161–170 of 437 posts
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What is with "The winter is coming" vibe? Your comment is too vague for me to understand.
Did you not read about the European energy crisis? Here, let me help you out: https://search.brave.com/search?q=european+energy+crisis&sou...
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> I am a fan of nuclear energy for various reasons, and it's obvious that the safety and waste problems can be solved No you don't from your arguments. > The technology is not there yet. There are a lot of promising companies that are trying to solve the safety problem.[...], we don't have decades, we need to start replacing coal right now. That's bullshit. Even nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically…
> No you don't from your arguments. One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense. > nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal. That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables. > France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades [...] Nucle…
Starting a discussion with a "I'm a huge fan" before spending the next 10 min to debunk the thing is not "being a fan of" but just a sign of being hypocritical, or manuipulative or both.
> That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables.
Renewable alone (Without Coal or Gas) implies nationally to have close to 100% of the production capacity in storage alone (Battery, power2Gas or hydro storage) to compensate solar / wind intermittency. Which no country on Earth is able to do right now: not even close to, not even as a minor part of their production. That is the real straw-man argument.
Climate emergency need actions and solutions now, Nuclear is one of them. Dreams scenario where storage does everything renewable cannot do is not realist with the current technology available excepted in powerpoint bullshit slides. And it will not for the next 20 years even with a Colosseum size investment.
> The levelized cost of nuclear is about twice as high as that of solar or wind, see page 8 of the referenced EIA report [1].
Solar and winds are currently highly subsidized and are still intermittent. With storage cost considered, any of their hypothetical advances goes into vapor.
At the opposite, France was producing electricity cheaper than its neighbours for around 30 years before photovoltaic and Wind power even became a thing.
> Again, strawman's argument. The discussion is about what should be built, not what has been built.
The discussion is about what can be and should be done now to reduce CO2 emission as fast as possible if we do not want get toasted in 20 years. Bcause in 20 years, it is already too late.
And the easy answer is built damn nuclear power plants and at the world scale. Not take 20 years to play with techs that are still on the design board: Power2Gas is one of them. And everything else is not scalable in term of storage.
> and power to gas has an end to end loss of roughly 50%
I do see power to gas as the last desperate attempt of the oil and gas industry to stay relevant in the next decade. Nothing more. For the rest it's a joke. It is a joke in term of investment, it is a joke in term of efficiency, it is a joke in term of economical viability. Hydrogen has its usage, but not as backbone of the power grid.
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Did you not read about the European energy crisis? Here, let me help you out: https://search.brave.com/search?q=european+energy+crisis&sou...
I suppose it is my fault for asking about less vagueness. Who is asking for trillions? Who is flying out of a window?
Governments and their owners/political donors.
> Who is flying out of a window?
Common sense. We could solve climate and achieve net zero carbon in a decade if we focused on 4th gen nuclear. But that's not as profitable to the aforementioned donors, so it ain't happening.
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Nuclear fuel is incredibly abundant. People talk about the small amounts of nuclear fuel available but completely ignore how energy dense it is. You need very little of it. There's vastly more energy in nuclear ore in the ground than there is even coal and oil combined in the ground.
Do you have a source for this? To my knowledge, uranium would run out in a decade or two if one would use it to supply 100% of the world primary energy consumption [1]. Coal is obviously way more abundant. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
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> baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Why not? Unless you're ok with not having reliable baseline power at all.
For that we should look at what baseline is. Ideally all our power sources would adjust instantaneously to demand. In reality that is not possible. Traditionally, power plants which can be run constantly at fixed output (i.e. coal plants, nuclear power plants), have been cheaper to operate, so we used those for "baseline" power and more expensive adjustable plants (e.g. gas turbines) to follow the load. However, the…
Overprovisioning by how much? Currently ( at least since a month or so) across Europe there's a meteorological phenomenon that makes for cold temperatures, lower than usual wind speeds, and clouds. 2 out of the 3 main renewable power sources ( solar, wind, tidal) are heavily impacted ( wind most of all iirc) and producing less electricity than usual, while people need to warm themselves. And this is expected to continue into the winter.
To combat such a scenario if everyone was on renewables+storage+interconnects, you'd have to built massive storage ( which we don't have the tech/space for) or massive interconnects from really far away places like Africa.
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> Newer data says otherwise OK, GLWT. > And variability is easy to deal with: overbuild and/or storage. Southern Australia shows how it is done. Australian energy is 72% fossil fuel, 11% hydro, rest solar and wind. https://www.worlddata.info/australia/australia/energy-consum...
He did say South Australia, which is investing heavily into renewables and battery storage. The thing is that Australia has a huge coal lobby (being one of the biggest producers in the world) and the current conservative government is essentially in bed with them. Incidentally Australia is also one of the biggest producers of Uranium.
So adding unreliable renewables to a grid is not an impressive achievement as long as you have a reliable source on the same grid. This is why I asked for examples of countries.
To switch entirely to wind or solar, you have to spend a lot on battery tech or other energy storage, and those costs dwarf the costs of the solar panels or wind turbines, and that is ultimately what determines whether something is feasible to scale up to the entire grid.
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> This might be the turning point that kills humanity. What makes you say that? To me it seems like the worst case is probably human deaths in the hundreds of millions, not extinction.
As you accurately describe the threat is mass conflict and disorder. Why do you willingly support that or changing the narrative? Global instability is likely to lead to more conflict and war without any guarantees of end. A vast population reduction of vulnerable people for a lot of people IS extinction.
I’m sure where you got that impression. But language matters and the worst case outcome isn’t a situation that “kills humanity”. I was asking for clarification in case there was something I was missing in terms of impact that would actually lead to extinction, which by definition means a complete end to all human life.
Read between the lines. It's not about the best solution(s), it's about _their_ solution. Nuclear solves the problem they champion, which means, it negates the need for their efforts and existence (economic). Ironically, the rejection of nuclear as a viable option seems to be the result of a psychological existential threat to the supposed "elite" of our world. The mask is off. Protecting the future of humanity isn't…
The reason nuclear is unpopular is that it is expensive. It's more expensive than coal and gas typically. It's also very slow to deploy. A decade is nothing. We'll hit 2035 when several countries are planning to be 100% renewable powered in about 13 years. That's not a lot of time to build a meaningful amount of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants coming online recently are not great examples of speedily execution on a ti…
As i mentioned elsewhere, much of Europe is currently facing an ongoing wind shortfall ( since around a month ago and projected to continue into the winter), which is adding extra fuel to the ongoing energy crisis.
To cover such a potential future scenario with renewables only, you'd need to build absolutely massive storage, which would certainly change the costs.
But in any case, fuck the costs - investment is needed into more nuclear, different types of storage tech, more renewables, because this is a very serious issue and making the wrong decisions purely based on costs would be really sad.