641–650 of 1001 posts
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We absolutely should cover those, but there is a lot of farmland. There may not be enough "mall-land"
Well, when i see solar panels atop every mall and commercial building, when every home has a solar roof, then i'll entertain chopping down wilderness or sacrificing farmland to the cause. I still see plent of bare rooftop to address first.
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Last I checked they're also outcompeting everyone in new coal plants https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Their capacity factors are getting ever lower and at the same time they added more renewables than the growth for the electricity grid. In other words, their CO2 emissions are set for structural decline simply by the amount of renewables being built. China is way ahead of the west. https://theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-e...
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Jeez. Imagine walking into a construction site from 2 decades ago.
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.
That was in 1937 - the new main railway station does not exist yet (though it looks like it might actually be built this time) and post even moved out of the historic building last year. :P
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How many hundreds of billions in subsidies would be required to once again, for the nth time since the 1950s prove that nuclear is truly dead outside of luxury niche applications like submarines? Today renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels which in turn are cheaper than than nuclear. Through pure economic terms the world is steaming towards a new cheaper energy equilibrium based on renewable energy. We are current…
Its pretty clear whats going to happen. Energy companies will provide the absolute minimum redundancies and will make formidable profits most years. Every 10-15 years there will be some catastrophic blackout due to unlikely weather events and everybody will scream murder. The energy companies will swear to do better and maybe some toothless regulations will be legislated. The politicians will be happy to be bought of…
We seem to get by fairly well without those in most places. There are various solutions.
I think it's more likely the current exponential improvements in renewables increase such that we have to come up with new uses for the excess power.
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Oh good grief, not that Lazard "study" again. They took the cost to build Vogtle, which is one of the most or even the most expensive outlier in terms of time/cost overruns of all time, and decided to make that the baseline for "the cost of nuclear power". When the average time to build a nuclear reactor in the world has consistently been around 7.5 years. For the last 50 years, and also for the ones that came online…
Which new nuclear would you suggest instead? Hinkley C will cost about $160/MWh, right in the range given by Lazard.
Time to construct a nuclear plant takes on average 7.5 years, a number that hasn't really budged in the last 50 years.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
And since financing (i.e. interest) is the primary cost of nuclear (~50%), time is money.
Hinkley and Flamanville are examples of the EPR, a brand new reactor type that is both at the start of its learning curve, always problematic, and also apparently a design that is particularly difficult to build. And both Europe and the US haven't really built any nuclear plants for quite a long time, so the know-how to build them is just not there. Oh, and the regulators sometimes change regulations after parts of the plants have been built so they have to tear down what they have built and start again.
These are obviously all solvable problems, and mostly solvable by just building more. The problem is that we didn't build enough. Just build more.
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Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term. If you mean building infrastructure, that's true, but also partly because the US invested heavily in the same type of infrastructure a generation or two prior. I would disagree with the pharmaceuticals because that is a manufacturing-intensive industry. Throwing out gems (because that probably isn't a good case, like you said), it still amounts t…
Gems isn't good also because it's mostly aesthetic. No intrinsic utility other then being rare and pretty. You won't actually "improve" society with gems. It's hard to distill this in technical terms but I hope you're able to understand without the need to get pedantic. Gemstones therefore are more of a reflection of countries with the ability to purchase the gemstones as an import and less of a reflection of the cou…
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Pretty much all relevant ceuntries also pleged to triple renewable capacity in 8 years, which seems mostly doable, while with the typical (western) construction timelines for nuclear they would have to pretty much start tendering the new plants now, while currently mostly only vague promises exist. China, which the country building the most nuclear right now, is falling behind its own plans and downscaling its nuclea…
I've heard rumors that you can do both at the same time.
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. The world will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon. *excluding research or military reactors of course.
A little bit silly to compare the price of solar and batteries, which has been driven down due to extensive government subsidy, tax incentives, and massive economies of scale over the past few decades (including production in China), to the current estimated cost of nuclear plants that we have almost no experience building anymore. If we embarked on a sustained plan to invest in nuclear the way we have in solar and w…
[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/emd-79-52
[2] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-establishes-6-billion-pr...
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>I don't know how many times this needs to be said Zero. Few people are unaware that the sun doesnt shine at night. It never needed repeating. What theyre less educated about is that pumped storage, hydrogen, batteries, solar/wind anticorrelation and demand shaping are, together, more than capable of accomodating renewable intermittency. What's most ridiculous is that even the most expensive form of viable power stor…
The energy sector is still private. If green were cheaper, and more reliable, and gave a good return, it would be getting a bigger investment. But it's not, because it's not. Maybe in theoretical-perfect-future-world it's cheaper, but not today.
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That was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found to be a stupid idea. Too expensive and no real benefit over ship engines. By the way, tha vast majority of military ships and boats are not nuclear powered.
What are other options for ships if fossil fuels were phased out? Big batteries? https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-28/making-waves-e... Hydrogen fuel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_ship Yeah, those options seem simpler.