Well, you see, the “Anti Magic Rock” Lobby has immense amount of power because of the money of the still lucrative “burning stuff and pollute everything” business.
It’s the “Burning other magic rocks” party.
That, and the green parties (at least in EU).
The “green” parties 💵💵
Yeah, oil oiled the “green” anti-nuclear protests.
You can tell that’s how it was because the cops didn’t beat them as much (or in some big cases at all) as they do even the most insignificant anti-oil protesters.
I feel like people are interpreting your comment with an American context. As a fellow European I agree, NGOs like Greenpeace are also to blame, and I don’t think those are financed by fossil fuel lobbies.
I hadn’t made that connection. Thank you
Nuclear isn’t in competition with fossil fuels, it’s in competition with renewables. Renewables are better than nuclear by pretty much every conceivable metric. So fuck nuclear power, it’s a waste of money and time.
Fact: that is a fake statement.
Nuclear is not renewables competition.
Nuclear provides a base line energy production.
Both renewables and fossils produce a variable production line.
So within a rational production scheme the choice is nuclear+renewables or fossils+renewables. As renewables by themselves cannot work. Because there is months over the year when it’s not sunny, not rainy and not windy enough, what do we do for those months? We close humanity during those months because some political dogma says so?
Since we are talking hypotheticals, an ideal scenario would be a nearly completely renewables approach where each household is its own self contained energy production center equippef with solar arrays, wind turbines, thermoelectric generators. Various means of production. And have either propane or diesel generator as a backup. You know your average overall watt-hour usage for the household and try to have enough battery capacity to satisfy it for a week or two of bad weather.
Most household electrical wiring is redone for DC transmission and all consumer appliances possible are run straight on DC for optimal efficency. Energy efficent heat pumps for cooling and heating. energy efficent cooking appliances like induction heaters. Electric cars that act as backup battery banks would be awesome.
Industrial zones would be much harder as you need huge solar panel or wind turbine arrays to get the megawatt and gigawatts needed to run a factory. Most factories are decades old running on the most energy ineffient assembly lines you can think of. A energy mandate that calculated and taxed total energy efficency compared to national average for factory size and the would be a start.
Humanity simply does not “stop” because we go through an energy crisis. We did fine enough before the industrial revoltion and renewables + energy efficent consumer devices have improved a bunch. The economy would tank and what renewable energy made would be a premium commodity and the system would adapt to use it best as possible. But things would go on.
Are you sure renewables don’t require more extracted resources and more land usage per quantity of energy produced?
yes
You may be incorrect
Burning down your house doesn’t poison people thousands of years later, so it’s not a perfect analogy.
Plus we have magic mirrors and magic fans that do the same thing as the magic rocks just way cheaper.
We’ve upgraded from burning our houses down to burning our atmosphere down which will absolutely poison humans for centuries to come. And since we now burn larger fires with black rocks, those release far more magic rock dust that poisons people than the magic rock water heaters do. Not to mention that fire has both killed more of us cave dwellers than magic rocks ever have (including the flying weaponry runes made from them) and have caused more ecological disasters, so fire is much worse.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
And the magic fans? The design is very human. They’d be a gift from the gods if only the spirit of the wind were always with us.
Summary: Magic rock still good, black rocks and black water make bad fire and hairless monkey make sick more.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
Sure, because mining uranium is total helaty and no problem at all.
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-015-0019-3
One must be very careful when digging for magic hot rocks or else you expose the evil spirit vapors. Our ancestors knew that where there is magic, some evil lurks. As they did then, we do now when we accept a better evil in return for the magic we believe may do more good than before.
I love the wording in here
This is exactly, factually right, and eloquently put using the same meme terminology people here understand.
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We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
Yet we decided to release way more poison and even way more radiation by mining and burning fossil fuels. We just poison larger areas than any nuclear disasters. And with fossil fuels people actually get cancer, and with toxic byproducts, mutations and birth defects.
People in polluted areas die sooner. Except around nuclear disasters sights - the air gets cleaner once all the people are thrown out.
We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
We’ve had solar and wind electricity generation for centuries?
Eccentricity generators were invented before mass oil or coal use (1830s by Faraday).
We’ve had windmills, hydro, and even animal/human powered devices that could result in turning cranks for the generator to produce electricity - all for centuries at even that point. I would have to look up about when we first used solar to boil water, but I’m guessing there about.
Biomass and windmills perhaps
You say thousands of years, but it hasn’t been even 70 years since Chernobyl and the surrounding area is a thriving forest with tons of animals, unbothered by humans.
. Don’t feed the troll 💩
As long as you don’t care when the electricity is produced
Storage is a solvable problem. Whereas we don’t have the resources to power the world with nuclear plants.
Storage is a solvable problem
I’m not convinced it is. Storage technologies exist for sure, but the general public seems to grossly underestimate the scale of storage required to match grid demand and renewables only production.
I think you underestimate how much storage power is currently being build and how many different technologies are available. In Germany alone there currently are 61 projects planed and in the approval phase boasting a combined 180 Gigawatts of potential power until 2030. Those of them that are meant to be build at old nuclear power plants (the grid connection is already available there) are expected to deliver 25% of the necessary storage capacity. In addition all electric vehicles that are assumed to be on the road until 2030 add another potential 100GW of power.
Of course these numbers are theoretical as not every EV will be connected to a bidirectional charger and surely some projects will fail or delay, however given the massive development in this sector and new, innovative tech (not just batteries but f.e. a concrete ball placed 800m below sea level, expected to store energy extremely well at 5.8ct / kilowatt) there’s very much reason for optimism here.
It’s also a funny sidenote that France, a country with a strong nuclear strategy, frequently buys power from Germany because it’s so much cheaper.
Another important note about France: They are the second country alongside Germany heavily pushing for an upscaled green hydrogen market in the EU. Because -just like renewables- nuclear production doesn’t match the demand pattern at all. Thus it’s completely uneconomical without long-term storage.
The fact that we seem to constantly discuss nuclear vs. renewables is proof that it’s mostly lobbying bullshit. Because in reality they don’t compete. It’s either renewables+short-term storage+long-term-term storage or renewables+nuclear+long-term storage. Those are the only two viable models.
upscaled green hydrogen market
That’s been the talk in town for 40 years now. Green hydrogen has never gotten beyond proof-of-concept.
The fact that we seem to constantly discuss nuclear vs. renewables is proof that it’s mostly lobbying bullshit.
Sadly, it’s because the political green parties available to me are anti-nuclear.
It’s either renewables+short-term storage+long-term-term storage or renewables+nuclear+long-term storage.
Why is nuclear+short term storage not an option, according to you?
Why is nuclear+short term storage not an option
Because cold winter days exist. Yes you can only build nuclear capacities for the average day and then short-term storage to match the demand pattern. But you would need to do so for the day(s) of the year with the highest energy demand, some cold winter work day. What do you do with those capacities the remaining year as throttling nuclear down is not really saving much costs (most lie in construction and deconstruction)?
Due to the recent nuclear hype uranium price will rise and keep in mind that the resource will not exceed a century.
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It’s not just power that’s needed (MW), also stored energy (MWh).
Germany consumes on average 1.4TWh of electricity a day (1). Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.
