481–490 of 1001 posts
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We can thank the hippies of the 60s and 70s for all their anti-nuclear silliness for making the nuclear industry heavily over regulated.
There was also the Soviet nuclear fireworks project in the 80s that didn’t help much.
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But remember that a square kilometer of solar panels needs maybe ten square kilometers of actual land. Anywhere other than at the equator, the panels need to be spaced far enough apart not to shadow each other. On a north-facing slop they would be even more spaced out. Do that in two dimensions, so they can track the sun, and keeping one square meter of panels perpendicular to the sun requires a suprisingly large foo…
Nobody builds solar farms on "north-facing slopes". Nobody is making solar panels "track the sun". Nobody even proposes "clearcutting forests" for solar farms. Trolling is in strict violation of site guidelines.
"But there are also other ways to boost the energy production of solar panels – such as by tilting them to follow the Sun's path in the sky, similar to the way young sunflowers follow the sun from east to west during the day. Tracking technology, which is already in use on some land based solar arrays, helps increase the overall electricity production, as the panels constantly adjust to face the Sun."
1) www.bbc.com/future/article/20221116-the-floating-solar-panels-that-track-the-sun
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Well the Three Mile Island accident was in 1979, so I imagine that created a lot of resistance to continued construction across the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown. It wasn't just a fender bender.
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Jeez. Imagine walking into a construction site from 2 decades ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juragua_Nuclear_Power_Plant an abandoned nuclear station in Cuba
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The point of the various 100% solar, wind, battery projections that exist is that no new tech is needed. Things won't be 100% Solar, Wind, Battery because other minor techs like nuclear, hydro, tidal, biomass or whatever already exist to some degree and can be part of the system. But current solar, wind and battery tech is enough, we just need to build it. The first 80% is the easy bit, with the greates payback, so t…
Batteries cannot feasibly achieve the scale required to even out diurnal, let alone seasonal, fluctuations. The amount of batteries produced is nowhere near enough to satisfy demands for grid storage, and it'd massively set back electric vehicle adoption. Even as battery production ramps up, it's mostly going to go the EVs. Furthermore, electricity demand is going to go up too as people move from gas heating to elect…
We can't build more dams because there really is a hard limit on the geographical sites. With batteries, we already have commitments for factories to build 1TWh/year within the US alone by 2030. Worldwide production will be several times that.
Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh. With batteries lasting 20 years, only need 200GWh/year of production to fill that diurnal need.
Batteries are cheap and scaling at a scale that we couldn't dream of scaling our construction capacity. Our limited construction capacity should be reserved for high speed rail, subways, and housing in urban centers.
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What world do you live in that you don't see the burdensome regulation everywhere. Don't know anyone with a business? Never investigated how zoning works? Never filed taxes? Never used the healthcare system?
I've used all of these services and they all have problems. I can't say that those problems are due to "excessive regulation." In the case of healthcare, for example, most of the problems come from insurance companies who allegedly operate in the free market. I am strongly in favor of business, zoning, and environmental regulations because they provide valuable function. Moreover, none of that is relevant to nuclear…
Healthcare companies operate in an environment that is very much not a free market. For these companies, the regulatory burden is welcome as it is a high barrier to entry for new players. Read up on regulatory capture.
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The A-35 (a highway in Quebec) has been under construction since 1966. When finished, it will be 34 miles/55 km long. Two decades isn't very long for an infrastructure project, which is unfortunate since long-term planning benefits greatly from political stability, and many areas are seeing large shifts for the worse in that regard.
Two decades ought be a very long time for an infrastructure project. I guarantee you China and India aren't taking 47 years to build a 55 km highway.
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One benefit of building excess capacity of renewables - free electricity to power your automobile. If we actually priced excess energy smartly people would charge their cars in the daytime and spend ~ 0 to drive most of the year.
Electricity demand isn't that simple, it's not like Sheetz dropping the price of gas to $1.776/gallon on the 4th of July and having to bag the pumps within the hour [0]. Electricity is quite interesting as a market because it's truly the logical endpoint of just-in-time manufacturing: the time between generation and consumption is measured not on the order of months, weeks, days, or even hours, but in milliseconds .…
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There's little reason to build massive batteries at one spot, unless you are repurposing an only transmission line. Instead, a good chunk of grid storage is getting deployed right at the generation site of solar (and some wind), which allows more efficient use of that transmission line. Instead, we should be looking for large amounts of total install. However, this still won't happen much until it's actually needed b…
The tech is not here. The scale of grid storage required to fulfill just diurnal storage - let alone days or weeks to offset seasonal variation - is far beyond what batteries can provide. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 12 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60 TWh per day. Both of these figures are going to increase, as poorer countries develop and want amenities like air conditioning. Also, as…
Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x. Where does that leave us, assuming that it was magically economically acceptable to electricity customers to pay higher prices than necessary. 15 years for 2.2GW is about 150MW/year. 100x would be 15GW/year. That's nowhere close to being where we need for a full energy transition in the US.
Nuclear, if it figures out its huge problems with construction, will be a small player to help with climate change. But in the year 2023, we know the big players: solar, wind, and batteries. There's no more time for anybody else to scale to catch up. Nobody else has a tech that can compete with such fast dropping costs. The numbers and pace of change are hard to compete with.