451–460 of 1001 posts
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I agree, there are better options for mass scale long term energy storage than batteries, e.g. (green) hydrogen, methane
Pumped hydro is currently the cheapest long term energy storage by a significant amount.
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Naval reactors use HEU specifically so that humans can live and work in close proximity for long periods of time. Land-based deployments don't have this constraint.
What does the enrichment of uranium have to do with humans working in proximity? In both low-enriched land based plants and in marine nuclear power plants, the radioactive materials are contained in the pressure vessel and inner cooling loop.
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>commercially operating And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money. >how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics? Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors. Or solar. And how…
Efficiency is not the problem. We have plenty of nuclear fuel.
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Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.
Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…
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China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
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China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base. Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
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>the entire US Navy uses them Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market? You are the one conflating things that have absolutely no connections.
"Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?" No but they do use those reactors to power areas in times of disaster relief.
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Cool, the price of solar right now is $30-$85 / MWh, and that range is dependent on whether you got storage included in the bill or not. And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production. Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years. Nuclear is economically a…
Is that price for Switzerland? What time of year is that power available? Here's how much each energy source contributes to Switzerland's grid: https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/strom/produktion Right now, solar and other renewables produce enough energy to meet about two thirds of our demand. Solar alone produced around 55GWh of the needed 169GWh yesterday. Look at new year's day though: consumption was 192GWh (14%…
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Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.
No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative. We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive. It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition". [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
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That’s a strange way of wording “Germany burns more coal today than they would be if they hadn’t replaced their nuclear power plants with coal power plants”. Jumbling up the word order doesn’t make Germany replacing their nuclear plants with coal plants a good thing.
No, it's not a good thing, but it's also not an example of the claim that countries replaced nuclear with coal. Still waiting on those countries from the previous poster.
If Germany eventually got more renewables, great. That does not retroactively mean that they didn’t replace nuclear with coal. That’s just replacing nuclear with coal and then doing something else afterward.
It’s like if someone left their first wife and got married to someone else, then did that a second time, you wouldn’t say that, based on who they’re married to today, they left their first wife for their third. That intermediate step happened.