Worldwide lithium ion battery production is 4TWh a year (2).
It’s also a funny sidenote that France, a country with a strong nuclear strategy, frequently buys power from Germany because it’s so much cheaper.
Isn’t that normal? The problems with renewables isn’t that they generate cheap power, when they are generating. Today windmills even need to be equipped with remote shutdown, to prevent overproduction.
The problems arise when they aren’t generating.
Another problem arises when you’re generation 63.688 after today and still have to keep maintaining deadly waste from nations that don’t exist anymore, because they produced “cheap” and “clean” energy for a couple of decades.
Come on, Jesus died like 2000 years ago, this stuff will haunt us for centuries. Arguing in favor of something this unpredictable is just selfish, stupid and shortsighted.Your estimation goes way off because you still believe lithium ion to be the only viable solution. By now Sodium-Ion batteries are already installed even in EVs and can be produced without any critical resource like lithium.
And then of course there are all the other storage solution. Like I said, there even are storage solutions like concrete balls. Successfully tested in 2016, here an article from 2013.
By now it wouldn’t be wise to stifle this enormous emerging market of various technologies by using expensive, problematic technology (not just because the biggest producer of fuel rods is Russia).
I don’t think lithium ion is the only storage technology. I was using it for scale.
The most cost effective storage is pumped storage. But even that wouldn’t reach the scale necessary.
6 MWh pumped storage proof-of-concept won’t l, either.
The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.
…or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.
Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.
That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
is what gas is for
Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change. And the fact that the gas needs to be shipped all the way from the US.
That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?
Ok but maybe a counterpoint is we are overestimating the ability of the atmosphere and ocean to absorb CO2 and maintain a habitable planet. I’d rather store isotopes in the earth (where they came from anyway) than carbon in the air.
Again: This is just the beginning! We’re like
five years intoat the beginning of an energy revolution and you are drumming against it because you’re “not convinced”, rooting for stuff we already discarded because it’s uncontrollable and will poison our planet for centuries. Get out of the way, boomer!Germany has over 400 MW of solar-plus-storage projects under development, with notable installations like a 100 MW/200 MWh battery system in Bavaria. This is way more than even the green minister of economic affairs set as a goal for 2045. California leads globally with 6,600 MW of battery storage already operational and an additional 1,900 MW expected by year-end, totaling 8,500 MW. By 2045, California aims to expand its capacity to 52,000 MW. Australia is also scaling rapidly, with around 9 GW of utility-scale battery projects underway or completed. Soon EV batteries get to feed energy back into the grid, we’re becoming one huge decentralized batterie mosaic. It’s gonna be beautiful!
We’re like five years into an energy revolution
Exactly, after working on it for over 30.
It seems like theyre not even planning on going fossil free.
That quote, again, not mentioning stored energy. How do they not understand that storage needs to be specified in both power and energy?
The fossil industry, which earns 1 billion dollars a day since the 1970s, won’t go down without a fight. They are very powerful, able to start wars and overthrow governments. These fossil destroyers know they are dying, but they will fight back to make money as long as possible. The best we can do is drain their business model by going renewable, and fast. Nuclear is not an option anymore, they know that as well, it’s already way too expensive. But they use it anyway to buy some time. Making more money while we are debating instead of building renewables and batteries like our lives depend on it.
I always imagine Henry Ford after building his first cars. People would laugh at him: “And how do we fuel these?! You want to pave every road and build a web of gas stations all over or country? You are insane!”it’s already way too expensive.
If you don’t account for the storage problem, renewables look like a cheap solution, indeed. And you end up with renewables + huge reliance on fossil fuel.
This is an ideal scenario for the fossil industry.
The second half if most important. It doesn’t produce enough electricity. Renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper and are taking up the mantle to take over majority of power production in some nations. But it is harder to monetize and can be democratized and made pretty easily. It’s like weed. It can be taken away from bigger producers and therefore there is significant push back/lobbying against it.
Storage is a solvable problem.
Not in this economy. We need change in consumption too. Make loads opportunistic. Have extra energy - heat more water. Or heat homes. There was video on Technology Connected about it.
Don’t feed the troll! We’re making progress fast. ☀️
Nuclear: As long as you don’t care about the magic rocks once the magic has decayed to a level where they’re not boiling water anymore
90% of magic rocks that no longer boil wsater is magic rocks that can boil water.
If you’re talking breeder reactors, do we have any in the US?
If you’re talking breeder reactors
I was talking about reusing uranium from “spent” fuel, not about using plutonium. Found source that says “spent” fuel is 95-98% mix of uranium isotopes that were there. Sadly, source doesn’t say how much of each isotope, I expect very low amount of U-235. Yes, you can also use plutonium in MOX fuel, but only Russia~~, France~~ and China do that, as far as I know.
do we have any in the US?
Dunno. Do you? If you don’t, you can buy them from mentioned above countries.
EDIT: France no longer has working breeder reactor? How did it happen?
Funny how nuclear power plants are taboo, but building thousands of nuclear warheads all over the globe is no issue.
Funny how building nuclear power plants that can only (if you have dipshits running them) kill a nearby city is taboo, but climate change that will kill everyone is acceptable to the moralists.
Funny how solar, wind, and batteries are way cheaper and faster to build yet people are still talking about nuclear.
Stopping nuclear from being built is the problem.
We would have had a lot more clean energy than we do by now if we let the nuclear power plants that “would take too long to build!” be built back then, because they’d be up and running by now.
More letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Nuclear may have been good 10 years ago, but it isn’t really good anymore. This is like saying “if I had bought a PS2 in 2002 then I would have had fun playing Final Fantasy XI Online. Therefore, I should buy a PS2 and FFXI Online so I can have fun in 2024”. That ship has sailed
You can still play FFXI in 2024 officially on PC. Just don’t need the PS2.
and we can have 100% clean, renewable energy in 2024, we just don’t need the nuclear reactor
Nuclear actually releases less CO2 than renewables, because renewables aren’t nearly as clean as you think they are. Those solar panels and wind turbines have to be made somehow. The things needed to make solar panels and batteries aren’t exactly great for the planet to mine and manufacture.
This concept of 100% clean energy is a myth, there are just more and less polluting sources. Nuclear being the least polluting, with fossil fuels being the worst, and renewables in the middle.
If only people weren’t fearmongering about nuclear 50 years ago we’d have clean energy today.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best is now”
That saying works for trees. We didn’t make trees obsolete with better technology.
Reliable clean energy isn’t a solved issue today either. Until we have grid-level storage we need something that can provide a reliable base and had enough mass/momentum to handle grid fluctuations.
Solar and wind are cheaper yes. Batteries, no. If batteries were that cheap and easy to place we’d have solved energy a long time ago. Currently batteries don’t hold a candle to live production, the closest you can get is hydro storage, which not everyone has, and can’t realistically be built everywhere.
Look at the stats. The second largest battery storage in the US (and the world) is located near the Moss Landing Power Plant. It provides a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned (Which would make it the largest). That sounds like a lot, but it’s located next to San Jose and San Fransisco, so lets pick just one of those counties to compare. The average energy usage in the county of San Clara, which contains San Jose (You might need to VPN from the US to see the source) is 17101 GWh per year, which is about 46.8 GWh per day, or 46800 MWh. So you’d need 8 more of those at 6000 MWh to even be able to store a day’s worth of electricity from that county alone, which has a population of about 2 million people. And that’s not even talking about all the realities that come with electricity like peak loads.
