691–700 of 1001 posts
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I'm not planning for anything because you can't plan for the next decade atm. How would you plan for 100s and 1000s of years? We should REDUCE the danger to those generations and not make it larger for no sane reason.
Nuclear is REDUCING the overall danger. Because the alternatives are much more dangerous.
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The biggest risk for nuclear is the government. That's why the government has to indemnify the companies against those risks. Spot market prices are not total system costs.
You’re right, the total system costs include a lot of things, including disposal of spent fuel. Which is apparently so expensive, nuclear can’t compete with renewables fairly.
Finland just built a spent-fuel repository for ~ € 1 billion. For the entire country. Just the single EPR at Olkiluoto 3 will produce electricity worth €100 billion over its lifetime if you assume a price of 10 cents/kWh.
So at 10 cents, it would be 1% of the price of electricity if Olkiluoto 3 had to finance the whole thing by itself.
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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%…
If you 6X the number of panels the price stays the same because you've increased the cost by 6X and increased the production by 6X.
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Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.
Have people walk with radioactive material sealed in lead containers down some km into a mine and back up?
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Political will is not the actual bottleneck. Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sens…
China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
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> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems. Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists hav…
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar. France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided h…
I wish Italy did the same. We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.
> I wish Italy did the same. They are in the process. Last I checked the bill to do so had passed the lower house and how needs to get ratified by the senate. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/italian-bill-on-...
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France also produces less CO2, sell electricity at reasonable and stable cost. If fossil fuel weren't massively subsided (impact the environment for free, wars with taxpayer money), Nuclear would have made a massive dent. Producing the same with other sources will have a massive immediate impact on the land / environment.
I like the idea that fossil fuel should take the hit from the impact on the environment, but don't see why nuclear should at the same time get a free pass for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Surely nuclear needs to take the hit from those as well in order to make the comparison apples-to-apples?
This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full fro…
Its bizarre that nuclear power is a left/right thing. It's clean, safe, and immediately displaces carbon emissions elsewhere. It doesn't require decades of storage and transmission improvements that may or may not come. It just works. Today. One day nuclear will no longer be neasessary. Until that day comes it is essential . Anyone who disagrees is confusing wishful that being for physics.
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Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
On the other hand their nuclear share is declining. It peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is today down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant.
For each plan they put out they lower their nuclear targets and push them further into the future.
Going from a French like buildout 10-15 years ago to having it as a token investment today.