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Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

cleanenergyreview.io

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Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#21

Post by throw0101d »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18
slopinthebag wrote: post #10

One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.

This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good. In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid). But instead they decided to massively overpay for w…

> Which dropped from 55% of electricity from coal in 1990 to 23% today. From 400 million tons to 130 tons.

And how much lower would have it been if they had chosen to keep their existing nuclear and reduce/retire their coal and/or gas? Certainly if they did not want to build new nuclear that's one thing, but they chose to keep the emitting stuff, which was really stupid IMHO.

Even now it'd be viable to re-start some of Germany's nuclear if they really wanted to reduce emissions:

* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...

* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#22

Post by throw0101d »

csb6 wrote: post #17
slopinthebag wrote: post #10

One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.

I think a lot of it was driven by the Chernobyl disaster, which was a massive environmental and health catastrophe. But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.

> But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.

Even other plants built in the same timeframe as Chernobyl are safer (not even getting to newer designs/builds), because in the West they were built with containment.

The founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank isn't anti-nuclear:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas

* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#23

Post by bonesss »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18
slopinthebag wrote: post #10

One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.

This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good. In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid). But instead they decided to massively overpay for w…

Ok, but if they had instead bootstrapped industrial nuclear technology into our known design-space we’d have actionable scalable solutions to transportation fuel generation (OPECs geopolitical sway, Chinese economic stability), mass desalination, environmentally friendly electrification of industrial processes, and industrial heat applications that could save incredible amounts of greenhouse emissions on a yearly basis. Instead we are reliving the oil dynamics of the 70s because of our poor industrial accounting, doubling down on emissions heavy tech in energy intensive operations, and maintaining harmful environmental chemical pollutants in our processes farmed out to the developing world…

Renewables in isolation have an entrenching effect on other aspects of our global emissions footprint & some likely causes of WW3. Humanity has an energy and greenhouse gas crisis, not an electrical generation crisis. Transportation fuels are central. Delaying our high energy future results in, among many other things, intensely polluting data centres instead of the obvious pairing of 24/7 large scale steady energy with no emissions to our increasingly digitally dictated economies.

Wind/wave/solar is nice, cheap enough anything pays for itself, but there is a bigger picture. Tribalism and anti-nuclear sentiment are not in line with our short to medium term environmental goals and are only marginally relevant to the long term and existential ones. We have already cursed generations by our trepidation, reluctance, and submission to monied interests. We cannot get an iPhone 20 without building and iterating on 19 models first.

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#24

Post by [deleted] »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #14

Discussions about baseload are meaningless unless you can articulate how much of it we're talking about (in gw, gwh, and $). Most discussions about this topic completely skip over that. Technically, what grids mostly need now that we have a lot of intermittent producers and consumers of energy is not a lot of very inflexible generation (which is what baseload boils down to) but a lot of flexibility in the grid that c…

[deleted]

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#25

Post by throw0101d »

cbsmith wrote: post #16
msandford wrote: post #3

The article concedes that there is an actual base load that's real (so not a myth) but then talks about another sort of related thing and says that's dumb. Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.

The article concedes that there is a minimum power consumption. Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.

> Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.

The strategy would be to have economical, non-intermittent generation. It would be non-intermittent supply because that part of demand is non-intermittent.

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#26

Post by wiml »

arn3n wrote: post #19
slopinthebag wrote: post #10

One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.

I have this stance. It’s, for me, a tail-risk calculation: For a given nuclear power plant to be more environmentally friendly than equivalent coal, you have to price in the probability of a nuclear catastrophe with the fact that such catastrophes create fallout that can outlast human civilization . I can expect that a well-built nuclear plant might not have a catastrophe in my lifetime. But when the consequences are…

Environmental disasters that will likely outlast human civilization? Coal does that in normal operation.

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#28

Post by bryanlarsen »

bonesss wrote: post #23
bryanlarsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good. In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid). But instead they decided to massively overpay for w…

Ok, but if they had instead bootstrapped industrial nuclear technology into our known design-space we’d have actionable scalable solutions to transportation fuel generation (OPECs geopolitical sway, Chinese economic stability), mass desalination, environmentally friendly electrification of industrial processes, and industrial heat applications that could save incredible amounts of greenhouse emissions on a yearly bas…

So, nuclear powered trucks are the solution?

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#29

Post by slopinthebag »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18
slopinthebag wrote: post #10

One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.

This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good. In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid). But instead they decided to massively overpay for w…

But had they invested in nuclear perhaps coal would be down to 0% today, and the same cost reduction would have applied to nuclear instead, with nuclear being orders of magnitude cheaper?

Re: Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

#30

Post by bryanlarsen »

slopinthebag wrote: post #29
bryanlarsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good. In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid). But instead they decided to massively overpay for w…

But had they invested in nuclear perhaps coal would be down to 0% today, and the same cost reduction would have applied to nuclear instead, with nuclear being orders of magnitude cheaper?

If they had invested in nuclear in 2000, they'd have maybe 3 plants built by now.
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