For reference, the largest hydro plant has a storage capacity of 40 GWh, 6.6x more (at 6000 MWh above).
Relative to how much space wind and solar use, nuclear is the clear winner. If a country doesn’t have massive amounts of empty area nuclear is unmissable. People also really hate seeing solar and wind farm. That’s not something I personally mind too much, but even in the best of countries people oppose renewables simply because it ruins their surroundings to them. Creating the infrastructure for such distributed energy networks to sustain large solar and wind farms is also quite hard and requires personnel that the entire world has shortages of, while a nuclear reactor is centralized and much easier to set up since it’s similar to current power plants. But a company that can build a nuclear plant isn’t going to be able to build a solar farm, or a wind farm, and in a similar way if every company that can make solar farms or wind farms is busy, their price will go up too. By balancing the load between nuclear, solar, and wind, we ensure the transition can happen as fast and affordable as possible.
There’s also the fact that it always works and can be scaled up or down on demand, and as such is the least polluting source (on the same level as renewables) that can reliably replace coal, natural gas, biomass, and any other always available source. You don’t want to fall back on those when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. If batteries were available to store that energy it’d be a different story. But unless you have large natural batteries like hydro plants with storage basins that you can pump water up to with excess electricity, it’s not sustainable. I’d wish it was, but it’s not. As it stands now, the world needs both renewables and nuclear to go fully neutral. Until something even better like nuclear fusion becomes viable.
Ok let’s compare real data then. Vogtle 3&4 are the latest nuclear plants to be completed in the US. They cost over 30 billion dollars for a capacity of 2.106GW. That’s >14.2 dollars/watt. Let’s be generous and assume nuclear has a 100% capacity factor (it doesn’t).
I can’t find real numbers for Moss Landing specifically, but NREL has data on BESS costs up to 10 hr storage at $4.2/watt. Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet.
Utility scale solar has well known costs of ~1 dollar/watt. Let’s assume a capacity factor of 25%, so for equivalent total energy generation we are looking at $4.
$4 for solar, $4.2 for BESS, and since you’ll complain about not having 24hr baseline let’s add another equivalent 10hr storage system at $4.2. that’s a total of $12.4, compared to Vogtle’s $14.2.
Add in that the solar plus BESS would be built in 1-2 years, while Vogtle took well over a decade.
Also consider that BESS systems have additional value in providing peaking ability and frequency regulation, among other benefits.
Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.
2.160 GW is it’s rated capacity. I’m not sure how you got from there to 14.2 dollars per watt, but it completely ignores the lifetime of the power plant.
Vogtle 3&4 are really a bad example because unit 4 only entered commercial activity this year. But fine, we can look at what it produces just recently.. About 3335000 MWh per month, or about 107 GWh per day. We can then subtract the baseline from Reactor 1 & 2 from before Reactor 3 was opened, removing about 1700000 MWh per month. Which gives us about 53 GWh per day. The lifetime of them is expected to be around 60 to 80 year, but lets take 60. That’s about 1177200 GWh over it’s lifetime, divided by the 36 billion that it cost to built… Gives you about 0.03 dollars per kWh. Which is pretty much as good as renewables get as well. But of course, this ignores maintenance, but that’s hard to calculate for solar panels as well. As such it will be somewhat larger than 0.03, I will admit.
Solar panels on the other hand, often have a lifetime of 30 years, so even though it costs less per watt, MW, or GW, it also produces less over time. For solar, and wind, that’s about the same.. So this doesn’t really say much.
But that wasn’t even the point of my message. As I said, I agree that Nuclear is slightly more expensive than renewables. But there are other costs associated with renewables that aren’t expressed well in monetary value for their units alone. Infrastructure, space, approval, experts to maintain it.
Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet.
Because they cannot. They can’t do it because there’s not enough capacity. If the sun is cloudy for a day, and the wind doesn’t run. Who’s going to power the grid for a day? That’s right. Mostly coal and gas. That’s the point. Nuclear is there to ensure we don’t go back to fossils when we want to be carbon neutral, which means no output. If you are carbon neutral only when the weather is perfect for renewables, then you’re not really carbon neutral and still would have to produce a ton of pollution at times.
I’m glad batteries and all are getting cheaper. They are definitely needed, also for nuclear. But you must also be aware of just how damn dirty they are to produce. The minerals required produce them are rare, and expensive. Wind power also kills people that need to maintain it. Things aren’t so black and white.
Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.
This is not true, and it should be obvious when you think about it. Since this data fluctuates all the time. Nuclear has been more expensive in the past, before getting cheaper, and now getting more expensive again. Solar and wind have had peaks of being far more expensive than before. These numbers are just a representation of aggregate data, and they often leave out nuance like renewables being favored by regulations and subsidies. They are in part a manifestation of the resistance to nuclear. Unlike renewables, there are many more steps to be made for efficiency in nuclear. Most development has (justifiably) been focused on safety so far, as with solar and wind and batteries we can look away from the slave labor on the other side of the world to produce the rare earth metals needed for it. There is no free lunch in this world.
For what it’s purpose should be, which is to provide a baseline production of electricity when renewables are not as effective. A higher price can be justified. It’s not meant to replace renewables altogether. Because if renewables can’t produce clean energy, their price might as well be infinitely high in that moment, which leaves our only options to be fossil fuels, hydro, batteries, or nuclear. Fossil fuels should be obvious, not everyone has hydro (let alone enough), batteries don’t have the capacity or numbers at the scale required (for the foreseeable future), and nuclear is here right now.
Would battery companies allow the price to go down? They are quite greedy as well.
There is competition in battery production. Pretty much all of society would be better off with better batteries, so price gauging in an industry like that is quite hard. And if it was, it would not go unnoticed.
The problem is simply the technology. There’s advancements like molten salt batteries, but it’s practically in it’s infancy. The moment a technology like that would become a big improvement over the norm, it would pretty much immediately cause a paradigm shift in energy production and every company would want a piece of the pie. So you’ll know it when you see it. But it might also just start off very underwhelmingly like nuclear fusion and very gradually improve with the hope it can scale beyond the current best technologies for batteries.
All we can do is wait and hope for breakthrough, I guess. Because cheap and abundant batteries could really help massively with reducing our carbon output.
You know why people who live near wind power hate wind power?
It’s because their neighbour got paid to host a turbine, and they did not. It is envy.
I’m sure such cases exist, but where I’m from people don’t really get paid to host turbines, maybe companies at times. They dislike them because it affects the view in the area, and especially if you live very close to them the blades can cause noticeable flickering shadows. That latter point has a lot more weight to it in my eyes, but people do really care about the former as well, and it’s kind of hard to push on people when they live there and not you.
I’m taking from the Australian context where someone always owns the land and it’s cheaper to buy rights to place and service a turbine then to buy land
I suppose you live somewhere the land can be leased from government
Funny how whataboutism makes your audience defensive.
Funny how being polite didn’t convince you so now you’re trying to sell that being mean is going to stop you. You were always useless.
Hey, I hear you, life is stressful and there’s a lot going on. It’s okay to be upset, I hope whatever you’re going through gets easier.
