> A corporation getting its way, irrespective of the democratic will of the people, or rather, those "insane NIMBYs". Corporatocracy truly is a beautiful thing. Generally a NIMBY is anti-progress and very selfish, putting themselves ahead of everyone. My dad was called to help resolve TMI during the meltdown and was part of the engineering design group the the Beaver Valley nuclear power station. People were complain…
>a NIMBY is anti-progress And what is "progress"? We both have ideas about what progress is. Are mine the same as yours?
You can define it how you like, the nature of a NIMBY is that whatever it is, they don't want it near THEM (hence Not In My Back Yard) and affecting THEM, but they don't care about how it may affect others. If they were against whatever the thing is it wouldn't matter if it were their backyard or someone else's, they're only concerned with THEIR lives. When all you care about is you, you don't care about others and that's anti-progress.
Who pays for it? If everybody gets all of the above for free, then why would they ever work and contribute to covering the cost of these free for everyone services? Once a large number of people stop working, who actually works to grow the food? Who builds the houses? Communism does not work.
Everyone pays for it. It's interesting that you bring up a large number of people no longer growing food as if that's not the current reality. What do all those people do now that they don't have to work for food?
Someone works grueling hours in the sun to grow it and then the rest of us work and pay those people that grew it money. Is this really a question?
If the people doing the growing are getting all of their needs met why would they grind to produce food to sell for money when they get money for free?
Why would the vast majority of people in the bottom 50% of the economic ladder work at all if they were getting all of their needs met at no cost to them?
You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system. The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance. The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.
That doesn't help after sunset on the west coast when residential demand peaks and there is little renewable power being generated anywhere in North America. In theory batteries or other storage could close that gap but realistically it's going to take decades to scale that up.
That's 16 hours of sunlight but more importantly that allows the US to distribute energy production from hydro, wind, and geothermal production across the country.
During the daylight hours solar is great of course but my point about power averaging out had more to do with the other forms of renewable energy.
Why stop there? EVERYBODY deserves healthcare and education too! I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things. The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an ur…
> Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them! You mean governments signaled the creation of a market by printing and lending free money to build those systems ?
That same government is now over 30 trillion dollars in debt.
You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system. The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance. The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.
There are huge downsides though because moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid (and cyber attacks) unless you also do less centralized production which is going to be more expensive.
That's the thing. HVDC works better in a decentralised manner. You don't have clocking to deal with so instead it's mainly a matter of just hooking power production and power draw up to what is basically a big cross-country busbar.
And you can connect as many bridging connections as you want without having to worry about phase or desync. Instead more connections generally just means power goes from production to consumption along more efficient paths.
Can someone explain why it's going to take so long to fully decommission TMI-2, the old reactor? Reading the commission report, they have about $733m in the decommissioning fund, while decommissioning is projected to cost $1B. Active demolition projected to start 2046, completed in 2052. They've started some work on debris demoval, but it looks they're going to take a break 2030-2046 to let the fund accrue (at expect…
Maybe this is going to shed more light on the subject? Looks like the coolant and 99% of fuel have been removed, maybe it's to also give more time to the radioactivity to subside.
No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage s…
We'd be screwed if a Mount Tambora black swan event happened again.
No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…
Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement. You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. Yo…
What you say makes sense. But what if we need to generate 50 times more electricity than we do now? At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land. You might think 50 is absurd, but consider this: right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3. Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person. That's another factor of 3. Then we want to increase our (clean) energy use. Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year. AI will also consume a lot of electricity. We will also need to build cities, if we are to lift billions of people out of their current rural life (in Africa, South America, India, etc). Everybody talks about solar as if the goal is to replace the current generation capacity. But the goal is to do that, and then more, much, much more. I think you need nuclear for that.
No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…
The worst part of this is, Thorium-based reactors seem to be the future of nuclear, but because of FUD and politics, no one is funding research to find out whether the theoretical thorium reactors are the way to go forward.
This is a country that simply hasn't built nuclear for ages. And the only one (two reactors) it did build was a brand new design (FOAK - First of a Kind). With COVID happening. Like everything, this gets better with practice.
This is a recommissioning of a 50 year old plant that’s been sitting idle for five years from an era when nuclear plants were all bespoke. Does that sound more like an nth of a kind project, or a first of a kind project?
It sounds like a refurbishment of a plant that was working just fine until 2019, not a new build of a design where you don't even know if it can be built.
(The originally submitted Vogtle-3/4 design could not be built)
In fact, last I checked they had already planned this refurbishment, but could not obtain the funds to do it, and thus shut down the plant instead.