611–620 of 709 posts
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> In the literal backyard of my house? No. Ok, so storage is a problem.
Do you not throw anything away? All the trash you've ever created is kept in a landfill on your own property? Impressive!
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If you read the article you'd see it's not "million years" but ~300.
Even if it was a million years it wouldn't matter. The US has the Nevada desert which is effectively a barren wasteland, just shove it in a bunch of containers and leave it there. They already do that for removed nuclear reactors from military vessels (which is actually so it can be seen in satellite imagery to fulfill international treaty requirements.
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> The topic is renewables vs. nuclear though. I'm only commenting on a portion of the argument against nuclear based on its waste. The fact is the waste is negligible. Esspecially so when you consider the return of energy from a nuclear reactor Per square meter of real estate versus most viable renewables I'm personally of the opinion why not both. So I'm biased of course, but nuclear isn't something to be afraid of.…
> The fact is the waste is negligible. Esspecially so when you consider the return of energy It doesn't matter how much energy it "returns". It doesn't make the waste less worse for generations. > Per square meter of real estate versus most viable renewables You can literally put solar on roofs of private buildings...if your local fossil/nuclear lobby allows it. I don't even get how this is relevant. Especially becau…
What about the 16% of americans living in apartments? that’s just apartments, not counting condos or other units where you don’t have permission to install things on the roof. what do these people do for power?
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Plants planned or under construction will be cancelled anywhere they are not massively subsidized by government coercion of tax- or ratepayers, as energy prices continue downward. They will be recognized as unable to compete. Existing plants will be mothballed as energy prices drop below the level needed to continue operating, again except where coerced.
Nuclear power is the cheapest option: https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/ And it is far more reliable than renewables.
It is furthermore a snapshot. Policy for construction needs to consider the future, and renewables cost is still falling fast.
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> That baseload myth is dead these days. Batteries are merely one way to store energy but they’re not the only way. How is it a myth? Weather systems are big. it is not unusual for eg. the entirety of North-western Europe to have a calm spell of little to no wind. You need something to keep the lights on when there's no wind, night time etc. That's your base load right there. > And all of this is already working in p…
Your skipping power to gas [0]. At least for the US, how are you going to use nuclear to heat every building in the entire continent 30-100 degrees fahrenheit when a polar vortex hits [1] with nuclear? Nuclear has the opposite problem of wind/solar in that they need to be run at 100% capacity basically all the time because of their absurd building costs and low operating costs. Building enough nuclear to support that…
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
under “Load following”
There is this idea that nuclear is not being deployed because people have a wrong perception of risks. However, the main reason is the economy. The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. We can blame regulation and the hypothetically wrong public perception about safety, but the reality is that costs cannot go down easily because of the innovation dyn…
> 2. A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped, it has to be build on site. Does it? This is the premise behind NuScale's modular SMRs. https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/fabrication-and-asse...
There is this idea that nuclear is not being deployed because people have a wrong perception of risks. However, the main reason is the economy. The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. We can blame regulation and the hypothetically wrong public perception about safety, but the reality is that costs cannot go down easily because of the innovation dyn…
> A nuclear reactor cannot be shipped. There does exist an exception to this. Russia built a floating nuclear power plant. There is a lot of controversy around it. However the main claim that economy is the center of the argument is true. Fossil fuels are exceptional cheap as a battery solution to be combined with solar and wind, especially wind which don't have 365 days of charge cycles. Natural gas in Europe play t…
There are many floating reactors, they’re called aircraft carriers and warships.
At any rate, an actual shippable reactor is available and the first will be built in 2029: https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/nuscale-smr-approval-nucl...
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The economics of nuclear power don't make it an ideal companion to wind and solar. You want to have backup power for days where it's neither windy nor sunny. So you need a lot of nuclear. But then you want to use renewables when they're available, so most of the time you run your reactors way below capacity. Unfortunately most of the cost of nuclear is capex, so every minute you don't run at 100% makes nuclear power…
That is why companies like Moltex Energy are building a nuclear reactor with a combination of a heat battery. So that they can do 100% utilization and then make massive profit when solar is not there. However that means you are innovating in nuclear and in heat batteries.
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Not to mention they employ batteries fabricated with toxic chemicals. It’s going to be tragic watching folks try to figure out how to safely dispose of these batteries 20 years from now. Not to mention the carbon that will be emitted to make them in the first place.
Lithium Ion batteries are recyclable and the fact that not many are yet is mostly because of infrastructure rather than any technical issue: https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re... This has improved since 2019 (when that article was written) and now all Tesla batteries are recycled[1][2]. [1] https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/support/sustainability-recycling [2] https://electrek.co/2022/05/09/tesla-…