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Is there a particular reason you think everyone, here specifically, believes those things?
Edit: I absolutely share your passion about climate change, as a preface. Calling someone, who agrees with you or not, “useless” makes them dismiss your opinion. It just means we can’t engage in any meaningful discussion and others are less likely to take action.
A nuclear power plant cannot destroy a city.
I guess destroy != Make unlivable
People don’t put reactors next to cities for a reason. Meaning this scenario wouldn’t happen. Nuclear is also one of the safest energy sources overall in terms of deaths caused. It’s safer than some renewables even, and that’s not factoring in advances in the technology that have happened over the decades making it safer. This kind of misinformation is dangerous. It’s also not a good reason not to do nuclear. The reason why renewables are used more (and probably have a somewhat larger role to play in general) is because they a cheaper and quicker to manufacture. Nuclear energy’s primary problem isn’t safety but rather cost. It’s biggest strength is reliability and availability. You can build a nuclear plant basically anywhere where there is water.
I know nuclear is super safe but we have actual examples of accidents happening and making cities unlivable, you can’t deny that.
Which cities? I haven’t heard of any cities being made unlivable, only towns and villages.
🙄 I’m sorry, I was unaware of the population requirement
Depends on where you live, Germany that gets the beating for phasing out nuclear, is so densely populated that these remote areas hardly exist!
That’s actually an interesting point. Maybe we shouldn’t put nuclear reactors in Germany.
And that cannot happen. It’s a fear people have because they equate a nuclear power plant with a nuclear bomb. That is as wrong as considering the earth flat.
Fukushima?
Fukushima, in 2024,is a city of 272569 inhabitants. If that’s unlivable, I’m fine with it. Hiroshima, Nagazaki and Chernobyl are all inhabited too.
Saying that nuclear stuff makes places unlivable is plain wrong, it’s anti-science. It’s comics level of bullshit science. Travel in time is a more serious theory than nuclear stuff destroying the planet.
Chernobyl
But that was a really old tech, the plants built after 1990s shouldn’t allow this scale of pollution even if all the stops are pulled and everything breaks in the worst way possible
Chernobyl yes, let’s talk about it : after the catastrophy, 2 reactors were used until very recently (like until 10 or 20 years ago).
After the catastrophy, Chernobyl was made into an exclusion zone where people wouldn’t be allowed to live. But people came back 10 years after and it’s a small village now.
BTW even Hiroshima and Nagazaki that were annihilated with atomic bombs, that is weapons meant to destroy whole cities, were quickly inhabited again.
So much for the permanent destruction and millions of years of contamination. CO2 is a far more deadly compound for mankind than any radioactive material. Anti-nuke militants are merely ignorant fanatics.
It’s because there’s no opposing corporate interest to building nuclear weapons. The way the world works is: profitable shit happens, no matter what the hippies think about it. See: every other environmental issue.
I’m in Missouri so apparently I’m surrounded by silos
How many fingers do you have?
Anon is dumb. Anon forgets the nuclear waste. Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive. So much that energy won by these rocks is more expensive than wind energy and any other renewable.
Anon isn’t dumb, just simple. Nuclear energy can be the best solution for certain situations. While renewables are the better choice in every way, they’re effectiveness isn’t equally distributed. There are places where there just isn’t enough available renewable energy sources year round to supply the people living there. When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer. It shouldn’t be the first answer people look to but it is an answer. An expensive answer but sometimes the best one.
Also nuclear waste doesn’t have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it’s expensive.
Also nuclear waste doesn’t have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it’s expensive.
But it is a problem. Finding a place that can contain radioactive waste for millions of years is incredible difficult. If you read up on it, you get disillusioned pretty fast.
When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer.
Obviously, the best answer is to improve energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Why would we waste hundreds of millions on a stupid toy power plant when we could spend 10% of that money on just running decent underground cables.
You really don’t understand how expensive underground cables are. You know those big, huge steel transmission towers that you see lined up, hundreds in a row?
Those towers costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each. And the reason they’re used is because that’s way cheaper than underground.
Shit - just the cable is a couple million per mile per cable.
Are you fucking serious? Nuclear power plants cost way fucking more than some cables. You people are fundamentally so unserious. Pull your head out of a reactor for ten seconds and take reality as it exists
Yes. They cost more than some cables. But we aren’t talking about wiring a stereo.
A new nuclear unit (4 billion-ish) costs about as much as 2,000 miles of transmission-grade cable (about 2 million per mile). Considering that there’s about 30 cables on a tower run, you’re looking at around 65 miles’ worth of cable for the cost of a nuclear unit.
And that’s just the cost of the wire. No towers, no conduit, no substations, no land acquisition (aerial easement and underground are very different things), no labor.
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You do realize that all that is also expensive, and limited? We haven’t invented room temperature superconductors yet, and battery technology is far from perfect. There is only so much lithium and cobalt in the entire world. Yes we can now use things like sodium, but that’s a technology that’s still young and needs more research before it’s full potential is realized. There is also a reason we have overground cables and not underground. Digging up all that earth is hella expensive.
Because superconductors are even more expensive than breeder reactors.
and breeder reactors are more expensive than faerie magic, I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real
I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real
Wake up, 80-ies were 40 years ago!
USSR figured it out long time ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor
Anon forgets the nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste is pretty tame. Compare gloves that were used once to turn valve on pipe in reactor room to shit from coal in your lungs. Even most active kind of waste everyone thinks of - spent fuel - consists from about 90% of useful material.
EDIT: 95-98% of useful material.
Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive.
Actually not. Especially cost of energy compared to one of coal.
The costs used for wind/solar energy never included the cost of the required buffer storage, and even the rare few people who include that never factor in frequency stability which to this day is maintained by the giant steam turbines everyone wants to get rid of. It will not be trivial to solve the frequency stability problem; it will likely require massive investment in pumped water storage, flywheel storage, or nuclear energy, and these costs once finally included in the real cost of wind/solar will hurt its value prospect considerably.
As for nuclear waste: the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste generated over the lifetime of a reactor is stored onsite. Only the smallest amount of material is what will actually remain dangerous for a long time, and many countries have already solved this problem. It’s a seriously overstated problem repeated by renewable-purists who usually haven’t even considered how much frequency stability and grid-level storage have and will add to the cost of renewables, meaning they have not given a full accounting of the situation.
And even if we just buried all of it, all nuclear waste ever produced could easily be buried in one square mile.
Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.
produces amounts of waste orders of magnitude lower than any other means of energy production
reliable when done well
it shouldn’t be replaced with renewables, but work with them
Yes, but energy density doesn’t matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.
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“85% of used fuel rods can be recycled” is like “We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means”.
In theory it’s correct. In reality it’s bullshit that will never happen because it’s completely uneconomical and it’s just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
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They’re saying that plausible uses don’t necessarily translate to real world use, in practice. I have no stake in this, just translating
While I understand where they’re coming from, it should be noted that they’re likely basing their experience with recyclability on plastic recycling which is totally a shit show. The big difference comes in when you realize that plastic is cheap as shit whereas uranium fuel rods are not.
Fossil fuel lobbyists know very well that their business model is running into a dead end. So now their goal is to extend it as long as possible.
