661–670 of 686 posts
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So, after a full-scale catastrophe it's still significantly fewer casualties than from normal operation of coal, for example.
"Cleaner/safer than coal" is damning with faint praise.
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The issue when you say let’s build X00 new LWR is just cost vs benefit. Something like 5 Trillion in additional nuclear subsidies might slow down climate change a low single digit percentage over the next 30 years. This relates not just to the high cost of nuclear but also the delay between deciding to build nuclear and actually getting low carbon energy from a nuclear reactor. Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsi…
People have issues with really visualizing and understanding order of magnitudes, I get it. > Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsidies and you get vastly more carbon free energy Have you done the math, or are you just making that figure up? One single LWR generates from 1GW onwards. Do you know how much solar you need to generate the same amount of power? And that's disregarding the obvious issues with non-constan…
Ran the numbers, people are installing solar without any subsidies. If you look at what subsides could achieve for grid scale solar it gets crazy.
Also, there is no way solar and wind can have negative EROI simply on a cost basis. There is simply no way for an unsubsidized energy source to have a negative EROI and be the cheapest energy source. You believe there is an option for sub 1c/kWh power to be supplying energy to crease that equipment and nothing fits the bill.
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Commenting about fiat currency is a pointless distraction when the purpose of using it is as a proxy for labour and materials. 'Trillions in the pot' is just a proxy for a certain amount of access to raw materials, trading ability and labour power, all of which are finite and don't really increase if you sink your country into hyperinflation. > Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting t…
Given the scale of investment we are talking about, it's also plausible that EU based manufacturing of solar panels could emerge given the right incentives.
Nothing to the scale of china, but scaling it is far more viable than scaling the nuclear industries.
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> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades > and its kWh is costlier than alternatives > It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. That is not true, t…
Not only are the costs comparable to a carbon thermal plant, the generating equipment is identical, and the cooling needs are also identical. Solution: build nuclear cores as close to existing coal plants as possible, shut the coal plant down, and move everything from the steam boiler to the wires to the nuclear plant. Repeat until no coal.
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Nuclear in the UK has a capacity factor of around 60%. Availability is in the 70-80% range. Yeah it's (usually) planned, but it's a decently long time in which you need those gas plants. Why not just build solar instead and fuel those same gas plants with hydrogen or methane you plucked from the air with your $20-30/MWh unscheduled electricity? Plus, you can get solar and storage as an off the shelf item today as a r…
Solar requires land area. Storage requires land area. Britain isn't that sunny - particularly not in winter. Nuclear has a very small footprint on a crowded island. Plus we have Rolls Royce SMRs who have been building nuclear reactors for a while.
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> > Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. > This is a fallacy in two ways: > 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale. More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). The opportunity for reducing cost through economies of scales is low. Economies of scales w…
> More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). Presumably that's the cheap half of the nuclear plant, because coal/gas plants are pretty cheap to build.
Combined cycle gas plants are cheap because 2/3rds of the power output is from the combustion turbine, which needs no heat exchangers. The steam bottoming part needs two: the boiler running off the exhaust from the combustion turbine, and the condenser to transfer heat to the environment.
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Storage is cheap and getting cheaper even faster than solar or wind. By the time we need storage (after enough renewable generation is built to charge it from) storage will be very cheap. It will not be made of lithium batteries.
> By the time we need storage We already need it. During summer we have an overabundance of energy. It would be so nice to have it stored and used in winter, wouldn't it? Oh wait. "Cheap storage" in no way, shape or form translate into efficient storage. You might have to cover half of Europe in batteries to store just a few weeks worth of energy.
Long term storage doesn't need to be efficient, because the number of charge/discharge cycles is small and the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of such cycles.
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"Cleaner/safer than coal" is damning with faint praise.
true, but for the pro-nuclear folk who are frustrated by the “fear factor”, it’s a really important point.
When all these starups fail to deliver anything of value in a few years, the investors will disappear. Commercial fusion power is such a huge challenge IMHO there are only two ways we can get there currently: ITER/DEMO (if it doesn't get overcome by bureaucracy and the members don't loose interest in funding it) or Elon Musk (who is probably the only person who can attract the top talent needed, motivate it to work d…
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Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.
If the goal is 1 unit net, then min(3x, mean(x)) has massively lower variance than x. The extra power when 3x > mean(x) is just incentive for developing flexible loads and arbitrage.