the way. Especially as I'm in the UK, and we decided to build a copy of it (Hinckley Point) even after all the flaws become known.
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It usually goes like this: Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY!!!
And if you manage to convince someone this is an airplane crash type of problem, they start about the finances. And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so what can you say? They win the argument. Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades and that's after they pushe…
Agriculture and industry are tough nuts to crack. With electricity, transport and heating, it's a problem of scaling out. With agriculture and industry - we don't even have a blueprint yet
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By population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade. (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shoul…
How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade? How many more meltdowns per decade?
Energy generation is always a trade off. Right now the world is reacting to the fossil fuel funded wars created by one such trade off. We are also in the middle of causing irreversible climate change, which would cause more damage than any amount of meltdowns or nuclear waste could ever get near.
Naturally there are alternatives. If money were no objection then green hydrogen looks pretty nice, and one could always extract heat from the core of the earth as long the technology was safe enough to do so. As soon we have a technology that get proven to be cheaper, safer and more scalable than nuclear we should all switch to that. Buying natural gas from Russia is for multiple obvious reason not that.
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How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade? How many more meltdowns per decade?
And heat-polluted waste waters? People keep pretending there are no externalities.
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For one, it assumes the average human consumes as much electricity as the average Finn.
You really could have added a lot of value here. Clearly you know a bit about the situation. Please try and bring your knowledge to the table not your offense at someone else's error. I seriously think you could have a lot to offer.
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When an article starts with chernobyl as example of what mistakes we're likely to make when building a new plant today, it makes me itch to just close the tab and dismiss the opinion of the person who linked it. Not sure why I even bothered digging into it, but for example one later point is also misleading: "uranium resources will be depleted by the end of this century". I think I found the source (not that they lin…
> Accidents in nuclear power plants can have disastrous implications. As in the case if Chernobyl, large areas around the site remain unusable forever What exactly about this do you not buy? And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
See https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl-main.html#again
Or even just another comment in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653778
Or the fact that it hasn't happened despite hundreds of active nuclear power plants around the world (not all in countries that you would expect to have high safety standards).
Or the safety statistics in general: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Same with the waste issue. Nobody asks what the proposed solution is for CO2 storage (it will remain for billions of years! The horror!) when proposing to keep open coal/gas plants a bit longer until we have solar/wind/hydro+storage all set up, but with nuclear we need to find more reasons for the phase-out.
Here's another info page: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
> If these materials are burnt in fuel through recycling, nuclear waste would only remain radioactive for a few hundred years
And that's ignoring that we're also managing to deal with the waste so far just fine, also without recycling.
(The tally is at 40 minutes time wasted for these two answer so far, also because most of the previous one was 'researched' and written on mobile. How long did it take to ask the question? This is why I contemplate templates.)
What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.
It is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification, especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only incrementally more powerful than those already running at the facility. "The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling…