111–120 of 183 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not in the same ballpark. Chernobyl nearly poisoned the entire continent’s water supply. Nuclear waste is far far worse than excess water.
How would Chernobly poison all of Europe's (or you mean Asia's?) drinking water while all of our nuclear testing hasn't?
Extending the life of existing power infra is low-hanging fruit for more power short term, but the economics of renewables are just unstoppable. Article states 93% of new generation capacity was renewable which is good, but I can sense that nimbyism is growing towards wind and solar. Not to mention the animus towards China who has wisely cornered manufacturing of these. The US has shot itself in the foot because of i…
I still don't understand the economics when it comes to power all the time, not some of the time, and I rarely see that being mentioned in this sort of gung-ho post. I want to feel how you feel - can you help with the specifics there?
The way a traditional grid works is that you have baseload plants (nuclear, coal) that generate all the time and peaker plants (hydro, natural gas) that make up the difference between the baseload generation and the current demand by varying the amount they generate to match demand in real time.
The higher demand periods when you're not using electricity to heat buildings are typically daytime and early evening. Solar generates power during daytime. That makes "use solar instead of natural gas during daytime" an easy win. You can also do things like "charge electric vehicles mostly during daytime" and use solar again. Then you're still using natural gas in the early evening but you save a lot of fuel (and CO2) by not having to use them during the day. Meanwhile the gas plants are still there to use in the evening and then you can use them on a day when it's cloudy.
That's still where we are in most places. There isn't enough solar in the grid yet to completely replace natural gas during most of the solar generation window, and we could add even more by electrifying transportation, so we can still add a lot more solar before we have to really deal with intermittency at all.
Optimists would then like to extrapolate the economics of doing that to doing 100% of generation from renewables, which would require actually dealing with it.
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By that logic solar power should also be banned, due to the amount of coal required per panel (0) both for reduction and Czochralski process. And remember, solar panel factories don't run on solar power. (0) https://co2coalition.org/2024/05/21/coals-importance-for-sol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_Coalition
(0) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we...
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>incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China) That isn't how that works. Domestic students are just as cheap.
Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Tr…
I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.
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The wars in Ukraine and irán have also highlighted what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic. The idea that such will never happen is as silly as the idea that there will never be an accident or a tsunami. But passive safety won't stop a missile.
A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.
Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.
(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)
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Base load is marketing term for electricity supply which cannot economically follow the demand curve and is only affordable if you can use a constant supply of it. It's not a feature, it's a bug. What you want is dispatchable power. The term vaguely makes sense if there are sources of electricity that output a constant supply that are cheaper than the dispatchable sources of power. Like nuclear was supposed to be (bu…
Base load is a feature, not a bug. Companies planning new industrial facilities need long-term guarantees of reliable 24×7 power with predictable rates. Otherwise they'll build elsewhere. Dispatchable power doesn't help them.
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Base load is a feature, not a bug. Companies planning new industrial facilities need long-term guarantees of reliable 24×7 power with predictable rates. Otherwise they'll build elsewhere. Dispatchable power doesn't help them.
Base load power cannot provide predictable rates because it provides a fixed amount of power that the market then bids on. If there's too much demand rates go up arbitrarily high. If there's too little rates go to zero. Dispatchable power is the only sort of power that provides 24x7 power with predictable rates. If there's more demand, you produce more power (at the same cost). If there's less, you produce less so yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The wars in Ukraine and irán have also highlighted what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic. The idea that such will never happen is as silly as the idea that there will never be an accident or a tsunami. But passive safety won't stop a missile.
> what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic The same holds for hydro. Even worse, there would be no time for evacuation. Yet nobody is considering banning dams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
"After the disaster, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government remained silent to the public, while no media were allowed to make reports."
"The official documents of this disaster were considered a state secret until 2005 when they were declassified."
I don't think this article did the math right. In the linked source from the article ( https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... ), in 03/2026 combined generation from hydro (26 TWh), wind (53), solar (27.7), bioenergy (3.82), and other renewables (1.51) is 112.03 TWh, vs 120 TWh for natural gas. It's still an impressive number but it is still slightly less than natural gas.
I think you misread the solar number. The link says 37.6TWh solar with the remaining numbers matching what you wrote. That gives a total of 120.42TWh.
I don't think this article did the math right. In the linked source from the article ( https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... ), in 03/2026 combined generation from hydro (26 TWh), wind (53), solar (27.7), bioenergy (3.82), and other renewables (1.51) is 112.03 TWh, vs 120 TWh for natural gas. It's still an impressive number but it is still slightly less than natural gas.