171–180 of 583 posts
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The comment you are replying to was not "trolling"; it raised a legitimate, technical objection to a policy in a manner that invites constructive responses (for example, "with storage technology" is a common response I see).
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While wind and solar will help, nuclear is really the dominant part of the solution, because of it's ability to work independent of local weather.
Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh. You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the…
Insufficient detail.
You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on.
There's a good argument to be made that cheap-to-the-end-user electricity is a net good for society, because they can then spend that money elsewhere rather than on boring old electricity.
Besides all that, nuclear needs a lot of cooling capacity, and that's typically come from rivers / oceans, which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands.
So nuclear isn't always a good fit for many reasons, but may be a good fit for many other reasons.
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well nuclear is the current cheapest way of producing electricity. doesn't stop from funding other cheaper and future safe options. mantra is cheaper.
It is by far the most expensive method. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
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Its all built on very old thinking. Nuclear may have been a good idea in the past, but with the rapid reduction of cost of renewable, especially solar, its no longer worth considering. Building a plant takes a decade, and a decade from now the difference in cost will be even greater. Nuclear will look like huge waste of money then.
You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity. In practice this means natural gas and diesel plants that are off, or coal/nuclear that is being diverted elsewhere when the sun shines/wind blows. The EU gri…
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Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh. You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the…
> You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Insufficient detail. You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on. There's a good argument…
Arguing about how efficient subsides are vs other spending ignores the option to not spend the money and have consumers directly pay the bill. This normally results in greater efficiency because consumers can chose to say lower the thermostat and spend money on something else etc. People will argue for subsidies to deal with externalities, but markets can equally respond to simply taxing those externalities.
Short Version is here - https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/263861/download
The only green solution to our current energy problem is more nuclear power plants. We have to stop relying on coal, wood, oil, gas and the rest of the “dirty” materials.
Except nuclear is expensive and takes decades to build, runs on non renewable materials (a good percentage of which come from Russia), leaves waste that is deadly for 100.000s of years, and promising new technologies will need decades to reach maturity. Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar or geothermal?
> Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar
Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat that can be used for central heating, etc.
Now sure if you live on the equator where it's always sunny and happen to have a large reservoir nearby you can use for pumped hydro storage, then yes it's probably the better choice.
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Pure FUD. The wind doesn't blow all the time and battery technology at scale isn't there.
Yes, this argument gets repeated again and again and again, and when you ask about storage you never get a decent answer. And yet, the argument keeps getting repeated even by people who matter and make the decisions. When I started watching debates in the Dutch house of representatives I pretty much lost all hope. Of the 150 members, I'd say 145 are either unable or unwilling to think quantitatively and do simple nap…
Storage is technically trivial. Building it all will be a big civil engineering job, but we have plenty of civil engineers.
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While wind and solar will help, nuclear is really the dominant part of the solution, because of it's ability to work independent of local weather.
Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh. You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the…
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Is there any nuclear facility that's privately owned that didn't get massive subsidies/loan guarantees from a government? At the size of a 100MW+ generation facility, you need government sized budgets and timelines.
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The argument should be about whether or not those subsidies would have been better spend elsewhere.
I'd probably argue subsidising local wind / solar (plus storage), and local manufacturing of same, would be better, even though I tend to argue nuclear is a reason option some of the time.