Today’s fossil fuel propaganda isn’t “Climate change from CO₂ isn’t real” anymore. It’s “We can totally fix this with carbon capturing later”, “Renewables are actually bad for the environment” and “Better don’t build renewables now as a much better solution will be available soon™ <insert SMRs or any other fairy tale how new reactor will totally be cheap and not producing waste here>”. Yet it’s not happening. Nuclear is uneconomically expensive and produces toxic waste we actually don’t know how to handle safely for the amounts of time it stays toxic.
Nuclear basically only has a very limited amount of fake arguments constantly used in variations of the same chain:
“Nuclear is perfectly safe!”
“That’s not the problem. The problems are the massive costs and the waste.”
“But we can recycle most of the waste. Also renewables produce so much waste, too.”
“But you actually don’t do it because it’s very expensive and makes nuclear power even less economicallly viable. Also how is recycling wind-turbine blades and solar-panels unrealistic but recycling nuclear waste is not?”
“But nuclear would be economically viable and so much cheaper if it wasn’t so over-regulated. And lithium mining is so toxic to the environment.”
“It’s only perfectly safe because it’s highly regulated. And we don’t actually need lithium for grid storage where energy optimised density is not the biggest concern.”
“<Inserts insults about you being brain-washed to fear nuclear power here>, also nuclear will totally become much cheaper with SMRs any day now…”
In the end it’s always the same story. Nuclear might be safe but it is insanely expensive and produces radioactive waste. No, the fact that you can theoretically recycle the waste doesn’t matter, because you don’t do it. No, it will not become cheap magically soon. And no it is not expensive because it’s highly regulated because without those regulations we can start at the top again and talk about how safe it is.
There are only two reasons to pretend otherwise: you work in nuclear power and need to sell your product or you work in fossil fuels and need to keep the discussion up so people keep talking instead of actually working to get rid of them. And the nuclear industry and lobby is actually not that massive compared to the fossil fuel one. So it’s very clear where the vast majority of nuclear fan boys get their talking points. Have you ever thought about the fact why pro-nuclear is so massively over-represented on social media? 😉
PS: Nice, I only need to scroll ~ one page up and down to find all those fake arguments repeated here. How surprising /s
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
Recycling nuclear waste is one of those problems that should be easy but nobody knows what the easy way looks like. It’s impossible to tell if some breakthrough will make it viable tomorrow or if people will have to work for 200 years to get to it. But yeah, currently it’s best described as “impossible”.
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
What?
For starters, carbon capture takes an insane amount of power. And to follow up: we couldn’t even build the facilities is “a few decades” even if we free power and infinite money.
Yep, “insane amounts” of power like you what you get by investing something like 1% of a few countries’ GDP in PV panels.
the waste it produces is highly problematic.
It’s a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat, its just the reactors make use of an actual reaction that nuclear waste can’t do anymore. Yever watch the Martian, he has a generator that’s fuel is lead covered beads of radioactive material, it doesn’t generate as much as reactors but it’s still a usable amount.
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat
That’s an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don’t use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.
The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (238Pu, usually as PuO2), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can’t be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (210Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can’t be extracted.
90Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn’t used as RTG fuel today.
But it’s not done well. Just look at the new built plants, which are way over budget and take way longer to build then expected. Like the two units in Georgia that went from estimated 14bn to finally 34bn $. In France who are really experienced with nuclear, they began building their latest plant in 2007 and it’s still not operational, also it went from 3.3bn to 13.2bn €. Or look at the way Hinkley Point C in the UK is getting developed. What a shit show: from estimated 18bn£ to now 47bn£ and a day where it starts producing energy not in sight.
Do you know WHY they went over budget?
That’s for the nuclear industry to figure out. But the fact that companies from different companies originating in entirely different countries suggest that it’s a problem with the tech itself.
The hard truth many just don’t want to admit is that there are some technologies that simply aren’t practical, regardless of how objectively cool they might be. The truth is that the nuclear industry just has a very poor track record with being financially viable. It’s only ever really been scaled through massive state-run enterprises that can operate unprofitably. Before solar and wind really took off, the case could be made that we should switch to fission, even if it is more expensive, due to climate concerns. But now that solar + batteries are massively cheaper than nuclear? It’s ridiculous to spend state money building these giant white elephants when we could just slap up some more solar panels instead. We ain’t running out of space to put them any time soon.
Sometimes it’s documented but often I’d say it’s a selling technique that works for any big infrastructure project. You give a rather low first cost projection, governments decide let’s do this and after a while you correct the price up. First, people say: well that is to be expected the project shouldn’t fail because of a little price hike. Then the price gets corrected again and then the sunken cost fallacy kicks in. now we are to deep in and we have to pull through. And so on. And you probably can’t get price guarantees for such big projects cause no one would make a bid. It’s a very flawed system. I’d like to know how often solar or windpark projects get price adjusted?
The same problems faced the oil industry too, with their drilling rigs & refineries (over budget and over schedule, with gov money grants and subsidies), it’s just less in the media & more spread out (more projects).
Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things - we have the money, we just don’t tax profit enough. And we don’t talk about how the whole budget gets spent (private or public), where all the money actually goes, instead we get the highlighted cases everyone talks about. But not about the shielded industries when they fuck up.
Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things -
Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.
That sentence shows that you really aren’t thinking about this as a practical means of power generation. I’ve found that most fission boosters don’t so much like actual nuclear power, but the idea of nuclear power. It appeals to a certain kind of nerd who admires it from a physics and engineering perspective. And while it is cool technically, this tends to blind people to the actual cold realities of fission power.
There’s also a lot of conspiratorial thinking among the pro-nuclear crowd. They’ll blame nuclear’s failures on the superstitious fear of the unwashed ignorant masses or the evil machinations of groups like Greenpeace. Then, at the same time, they’ll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear’s failure: it’s just too fucking expensive.
Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.
I’m thinking in practical terms how that still doesn’t happen that often, humans allocate assets, humans don’t behave logically (behavioural economics).
Nothing ever is going to be perfect and efficient, solar panels might get through vast price volatilities as well, installation costs hand already soared.
Then, at the same time, they’ll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear’s failure: it’s just too fucking expensive.
So why did we subsidised so much expensive oil infrastructure. And at higher cost of life.
Oil rigs can go into billions of dollars (and thats not even the total cost), nuclear plants tend to have the total running cost up-front (with decommission costs after the planned decades).Humans don’t make economic decisions rationally.
Well if we had no alternative I would agree with you and I would be okay if we had to subsidize nuclear (which isn’t emissions free due to the mining and refining of uranium bye the way). But if a country like France, which has a pretty high rate of acceptance regarding nuclear, can’t get it to work, who will? Apart from maybe authoritarian countries. Just think about the amount of plants we have to build to create a significant impact, if hardly any plant has been built in a relative short timeframe. I’d say put money in research yeah but focus on renewable, network, storage and efficiency optimization for now.
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.
Nuclear energy indeed has very high energy per mass of fuel. But so what? Solar and wind power doesn’t even use fuel. So the energy density thing is a bit of a distraction.
just compare 1 ton of fissile fuel and 1 ton of Silicon or steel. how much power do you get out of it ?
What are you trying to say here? Are we still talking about fuel types here?
