181–190 of 252 posts
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Hungary is already using that (today we were 90% carbon-free thanks to solar), the problem is what to do when it gets dark.
Collect solar power in orbit (where sunlight is uninterrupted) and microwave[0] it to earth. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer#Microw...
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>we cannot build them anywere in Europe due to plain stupidity. Economics I think. Nuclear power has gone bankrupt in France already (arguably more than once) and gotten bailed out. Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price, with losses covered by the taxpayers. This despite relying on cheap cooling from rivers. Adding more expensive cooling won't help. We've quite recently reached mass…
> Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price Do you have any source? I'm not french and all I can hear from the news is that France's nuclear electricity is cheap, for example: https://thenextweb.com/news/france-energy-advantage-ai-data-... Now I'm curious what the truth is. Are these articles just fake-news trying to ride the AI wave? (not suggesting, just asking)
There are many sources and it's of course complicated, but around 6 eurocents per kWh seems to be an accepted semi-official figure.
"The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh"
(https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...)
One can also deduce that it's somewhere between the old ARENH price of 4 cents (which is known to be unsustainable) and the new price of 7 cents.
Prices for wholesale electricity in the FR region have dipped below 5 cents (monthly average) several times in recent years. (Source: Nordpool).
This is happening all across Europe right now - Romania, France too. https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/07/13/france-shuts-do... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea... We keep having folks here argue that nuclear, not renewables are the path to take to get rid of fossil fuels. I have strong doubts - it feels like that doesn't account for the sad realities of climate change.
High temperatures also severely affect solar panel efficiency.
This is happening all across Europe right now - Romania, France too. https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/07/13/france-shuts-do... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea... We keep having folks here argue that nuclear, not renewables are the path to take to get rid of fossil fuels. I have strong doubts - it feels like that doesn't account for the sad realities of climate change.
I have not seen anyone arguing only nuclear to get rid of fossil fuels, what I see is people arguing that we need nuclear to supplement renewables to remove fossil fuel and the other side saying renewables and batteries(and maybe the occasional gas peaker plant or two...) or bust.
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The principle cooling mechanism is vapourisation. The heat of vapourisation for water, converting liquid to steam, is 40.66 kJ/mol, or 2257 J/g. It takes a lot of energy to boil off water.[1] That compares with the latent heat of liquid water, the energy required to heat one unit of water by one degree, which is 4.2 J/g*K (where K is the delta temperature in Kelvin). Raising the temperature of input by, say, 10 degre…
Backing this up, these high numbers are for typical cooling towers where they vent to atmosphere. Once you get into closed loop PWRs the numbers get crazy. Actual figures for Naval Nuclear plants are classified, but as a nice round number example if you pressurize the secondary loop to 250psi you end up with about 1,725 kJ/kilogram to boil it. Absolutely terrifying stuff.
1,725 kJ/kg is 1,725 J/g, which is less than the enthalpy of vapourisation I'd quoted.
(Though yes, I understand your point: pressurisation raises boiling point, and so far as I'm aware, vapourisation energy.)
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> Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price Do you have any source? I'm not french and all I can hear from the news is that France's nuclear electricity is cheap, for example: https://thenextweb.com/news/france-energy-advantage-ai-data-... Now I'm curious what the truth is. Are these articles just fake-news trying to ride the AI wave? (not suggesting, just asking)
At this point in time it can be assumed that 90% of everything on the internet is a lie. French nuclear electricity is cheap because the government subsidizes it to keep it afloat. And because continental European electricity is generally expensive. It probably wouldn't survive in a free market.
This is happening all across Europe right now - Romania, France too. https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/07/13/france-shuts-do... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea... We keep having folks here argue that nuclear, not renewables are the path to take to get rid of fossil fuels. I have strong doubts - it feels like that doesn't account for the sad realities of climate change.
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Solar panels keep getting better and cheaper every year. Can't say the same for nuclear.
I believe this is why the USA recently declared that it's no longer going to follow the "linear no-threshold model" and "as low as reasonable achievable" principle of radiation exposure. In other words they're declaring that a small amount of radiation is good for you. Building a reactor without shielding and with a single open-cycle water loop should reduce costs, right? (Do you know what else reduces costs? Apparen…
Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.
Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.
It costed NuScale $500+ Million just to write the documents required for regulatory approval for a new reactor design.
Microsoft is spending $60 Million a year to build an LLM whose only purpose is to automate writing nuclear regulatory documents.
I don't support the Trump admin one iota, but I'm also saddened that democrats tend to be too safetyist to do an honest cost benefit evaluation of some of these insane regulations.