341–350 of 612 posts
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Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Nuclear capacity: +2GW in 2025 ( https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... ) Solar capacity: ¬300GW capacity https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202512/26/cont...
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It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining…
Those are nice pictures but I can take the same pictures in the USA. Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA. Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also sola…
And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.
The article here starts with: Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
Is the US anywhere in this ballpark?
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This planet-scale map of the global electricity network is incredible.
I expect to see it on the front page of HN by the end of the day
7 days ago, 93 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536866
Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear? Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it? And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
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You can see the pillars they are built on in for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-13/china-s-s... (direct link to image: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iy93Jvbye2e... ) Solar panels are meant to be water proof, after all they are meant to survive rain storms and melting snow and coastal weather.
"meant to survive rain storms" doesn't really mean the same as "meant to survive flooding", especially not "meant to survive flooding with salt water". For example, a car survives outdoor weather year-round, but you probably wouldn't want to buy one that was submerged in a flood zone. This plant seems to be floating, though, so they stay above water regardless.
Seems like a weird location to me, but what do I know.
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I’m anti nuclear on cost reasons but that’s excessively pessimistic. Nuclear can use seawater for cooling, and being colder offsets the cost premium of using salt water. Your 2050’s comment assumes a level of dysfunction that’s presumably exaggerated. Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic. The cost of canceled nuclear projects is generally quite low compared to lifetime subsidies of n…
> Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic. The average time globally is 14 years. The latest point of reference in the west, Vogtle was announced in 2006 and came online in 2025, 19 years later. It took 7 years alone just to start building it. There's no chance this would take less time in Italy, where you need to also find a suitable place, you don't have the know-how and there's an an…
Until there’s actual funding talking about nuclear doesn’t really mean anything. Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.
> These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Using the worst examples means there’s something very wrong with each of them.
All I see is missed opportunities to build a bunch less nuclear power plants and call it a day, without messing up with the landscape. Am I the only one? I believe if we Europeans and Americans start building nuclear power plants again we could finally compete. Renewable energy is not constant and has a storage problem
But I get it, and tradeoffs are necessary.
Another reason China may prefer this to more concentrated nuclear power is that is is much more distributed and resilient to targeted attacks.
It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining…
Those are nice pictures but I can take the same pictures in the USA. Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA. Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also sola…
Meanwhile, China has made the obvious realization that independence from oil and gas is economically, geopolitically, and environmentally beneficial.
It genuinely makes me so sad to see the US not doing the same. Having grown up to the constant beat of “energy independence” as the core goal of a party it seemed obvious that the nearly limitless energy that rains down from the sky would be the answer. But instead we’ve kept choosing the option which requires devastating our, and other’s around the world, community. That’s not to exclude the harsh reality of mining…