Again, let me point out that solar power does not consume any fuel. The materials used to construct the solar panels are not having any power extracted from them. And secondly, nuclear power plants require construction materials too. … So I really don’t know what kind of comparison you are asking for here.
yes it does, but indirectly : making solar panels comes with the cost of dumping them after they’ve been used, because they’re not fully recyclable. (which comes after 15/20 years if not earlier). plus they use vast amounts of land when much power is needed.
so yeah, energy density is relevant when comparing technologies. otherwise, why aren’t we all cycling to power our toasters / ovens / refrigerators ? because the energy yield is bad.
so no, you shouldn’t dismiss nuclear, because it’s insanity powerful for its cost.
solar and wind are great, but insufficient on their own.
The cost of constructing and decommissioning power plants is important for sure; but it has nothing to do with energy density - which is what we were talking about before. It’s true that building solar panels takes energy and resources, and the panels don’t last indefinitely. So there is a lifecycle cost to using them. But the same is true for all forms of power generation.
A common way to compare these costs is to look at the ‘payback time’ of each form of power generation. The payback time is the amount of time it would take for the power plant to produce enough energy to pay back the lifecycle costs required to build, operate, and decommission that type of plant. It’s basically how long it takes for the construction to have been ‘worth it’.
In terms of payback time, wind power is by far the best; typically taking less than 1 year to pay itself off. Solar is pretty good too, but is highly dependent on where it is used. And nuclear… is not good on this measure. It takes decades for a nuclear power plant to pay itself off, because the plants are very expensive to build and decommission.
Obviously there are other things to consider in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of power generation. But you’ve been talking about the cost of materials and construction as though it is a weakness of renewables, and it really really isn’t. That’s in fact one of their strengths, and a major weakness of nuclear. Its strange that you say nuclear is ‘insanity powerful for its cost’, because its cost is the greatest weakness of nuclear power. Its much cleaner than coal, but much more expensive, even though it uses so little fuel. And it is not cleaner than solar or wind, but it is still more expensive.
Your point about land usage is a stronger point in favour of nuclear power… except that depending on what country you are talking about, that could easily swing the other way. Solar and wind do take up more space than nuclear, that’s for sure. But nuclear requires certain geological conditions for the safe operation of the plant, and the storage of waste. So depending on where you live, finding unused land suitable for renewables can be much easier than finding a suitable location for a nuclear power plant and waste containment facility.
agreed and thank you for the detailed response 🤝
Who cares? We use economics to sort out the relative value of radically different power sources, not cherry-picked criteria. Fission boosters can say that nuclear has a small footprint. Solar boosters can say that solar has no moving parts and is thus more mechanically reliable. Fission boosters can say fission gets more power from the same mass. Solar boosters can point to the mass of the entire fission plant, including the giant concrete dome that needs to be strong enough to survive a jumbo jet flying into it.
In the end, none of this shit matters. We have a way of sorting out these complex multi-variable problems. Both fission and solar have their own relatives strengths and weaknesses that their proponents can cherry pick. But ultimately, all that matters in choosing what to deploy is cost.
And today, in the real world, in the year 2024, if you want to get low-carbon power on the grid, the most cost-effective way, by far, is solar. And you can add batteries as needed for intermittency, and you’re still way ahead of nuclear cost-wise. And as our use of solar continues to climb, we can deploy seasonal storage, which we have many, many options to deploy.
The ultimate problem fission has is that it just can’t survive in a capitalist economy. It can survive in planned economies like the Soviet Union or modern China, or it can run as a state-backed enterprise like modern Russia. But it simply isn’t cost effective enough for fission companies to be able to survive on their own in a capitalist economy.
And frankly, if we’re going to have the government subsidize things, I would much rather the money be spent on healthcare, housing, or education. A lot of fission boosters like fission simply because they think the tech is cool, not necessarily because it actually makes economic sense. I say that if fission boosters want to fund their hobby and subsidize fission plants, let them. But otherwise I am adamantly opposed to any form of subsidies for the fission industry.
Right now we probably use more energy to produce antimatter than getting it back
certainly
Energy density is a useless bullshit metric for stationary power.
Produces more waste than almost all of the renewables.
Reliable compared to… … … ok, I’m out of ideas, they need shutdowns all the time. Seems to me it’s less reliable than anything that isn’t considered “experimental”.
And it can’t work with renewables unless you add lots and lots of batteries. Any amount of renewables you build just makes nuclear more expensive.
They are an interesting technology, and I’m sure they have more uses than making nuclear weapons. It’s just that everybody focus on that one use, and whatever other uses they have, mainstream grid-electricity generation is not it.
Who gives a fuck about energy density beyond some physics nerds? Unless you’re planning on building a flying nuclear-powered airplane, energy density is irrelevant. This is why solar is eating fission’s lunch.
it shouldn’t be replaced with renewables, but work with them
Nuclear energy as a bridge technology is incompatible with renewables.
Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. Renewables are great and cheap, but they aren’t a complete solution without grid level storage that doesn’t really exist yet.
Solar with Battery grid storage is now cheaper than nuclear.
If the demand goes up I have some doubt, also, mining for Lithium is far from being clean, and then batteries are becoming wastes, so I doubt you would replace nuclear power with this solution
I guess in some regions it could work, but you’re still depending on the weather
You don’t need lithium. That’s just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.
Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn’t care if the building houising the batteries weighs 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).
PS: And the materials can also be recycled. Funnily there’s always the pro-nuclear argument coming up then you can recycle waste to create new fuel rod (although it’s never actually done), yet with battery tech the exact same argument is then ignored.
Density doesn’t matter much when it comes to grid scale, indeed.
What battery technologies are you thinking of? Zinc-ion? Flow batteries?
They’re currently bringing sodium batteries to market (as in “the first vendor is selling them right now”). They’re bulky but fairly robust IIRC and they don’t need lithium.
If you’re thinking of the portable battery marketed as ‘solid state’ then that was a scam - a teardown revealed it was just lithium cells
Nah, I’m thinking of sodium-ion batteries. That’s 1990s tech and is currently in use for grid storage. Several manufacturers are currently bringing car-ready Na-ion batteries to market and there seems to be one production car using them in China (a version of the JMEV EV3, which I hav enever heard about before).
Now, Na-ion is still less mature than Li-ion and that Chinese car gets about 17% less range compared do the Li-ion version.
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Yeah, lithium mining and processing is extremely toxic and destructive to the environment. On one hand, it’s primarily limited to a smaller area, but on the other hand, is it sustainable long-term unless a highly efficient lithium recycling technology emerges? And yes, I know there are some startups that are trying to solve the recycling problem, some that are promising.
you know that grid storage does not always mean “a huge battery”, you can also just pump water in a higher basin oder push carts up a hill and release the potential energy when you need it…
Pumped storage is a thing yeah. But might just as well go full hydro, if you’re doing the engineering anyways.
I feel like we’re missing the part about “push carts up a hill”, which involves virtually no serious engineering difficulties aside from “which hill” and “let’s make sure the tracks run smoothly”. See: the ARES project in Nevada
Yeah, that’s 50MW, storing power for 15 minutes, so 20MWh. (1).
There’s also a similar company: gravicity.
