441–450 of 512 posts
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Or just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.
The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
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Blows me away that energy policy is so political, and that somehow self-styled libertarians who don’t say a peep about oil subsidies are deeply offended by renewable ones. It you consider yourself libertarian can you at least be forward-thinking enough to see that shifting to renewables is also a step towards decentralization?
Hi! How is it decentralization if it's subsidized by the government? And which libertarians are in favor of oil subsidies? I'd like to have a talk with them
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The only credible competition against a state funded nuclear plant is hypothetical next gen geothermal power though. Nuclear won't save the planet, as few countries can develop a nuclear industry. But for countries that have one, it should be a no brainer if not for irrational nuclear bomb fears.
> The only credible competition against a state funded nuclear plant is hypothetical next gen geothermal power though. If we extend renewables and batteries on historical experience curves they could become incredibly cheap, with solar well below $0.01/kWh. Nuclear couldn't even make an operating profit in an environment with solar that cheap.
Most of the European population leave on places that are more northern then Montreal, we have less than 8 hours of daylight per day, and a significant fraction of it is cloudy.
There's no storage solution that can store the excess summer solar exposure (when we get more than 16hours on sun per day) to reinject it into the grid in winter. That's literally science fiction tech, and that's what you'd need to make solar + storage a reliable source in Europe.
Solar in California, India or the middle east? Sure. Solar in Europe, Canada and even Japan, good luck (and yes, these countries constitute most of nuclear power plants operators).
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Dropping a nuke on a city where nuclear plants aren't … And it's not even close. That'd be exactly like the difference between the sole victim of the Fukushima nuclear accident vs the 19 000 dead from the tsunami that caused the accident. If nukes get involved, all bets are off no matter what, millions of people would die and the consequences of a subsequent reactor meltdown would be negligible compared to the mess y…
> the sole victim of the Fukushima nuclear accident This is a misrepresentation. There is a single person who the courts have established was (to their satisfaction) killed by nuclear exposure from Fukushima, although even that is quite debatable. But that doesn't mean there weren't any victims, just that they could not (or could not yet) be identified. The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be l…
In comparison to the 19000 persons who died directly from the Tsunami? Yes it can be neglected. That's two orders of magnitude smaller!
> Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regulate it.
No industry on earth is even remotely as regulated as nuclear industry. Over the span of the period your “200 excess death” have been calculated, more people in that particular region of Japan will have died from industrial causes, from any other industry (you should check how many people die each year from professional deceases in places as mundane as hairdressing saloons … Should we ban hair coloring?)
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I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants. The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion when they were dumb enough to sleep there.
Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable. As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering. Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of…
All these industrial powerhouses like Iceland and Albania!
Lol... Hey now, I am Albanian, and we have delicious food. :) And export a bunch of random things (like Oregano, Olive Oil, Lavender, Shoes, etc..), and some steel and oil. But, mostly 'light industry' stuff.
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> not really surprising first countries to leave fossil fuels behind are also countries with mountains and rivers What's surprising is countries sharing natural resources are among the pioneers, despite the geopolitical implication... like Ethiopia testing the Egyptian waters by building dams on the Nile.
Maybe you should lookup when these damns were built. I wouldn't be surprised if in 1970 there were also 9 countries who didn't use any FFs. Same 9 countries of course. If you can build hydro you do. Problem is, we already have them everywhere they can be. And even now, hydro is only about 10% of all electric power production worldwide.
[0] Ethiopia outfoxes Egypt over the Nile's waters with its mighty dam, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz71zndj001o (2025).
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> The only credible competition against a state funded nuclear plant is hypothetical next gen geothermal power though. If we extend renewables and batteries on historical experience curves they could become incredibly cheap, with solar well below $0.01/kWh. Nuclear couldn't even make an operating profit in an environment with solar that cheap.
Price is irrelevant when you need most of your electricity in a season when there's barely any sun. Most of the European population leave on places that are more northern then Montreal, we have less than 8 hours of daylight per day, and a significant fraction of it is cloudy. There's no storage solution that can store the excess summer solar exposure (when we get more than 16hours on sun per day) to reinject it into…