81–90 of 200 posts
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> A clean power grid means cheaper power. That's a pretty wild assertion, given current events. Care to back it up with some evidence from a neutral source?
https://tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RethinkingEn... This research is solid and goes in depth about the costs etc.
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From the conclusion: - Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best And it didn't address the time scale issue at all. OTOH, solar power has a 5 decade history of 90% cost reductions per decade.
Solar power also has a decades long history of only working during a day.
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The US can't build a nuclear plant in 13 years.
The US can build a plant in 13 years. It's a matter of dedication and willingness. And pissing off a minority of vocal opponents. It takes longer because of the crazy regulations driven in part by environmentalists who complained about nuclear for decades while fossil fuels were the only other option. But the USA has the resources, skills, technology and money to do so in a short period of time.
Back in the real world, US is taking decades to build a railway and Russia's import substitution programm is 90% fraud - they buy from Czech Republic kits for assembly of Tractors, out them together in Russia and call them 'russian-built'.
You cannot just hand-wave away political issues, incompetence and corruption.
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There is clear political motivation in those who oppose the energy transition. Despite hundreds upon hundreds of papers on 100% clean energy electricity grids, they are produced by scientists that tend to follow the data rather than use data to justify their politics. There are a few counter examples (perhaps Marc Jacobs?) but there are so many other modelers coming to the same conclusion as DOE here, and nobody has…
Agreed except for the dig at Mark Jacobson. He was my undergrad and grad advisor, and I only knew him to be driven by data and a deep concern for the welfare of people and the planet. There are bad scientists out there but Mark isn't one of them. lol I recall him declining my request to put something about Al Gore in our common area because he didn't want to politicize the space.
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> local objections That's a big component of all this. NIMBYism in this country is becoming a big problem in a lot of ways. Want to build a dense, mixed use development that is less carbon-intensive than single family suburbia? NIMBYs oppose it. Build a transmission line from your green energy source? NIMBYs, again! Build a solar farm? NIMBYs will try and block it.
I think you're falsely putting a variety of different people into a single group called "NIMBY" -- people will object to all sorts of measures, and outside of the fact that they have objected they might not necessarily have anything else in common.
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What's your point? The guy doesn't have a few billion to single handedly throw at the problem to test them out. There are feasible solutions to make it less expensive, whether or not they get put into practice is a different topic. The point is that nuclear is not inherently and permanently as expensive as it has been for the past few decades. > And it didn't address the time scale issue at all. The time scale issue…
How can the design be standardized? Each location has its own risks to deal with. Extreme heat in Arizona, earthquakes in California, flooding in Florida. Every nuclear plant is a bit different. There is no economics of scale when building nuclear plants.
Reactor designs in China and France are standardised. There are suitability requirements towards the site ofcourse, that is normal
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You left out an important step - assuming that all the planning and modelling has been done correctly in and doesn't turn out to be politically motivated, have mistakes or miss unknown unknowns. Reconstituting all of society's energy consumption is a large project with a lot of technical uncertainties that will be discovered along the way. These sort of forecasts routinely turns out to be very wrong. Centrally planne…
> Reconstituting all of society's energy consumption is a large project with a lot of technical uncertainties that will be discovered along the way. These sort of forecasts routinely turns out to be very wrong I frequently see this type of comment, and I like to imagine what if people with this attitude won the debate that was happening 300 yeara ago. 300 years ago, thousands of people in London were dying of cholera…
The problem here is nuclear works great and regulators legislated until it wasn't cost effective. Indeed, they've shut down all the options that might cause pollution, which includes ... all the ones that work. The issue here is not cholera.
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Solar power also has a decades long history of only working during a day.
And lithium batteries have a 3 decade history of 80% price reductions per decade.
The only hope here is that Magnesium-based batteries will become a thing.
EDIT: OK, it seems that I mistook the "mineable lithium deposits" number for the whole lithium available :)
Anyway, unless there is a major technological breakthrough we are looking at few decades of lithium shortages. I expect countries to actually fight wars over lithium they way the US used to fight over oil. So, in the end, building nuclear plants seems more reasonable than building solar and then praying for cheaper batteries.