They’re a fun academic endeavour. But if gravity provides the potential, water beats them per dollar spend. It’s not even close.
So do regular batteries.
Would love to see a source for that claim. How many 9’s uptime do they target? 90%, 99%
This is old news now! Here’s a link from 5 years ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/
This is from last year: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
As to uptime, they have the same legal requirements as all utilities.
I was pro nuke until finding out solar plus grid battery was cheaper.
Source (1)
Later this month the LA Board of Water and Power Commissioners is expected to approve a 25-year contract that will serve 7 percent of the city’s electricity demand at 1.997¢/kwh for solar energy and 1.3¢ for power from batteries.
The project is 1 GW of solar, 500MW of storage. They don’t specify storage capacity (MWh). The source provides two contradicting statements towards their ability to provide stable supply: (a)
“The solar is inherently variable, and the battery is able to take a portion of that solar from that facility, the portion that’s variable, which is usually the top tend of it, take all of that, strip that off and then store it into the battery, so the facility can provide a constant output to the grid”
And (b)
The Eland Project will not rid Los Angeles of natural gas, however. The city will still depend on gas and hydro to supply its overnight power.
Source (2) researches “Levelized cost of energy”, a term they define as
Comparative LCOE analysis for various generation technologies on a $/MWh basis, including sensitivities for U.S. federal tax subsidies, fuel prices, carbon pricing and cost of capital
It looks at the cost of power generation. Nowhere does it state the cost of reaching 90% uptime with renewables + battery. Or 99% uptime with renewables + battery. The document doesn’t mention uptime, at all. Only generation, independant of demand.
To the best of my understanding, these sources don’t support the claim that renewables + battery storage are costeffective technologies for a balanced electric grid.
It looks at the cost of power generation
Yes.
But then you added the requirement of 90% uptime which is isn’t how a grid works. For example a coal generator only has 85% uptime yet your power isn’t out 4 hours a day every day.
Nuclear reactors are out of service every 18-24 months for refueling. Yet you don’t lose power for days because the plant has typically two reactors and the grid is designed for those outages.
So the only issue is cost per megawatt. You need 2 reactors for nuclear to be reliable. That’s part of the cost. You need extra bess to be reliable. That’s part of the cost.
But then you added the requirement of 90% uptime which is isn’t how a grid works.
I’m referring to the uptime of the grid. Not an individual power source.
Assume we’ve successfully banned fossil fuels and nuclear, as is the goal of the green parties.
How much renewable production, and bess, does one need to achieve 90% grid uptime? Or 99% grid uptime?
If you want a balanced grid, you don’t need to just build for the average day (in production and consumption), you need to build for the worst case in both production and consumption.
The worst case production in case for renewables, is close to zero for days (example). Meaning you need to size storage appropriatelly, in order to fairly compare to nuclear. And build sufficient production so that surplus is generated and able to be stored.
If we’re fine with a blackout 10% of the time, I can see solar + bess beating nuclear, price wise. If the goal instead is a reliable grid, then not.
As an example: take Belgium. As a result of this same idea (solar/wind is cheap!) we ended up with both (1) higher greenhouse gas emissions and (2) costlier energy generation, as we now heavily rely on gas power generation (previously mainly russian, now mainly US LNG) to balance the grid. Previous winter we even had to use kerosene turbine generation to avoid a blackout.
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
So it’s flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.
Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and
13gw2gw of production.This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn’t take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.
The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.
For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.
So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that’s when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let’s sick with 14.
For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW “storage” for 24hrs.
So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.
The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don’t think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it’s mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.
So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
That’s stored energy. For example: a 5 MWh battery can provide 5 hours of power at 1MW. It can provide 2 hours of power, at 2.5MW. It can provide 1 hour of power, at 5MW.
The max amount of power a battery can deliver (MW), and the max amount of storage (MWh) are independant characteristics. The first is usually limited by cooling and transfo physics. The latter usually by the amount of lithium/zinc/redox of choice.
What uptime refers to is: how many hours a year, does supply match or outperform demand, compared to the number of hours a year.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This is incorrect. Under the assumption that nuclear plants are steady state, (which they aren’t).
To match a 1GW nuclear plant, for one day, you need a fully charged 1GW battery, with a capacity of 24GWh.
Are you sure you understand the difference between W and Wh?
My math assumes the sun shines for 12 hours/day, so you don’t need 24 hours storage since you produce power for 12 of it.
My math is drastically off though. I ignored the 12 hrs time line when talking about generation.
Assuming that 12 hours of sun, you just need 2Gw solar production and 12Gw of battery to supply 1Gw during the day of solar, and 1Gw during the night of solar, to match a 1Gw nuclear plants output and “storage.”
Seeing as those recent projects put that nuclear output at 17 bil dollars and a 14 year build timeline, and they put the solar equivalent at roughly 14 billion(2 billion for solar and 12 billion for storage) with a 2 - 6 year build timeline, nuclear cannot complete with current solar/battery tech, much less advancing solar/battery tech.
Assuming that 12 hours of sun, you just need 2Gw solar production and 12Gw of battery to supply 1Gw during the day of solar, and 1Gw during the night of solar,
Again, I think you might not understand the difference between W and Wh. The SI unit for Wh is joules.
When describing a battery, you need to specify both W and Wh. It makes no sense, to build a 12GW battery, if you only ever need 1GW of output.
Thats a chicken/egg peoblem. If enough renewables are build the storage follows. In a perfect world goverments would incentivice storage but in an imperfect one problems have to occure before somebody does something to solve them. Anyway, according to lazard renewables + storage are still cheaper than NPPs.
Imagine this (not so) hypothetical scenario:
Yellowstone or another supervolcano erupts and leads to a few years of volcanic winter, where there is much less sunshine. This has historical precedent, it has happened before, and while in and of itself it will impact a lot of people regardless of anything else, wouldn’t you agree it would be better to have at least some nuclear power capacity instead of relying solely on renewables?
Sure, such a scenario is not probable, but it pays to stay safe in the case of one such event. I would say having most of our power from renewables would be best, having it supported by 10-20% or so nuclear with the possibility of increase in times of need would make our electric grids super resilient to stuff
Yeah let me imagine a supervolcano explosion of that scale to effect global weather patterns. What do you think will happen to your reactors? No, they are not indestructable just because they can handle an earthquake of normally expected proportion.
Nature catastrophes are the top 1 danger to nuclear energy. See Fukushima.
And the real question here would be a comparison between risk of a nuclear accident event and a renewables-impacting climate event.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/24/power-grid-battery-capacity-growth
US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years
Let’s be clear, the only reason grid-level storage for renewables “doesn’t exist” is because of a lack of education about (and especially commitment to) simple, reliable, non-battery energy storage such as gravitational potential, like the ARES project. We’ve been using gravitational potential storage to power our mechanisms since Huygens invented the freaking pendulum clock. There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
How about basic maths? I
Scale is a huge fucking issue. The little country of the Netherlands, where I happen to live, uses 2600 petajoule per day. So let’s store 1 day of power, at 100% efficiency, using the tallest Alp (the Mont Blanc).
Let’s round up to 5000 meters of elevation. We need to store 2.6e18 joules, and 1 joule is 100 grams going up 1 meter. So to power a tiny little country, we need to lift roughly 5e13 kilos up the Mont Blanc. To visualize, that’s 1.7 billion 40ft shipping containers, or roughly 100 per inhabitant.
