In my mind, the only allowable carbon offset should be an investment fund for new nuclear reactors.
A truly unlimited energy source with solve everything from poverty to wars over oil.
First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
> an artificial problem caused by regulation Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water. > Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight. It's often repeated, including by a certain political grouping, but never established I…
> Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water. That's just plain wrong. I don't know whether regulations in this case are bloat or not, but you're basically saying that regulations are never bloated, which is abjectly false.
Perhaps respond to the actual claim and not a strawperson.
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries are not for riding out winter, they're for evening out the daily load. You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation, as well as make long-distance interconnects. Pumped hydro is also extremely interesting for obvious reasons. Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Can we solve that without sacrificing safety? Can we…
One benefit of building excess capacity of renewables - free electricity to power your automobile. If we actually priced excess energy smartly people would charge their cars in the daytime and spend ~ 0 to drive most of the year.
Electricity demand isn't that simple, it's not like Sheetz dropping the price of gas to $1.776/gallon on the 4th of July and having to bag the pumps within the hour [0].
Electricity is quite interesting as a market because it's truly the logical endpoint of just-in-time manufacturing: the time between generation and consumption is measured not on the order of months, weeks, days, or even hours, but in milliseconds. It travels at 300,000 km per second/186,000 miles per second [1], which is incomprehensibly fast (it's fast enough to cross the widest span of the continental US, 4,799 km/2,892 miles, over 60 times in a single second).
As such, in order to maintain 50/60 Hz at nominal voltages and amperages (and that frequency is very important - in a 60 Hz system, 59.4 Hz is "we have 5 minutes before the entire grid blows up and plunges us into a 3+ month blackout" level bad [2]), utility companies aren't in the power generation business so much as they are in the predictions business. They have to take everything into account, from the weather to consumer purchasing habits, to determine exactly how much power needs to be generated at any given moment or the whole grid will collapse. That wide area synchronous grids like the UCTE (continental Europe) and Eastern Interconnection (eastern US) are able to operate is a testament to human ingenuity, as these really are quite fragile machines.
All this to say that you can't just "make power free when there's excess and people will magically use it up". Even if we can reliably predict excesses, people won't really be able to take advantage of it unless their schedule lends itself to it (e.g. being able to plug their car into a charger at work that only turns on when there's an excess), but even then, when done on a large scale, this only makes the predictions even harder for utility companies to plan around (think: thundering herd problem but on a national scale). At a macro level, it just doesn't work.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/business/sheetz-july-fourth-g...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity?useskin=v...
[2]: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3 U235) in a day. I'll take this bet. Edit: Tried to edit the edit but somehow deleted the rest of the edit. It was something to the tune of how a big problem with renewables is the fact that peak solar production does not match peak ene…
But remember that a square kilometer of solar panels needs maybe ten square kilometers of actual land. Anywhere other than at the equator, the panels need to be spaced far enough apart not to shadow each other. On a north-facing slop they would be even more spaced out. Do that in two dimensions, so they can track the sun, and keeping one square meter of panels perpendicular to the sun requires a suprisingly large foo…
Nobody builds solar farms on "north-facing slopes". Nobody is making solar panels "track the sun". Nobody even proposes "clearcutting forests" for solar farms. Trolling is in strict violation of site guidelines.
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
you don't need to overbuild nuclear; nuclear plants commonly have a capacity factor of over 80%
The grid has wild differences between day and night. Who cares if you can run at 100% when no one wants the power because everyone is asleep?
negative lmps have long been a result of baseload plants exceeding demand at night; widespread deployment of pv has turned that on its head, because now it's midafternoon when prices go negative, but also in a sense exacerbated it. consequently, expect rapid development of grid-scale storage: pumped hydro and massive li-ion, of course, but also maybe centrifugal trompe isothermal air compression, sodium-ion batteries, or high-temperature liquid-metal batteries
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#446If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete. The world will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon. *excluding research or military reactors of course.
> If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete.
On the contrary, solar and wind are _waaaaaay_ too expensive if you actually want your generation to be reliable. Just ask Texas.
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a line of reasoning that baseload is a billing and profit construction, an artifice of the needs of coal-fired and nuclear power. There is nothing innately wrong with over building renewable and storage, and a transmission network. It's an argument about economics, not physics.
That's absolutely true, but the economic argument still carries weight. How many acres of land, how many rare earth minerals, etc. are required to produce the load profile you need with batteries and renewables vs including baseload flat generation from nuclear? This is still an economic question but very relevant.
Literally no "rare earth minerals" are used in production of solar or batteries. Exactly zero.
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people bother mining it?
Because mining it is relatively cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it is economical to throw away >95% of the fuel rather than try to burn it all or recycle it. Fuel costs are 10% of the cost of nuclear electricity. The vast majority is financing.
> you can get uranium out of seawater for the same price as mining it
> Why do people bother mining it?
> Because mining it is relatively cheap.
Something does not add up here.
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
The A-35 (a highway in Quebec) has been under construction since 1966. When finished, it will be 34 miles/55 km long. Two decades isn't very long for an infrastructure project, which is unfortunate since long-term planning benefits greatly from political stability, and many areas are seeing large shifts for the worse in that regard.
Two decades ought be a very long time for an infrastructure project. I guarantee you China and India aren't taking 47 years to build a 55 km highway.
I would be stunned if it took 47 days.
Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
He has shook up and revitalized two industries and proven his ability to execute and get people motivated to do significant work with physics and manufacturing and project management that are complex. It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me and aligns with his sustainable energy focus but downvoters seem to disagree!
Based on everything he has said to date, he would just cover a few square km with solar. In that one talk he said building enough solar to power the entire world is similar in effort to all the cars that have ever been built. So we can certainly do it.
Also doesn’t he already own a solar company? Tesla is already a battery company. They do sell industrial cells. But I hear they have a bad track record of not delivering to spec.