321–330 of 363 posts
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Oh yeah I get what you’re saying but is that a thing? Like CATL has had lines before that aren’t making a profit?
It's not a thing; people are just stuck in the 2000s and think that China can't beat the West technologically and therefore must be cheating.
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Are you saying Texas doesn't have much rooftop solar? That's surprising. I suppose largely due to low electricity costs making the investment not worth it? (And, I suspect, secondarily, utilities not really incentivizing it)
And the hail, I suppose.
Gardens and vinyl siding get shredded by hail and vehicles get smashed up, but solar panels generally do fine.
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The one who doesn't know how the grid works is you. Some demand is variable. But a lot (usually most) is not. So having reliable base generation is highly valuable and not having that base-load generation ramp up and down is a feature, not a bug. Intermittent generation is not variable, it is intermittent. Whereas to meet variable demand it would need to be dispatchable. Look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disp…
Love it. Just pretend that you can separate the grid into a ”baseload” portion and ”everything” else. Like I said, on a yearly basis the Californian grid goes from 15GW to 50 GW. That your nuclear grid will collapse when a cold spell hits leading to people freezing to death is fine. Thats a socialized loss! Someone else will need to solve it! I love that you completely ignored the Swedish example from last week. And…
Like France's grid has collapsed every year for the last 40 years.
And of course California's grid is well known for its stability. Or was that brownouts, rolling blackouts and high prices? Well, one of the two.
Nice chatting with you. Well, amusing at least.
Sweden just approved new nuclear construction, after rescinding a nuclear exit.
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Love it. Just pretend that you can separate the grid into a ”baseload” portion and ”everything” else. Like I said, on a yearly basis the Californian grid goes from 15GW to 50 GW. That your nuclear grid will collapse when a cold spell hits leading to people freezing to death is fine. Thats a socialized loss! Someone else will need to solve it! I love that you completely ignored the Swedish example from last week. And…
LOL. Like France's grid has collapsed every year for the last 40 years. And of course California's grid is well known for its stability. Or was that brownouts, rolling blackouts and high prices? Well, one of the two. Nice chatting with you. Well, amusing at least. Sweden just approved new nuclear construction, after rescinding a nuclear exit.
Just pretend that the fossil fuels doesn’t exist by exporting the nuclear electricity and have someone else build them and balance both grids!
What do you think would happen if you tried sticking two French grids with an over supply of nuclear powered electricity when no one wants the electricity next to each other?
You mean the brownouts storage and renewables have now completely fixed?
Yeah, way faster than handouts to new built nuclear power and waiting until the 2040s for the solution!
> Sweden just approved new nuclear construction, after rescinding a nuclear exit.
Yes. The current government has spent soon four years pushing paperwork around. They want nuclear power without having to accept the costs.
They seem to not want to have the costs associated with new built nuclear power subsidies on their political records for their entire careers.
I bet they will push through a monstrous handout package the final weeks before the election next September and then spend years crying about it being cut.
All this talk about energy independence and not a word on where are the solar cells, batteries and wind turbines made. If your grid is standing on components with short life time and which you can't manufacture at scale, you are not independent. You have just traded one dependence for another.
If you're talking about longevity of solar or wind turbines, given that their lifespan is measured in tens of years, it does give you some ability to respond to some external group cutting your supply off. It's not remotely the same as oil/gas dependency.
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I'm not sure how you are measuring complexity. The plant and equipment required to maintain a stable nuclear reaction and extract its heat is far more complex than that required to control a coal or natural gas firebox. This is reflected in the fact that to run 1GW of nuclear generation, on average (in the US) requires about 700 FTE to operate. The average for coal generation is about a third of that number. And the…
Kind of my fault, I specifically thought only about the powerplant + fuel part. Of course nuclear is much more complex as a whole, because it comes with at least two, sometimes three different business sections attached by default: Production and sale of rare isotopes, on-site laboratories and research and recycling of spent fuel. It's hard to beat gas. The small double digit MW plant in my town literally has only on…
That misses my point. Managing fuel and waste is more complex for nuclear. Producing heat using a nuclear reactor is more complex than producing it with coal and gas. And extracting useful energy from the heat is also more complex (given the low-grade heat that reactors provide).
At every step of the way you have more complexity in engineering and operations.
These engineering realities are independent of the regulatory environment or other activities occurring around the plant.
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You’re in a thread about California adding record amounts of battery storage. These batteries charge at noon a discharge in the evening while demand is peaking. This smooths out the supply across the day so it can meet the demand. California did struggle with the duck curve but it’s less of a problem now. When the next heatwave comes, evening aircon demand won’t be a problem.
> California did struggle with the duck curve but it’s less of a problem now. When the next heatwave comes, evening aircon demand won’t be a problem. The point of my top-level comment was that we don't actually know that. Not yet. I'll be thrilled if that's the case. I'll also be very surprised.
Will it handle an extended heatwave that also affects other states simultaneously? You’re right, we can’t know that with certainty until after it happens. But based on what I’ve read I’m confident it will.
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I will counter this. I think theres going to be a significant work to push down the costs of re-powering the aging nuclear fleet. Renewables will continue to be a force and work around the edges. Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence. Potentially but not certain future where other people are also purchasing nuclear assets which pushes down mai…
> Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence. If the goal is energy independence, renewables will provide that more cheaply. If the goals are the other side effects of nuclear power: isotopes, national pride (Curie!), workforce augmentation for nuclear submarines and nuclear weapons, then these goals also require far fewer reactors than enough to p…
The only cheap renewable infrastructure comes from an enemy country and PV solar panels start degrading the moment you install them.
If you think "energy independence" means "be completely and utterly dependent on Chinese manufacturing" then sure, solar and wind offer a quick path to that.
But that's not what the term means, it means "don't need to depend on any other country to keep the lights on". And for Western countries nuclear is really the only option there, whether you like it or not.
If you think nuclear is too expensive, just wait until you see the bill for the the continual refusal to develop indigenous electric capability the minute things start going sideways.
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They don’t even plan enough replacements to keep generation constant as aging plants are decommissioned
Evidence?
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This shouldn't be confused for an argument to build new nuclear power in the year 2025 when far cheaper alternatives exist. It is an observation that nuclear works really well if it already exists and the fixed costs have been paid for, and that nuclear was the best choice a few decades ago.
The only reason nuclear is more expensive than any alternative are absurd regulations, reporting duties, the practice of financing these projects on borrowed money with high interests and that many of the companies running these projects are career parking spots and accelerators for the social circles around politicians and the bureaucratic aristocracy. Complexity-wise they're about halfway between gas and coal.