401–410 of 500 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Like Germany: coal and the energy provided by the rest of the EU. So, from actual non-intermittent sources like checks notes nuclear?
No, nuclear is terrible for covering seasonality, since unless it's used with high capacity factor the cost per kWh skyrockets.
wat
How is nuclear bad at covering the seasonality of, for example, winter in the Nordics?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would prefer to reduce emissions using technology that exists today, I know it works, and I have seen it operate at national grid scale, not speculative future tech.
You do highlight something there: the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance. If not, the 40 (or 60, or 80) year investment horizons needed to partially shore up the bad economics of nuclear become utterly absurd. (The criticism that renewables don't last as long as nuclear suddenly looks like praise when viewed in this light; renewables don't need those very…
1. No, it doesn't
2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
> But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-log plot, has never worked out well.
Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
> Something like hydrogen seems guaranteed to be available if needed. Realize that green hydrogen is needed
Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales. All known methods are either extremely complex and volatile, or require large amounts of energy to release hydrogen back, or cannot store much hydrogen to begin with: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S025405842...
> I'll add that if you are sticking to currently available commercial technologies, nuclear is a loser
something something assuming no rapid advances or something
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged. What other kind of subsidy is there?
Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industri…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when the world ran completely out of copper?
First: I completely agree that extrapolating current ressource use towards a "exhaustion date" is naive, and historically things never worked out that way. But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do highlight something there: the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance. If not, the 40 (or 60, or 80) year investment horizons needed to partially shore up the bad economics of nuclear become utterly absurd. (The criticism that renewables don't last as long as nuclear suddenly looks like praise when viewed in this light; renewables don't need those very…
> the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance. 1. No, it doesn't 2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction 3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances > But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-l…
It does, for the reason I gave. You didn't give a reason why not.
> 2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
Incredibly, you seem unaware of just how rapidly the cost of solar and wind and batteries have dropped.
If we project the demonstrated experience curve of PV forward another five doublings or so, PV energy will be delivered at under $0.01/kWh. This is basically impossible for nuclear to compete with.
> 3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
Unlike renewables, nuclear hasn't demonstrated a good experience curve. If anything, it has shown a negative experience curve.
But in any case, even if nuclear were capable of rapid advance, this would still argue against assuming 40 (or 60, or 80) year lifetimes for nuclear power plants when calculating their economics. The power plants would be obsolete and uncompetitive long before that time span ended.
One cannot have it both ways: both assuming rapid advance, and assuming long economic life.
> Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
One can model to determine the effect of intermittency and renewables still come out on top. This is why renewables are being installed globally and nuclear largely isn't. Listen to the market when it's sending you such a strong signal.
> Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales.
Yes we do. We store it just like we store natural gas, in underground caverns. This is demonstrated technology, and would be very cheap (capex > something something assuming no rapid advances or something
I'm pointing out your requirement that no advances be considered also rules out nuclear. I'm willing to consider nuclear advances, I just note that nuclear hasn't been very good at delivering them quickly or economically, unlike renewables and storage.
Makes alot of sense. Canada has: - one of the largest uranium reserves - a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU - experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington) and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years. Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that…
I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it. Nuclear power is the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even then, the costs came down 10x in a decade, so it seems foolish to commit to nuclear which has no prospects of getting cheaper.
It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those poten…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It cuts both ways. Solar and wind are great but intermittent, and the storage issue seems to be treated as a solvable ergo solved problem. Add a sprinkle of "overcapacity", gas peakers and demand shaping and we can have a fully green grid. So why didn't this happen anywhere - except perhaps two of the sunniest and windiest places in the world, Australia and California, where energy demand (AC) also matches production…
What doesnt add up? Almost all western industrialized nations are on a downward trajectory (or flat) regarding electricity use. So there is simply little economic incentive to "greenify" electricity quickly because demand is already met by existing infrastructure. Lots of people are completely unwilling to pay more for energy just to decrease emissions quickly (you might be surprised about peoples selfishness!). But…
In any case - displacing fossil fuels is cheaper than operating a fully renewable grid - because you have the luxury of simply dialling back gas or coal production when it's windy and sunny. The proble starts when you dont rely on these at all - this is my point. I haven't seen this happen anywhere or anywhere close to it either.
It's one thing to provide some marginal power generation in a grid based predominantly on fossil fuels, and another to do the same thing without that backup. The typical solar PV plant doesn't care at all about energy storage - it's someone else's problem, and hence cost as well.