271–280 of 361 posts
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And yet, what if that labor went into nuclear construction instead? How many 6 figure construction jobs is many multi-billion $ nuclear plants?
What percent of coal miners do you think could make that transition?
What, tell me you don't think coal miners have pick axes and chip coal out of tunnel walls into sacks.
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None of that is the root problem. Nuclear plants are too big, and we can't build big things cheaply in this country. The idle corruption of middle managers is what kills these kinds of projects.
It's not corruption; people in power don't want nuclear, and so the industry is regulated into its current quagmire. No other industry faces moving goalposts like nuclear does. The USA can move mountains if it really wants to. But as it stands, the country is doing everything it can to keep that mountain right where it is.
not cheaply, no.
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We don’t need batteries on that scale any time soon. Let’s project out 25 years and we might need 3-5 hours of 100% grid electricity storage nationwide depending on your assumptions but that’s about it. It’s not like hydroelectricity is going away anytime soon and that’s extremely flexible not just in terms of time of day but also days of the week, and wind doesn’t care when the sun is shining, and solar can shift ea…
And on the flip side, some energy markets like New England see a minimal variation in energy demand throughout the day, less than 10%. Provision enough generation to satisfy peak demand and spend the excess power doing things like carbon dioxide sequestration or desalination in places with limited drinking water. Too much energy is a vastly easier problem to solve than too little. And the great thing about nuclear is…
The issue with nuclear is it costs twice as much per kWh at 50% capacity than it does 100% capacity. Nuclear is expensive at 90% capacity factor, it’s insane at 45% capacity factor.
Further, daily demand isn’t that problematic. It’s really seasonal demand that kills people’s dreams of scaling nuclear power. Over 24 hours going from a 100% high down to 50% low might average say 70-80% depending on specifics. But if 1/2 the year you never get over 80% capacity, and you also need to curtail on nights and weekends year round, and take the plant offline for weeks to refuel etc, then things look much worse.
The temptation is to say batteries to the rescue, but then you’re directly competing with solar on price per kWh. It’s really hard to make things work without natural gas to pick up the slack.
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The problem with pumped-hydro is - and all storage based solutions is - how low can you let the storage get before it's an emergency? Electricity is a vital service: completely vital. Without it, modern civilization halts. It might be annoying being unable to make a cup of coffee, but municipal water and sewage need electricity to work. You go without power for a week, and the entire wastewater infrastructure will st…
Reading through the linked article, I don't think that's the way it's designed to be used. It can completely empty itself in 8 hours. That sounds like it's specifically designed to augment renewables at night and charge during the day, cycling every 24 hours.
But if you're electrical grid doesn't mostly have always on sources to backstop it, if you were all renewables and storage, then how much storage would you need to guarantee supply - 24/7/365 days a year.
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That’s a non sequitur. I never said hydro wasn’t renewable. I said it wasn’t clean. Most people think of hydro as renewable and low carbon and clean. Two are true, one is false. Hydro is dirty and, imho, we should phase it out the same way we should phase coal out. Nuclear isn’t renewable by most definitions. But it is low carbon and clean. Nuclear was good 40 years ago. Solar is getting good. Wind I don’t know much…
Hydro is indeed clean in that it does not emit greenhouse gases. Sure, it disrupts life around the dammed waterway. But that's way less of an impact than climate change.
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That's what I said. It's the cost of the powerplant that drives nuclear's cost. But you can reduce that dramatically via mass production of power plants. It will be a cheap source of electricity if done right. And we don't want just one energy source for everything anyways.
It's not at all clear mass production of nuclear power plants will reduce cost. This has not been demonstrated. It runs counter to economies of scale from large power plants.
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Human deaths aren't the only measure of safety. Pollution into the ocean from Fukushima was huge, unfortunately. Just because it's not as bad as Chernobyl (which was as worst-case as it gets) doesn't mean it's safe.
Why this is downvoted? Propaganda from Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs?
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Replacing gas heating with solar thermal is even cheaper and doesn’t. Electric heat pumps are viable when electricity is cheap or demand is low and you want AC, the more they drive up electric costs the more alternatives become viable. Net effect you tend to see them in areas where there’s a surplus of winter electricity which also tends to be places with minimal demand for heating like Virginia rather than Mane. 46%…
Solar thermal heating is not going to produce much energy in the winter when there's fewer hours of sunlight and more hours of cloud coverage - which just so happens to coincide with places that would need heating during the winter. Solar thermal performance is worse with diffuse light (read: overcast days) than PV solar, in fact that's a big part of why it was largely abandoned in the 2000s.
* Except of course when people want to heat a pool, that takes crazy amounts of energy.
“Israel became the world leader in the use of solar energy per capita with 85% of households using solar thermal systems (3% of the primary national energy consumption)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating
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> 4 cents per kWh. For comparison: I live in SF Bay Area and pay 42 cents per kWh.
To be fair it's more like 12 cents per kWh for actual electricity and the other 30 cents for delivery.
It seems that in Quebec (see the other reply with 6 cents per kWh all included), moving electrons through a copper wire is much-much cheaper. Something is very wrong with the PG&E costs.