Using 555m blocks of granite, you’d need 166 million of them (9 for every person in the country). Assuming a 2% slope, you’d need to build a 250.000m long railway line. And if you lined all those blocks up, with no space in between, you’d need 3328 of those lines (which then couldn’t move, because they fill the entire space between the summit and sea level).
And that’s just 1 small country.
And hey, you know what, that’s almost got a point. Firstly, I’m in the US, and I’ll freely admit that my comment was highly US-normative. However, I believe my comment on government corruption stands for the US case, where there is an insane amount of space that is already partly-developed in random bits of desert.
Now, let’s get into your claims against the Netherlands case. Let’s do some “basic maths”:
- Unless the IEA is very, VERY wrong, your claim that the Netherlands consumes “2600 petajoule per day” is INSANELY high. Every statistic I can find shows electricity consumption being between 113 [2] and 121 [1] Terawatt-hours per annum. Let’s divide that larger value by 365 (assuming uniform seasonal demand), then convert that into joules, and we get 1.19 Petajoules per day. more than a THOUSAND times smaller than your number.
- Secondly, this “just 1 small country” bit is spurious, since your “small country” is the 33rd-greatest electricity consumer in the world for the 77th highest population [2]
- The assumption that you must store an entire day’s worth of energy demand is ludicrous. Let’s be generous and assume that you have to store 50% of the day’s energy demand, despite the fact that the off-hours are during the night, when electricity demands fall off.
- Next, let us point out that we don’t need to abandon literally every other method of energy generation. From wind energy to, yes, nuclear, the Netherlands is doing quite well for itself outside of solar. Let’s assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let’s assume 50%.
- Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
- Because I neither want nor need your supposedly-charitable assumptions, let’s use the actual numbers from ARES in Nevada:
- Their facility’s mass cars total 75000 tons in freedom units, or about 68040000 kg. [3]
- They claim 90+% efficiency round-trip [4], but let’s assume that your condescending tone has made the train cars sad, so they’re having a bad day, and only run at 80% efficiency, despite the fact that we’ve known how to convert to and from GPE with insane efficiency ever since Huygens invented the fucking pendulum clock.
- Now, is this perfect for everywhere? Of course not. Not everywhere has the open space necessary. The ARES site requires a straight shot about 5 miles long, but they managed to find one that, in that distance, drops 2000 feet (~610 m) [5]
- Now, let’s do the math together: 475000000000J / 10m/s^2 / 68040000kg / 80% Efficiency = 880m total elevation needed
- Thus, unless my math is quite off, we would only need 2 of the little proof-of-concept ARES stations running at 80% efficiency to more than cover the energy storage needs required for your country to completely divest from fossil fuels and go all-in on solar for the remainder of your needs.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/the-netherlands [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption [3] https://aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/ [4] https://aresnorthamerica.com/gravityline/ [5] https://energy.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/energynvgov/content/Programs/4 - ARES.pdf
ETA: rectify a quote (“just 1 small country”), and make it more civil in response to the prior commenter removing some of their more condescending language.
You’re right in that I used yearly numbers and wrongly used them as daily numbers. The stats are from the central statistics bureau, and unfortunately it auto translates poorly https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/83989NED
The numbers include use of gas and coal for heating and industry, which often get ignored by people (mostly because it makes us look fucking terrible in renewable power stats).
- The assumption that you must store an entire day’s worth of energy demand is ludicrous.
It is, in fact extremely generous, if you’re using the solar+storage method. But let’s go with this and I’ll demonstrate what it means in practice.
Let’s assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let’s assume 50%.
You just made the switch from “energy used” to “electricity generated”. For a country that still does most of its heating with imported gas, that’s a big difference. The real amount of non-fossil energy is about 18%, call it 80% fossil.
- Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
So it’s 50% of 80% of 2600/365, or 2.8 petajoules. So that’s only 10 of those facilities. Not great, not terrible. But that’s not the point. Nor is it important that their demo facility has a height difference twice that of the whole country.
Let’s stick with the “one night of power store is plenty”.
That’s true, but only if you can use solar to power your whole day. In other words, to make do with only 1 night of storage, you need to generate all your power for 24 hours in December during December daylight hours. Assuming it doesn’t snow, one solar panel produces about .15kwh on a december day (working off of 2% of yearly production happening in december, and 300Wattpeak panels), or 540kj.
So you’re right, we only need to build 10 facilities twice the height difference of the entire country, to save one night of energy use. Unfortunately in order for that to be true, we would also need to cover about 960.000 hectares in solar panels, which is roughly twice the total built up area in the country, including roads.
And that’s assuming you keep a perfectly level energy use throughout the year, and a perfectly level production during December. Neither of which is true, and generally the worst days for solar production are the worst ones for use as well.
On the bright side, if we can put down two extra cities worth of solar panels for every city, we’ll probably have no issues building 600m tall hills by hand as well.
Alright, now we agree: solar isn’t for everywhere, and the gravity storage method won’t work in most places. You need preexisting slope, and my original comment was highly US-normative. As such, yes, we would need huge swathes of solar and wind collection sites, passive wave generators, pumped hydro and, yes, perhaps nuclear. Not everything will be “on” all the time. As far as the energy vs. Electricity numbers, while I vacillated between different terms, I WAS quite careful to only include electricity numbers throughout my stats and, again, none of my points were trying to prove that solar, specifically, is the right answer for the netherlands in exclusion of all else, but only that a significant energy storage problem can be solved with gravitational potential, and that the solution IS scalable if sites are selected carefully, and the fact that this has not been tried at scale anywhere in the world is due to government corruption. Still a US-normative idea, which I’ll grant, but still true, when you have places from morocco to the Gobi, to the outback to the western US, all with significant natural elevation change, significant open areas, and excellent prospects for renewable energy sources of ALL kinds.
Also, as far as solar panels go, remember that actual diode solar panels are NOT the only way to harvest solar energy (let alone the cheapest). Mirrors can easily be used to boil water, and this plan was nearly attempted throughout egypt a hundred years ago (see Frank Shuman’s solar thermal generators). However, I’m not about to argue that we should put giant solar collectors in one of the countries that is simultaneously the most population-dense (3rd highest in europe, IIRC) AND in a climate where large-scale solar is somewhat inefficient, ESPECIALLY when you have so much available wind power.
Not sure I get what you mean by “slow”.
And it’s not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we’ve been building and less of the one we stopped building.
This argument again?
Yes, it’s called reality. I know it’s an ugly thing that just doesn’t go away no matter how hard you want it to.
Dude, thorium reactors will be ready any day now, along with mini reactors! Everything will be super cheap and all the waste will be reused and we won’t be dependent on any fuel sources from Russia and all our problems will be gone!
/s, in case it’s not obvious
Reality can be anything anyone says, you just gotta believe it really hard?
And then repeat the
liereality in service to the ones than benefit from it. Gooboi.
You go on thinking renewables are ever going to replace fossil fuel while we charge full tilt to our doom
Hey now, someone who knows almost nothing is just asking questions here.
You are saying we should be kinder to the less fortunate & uneducated?
That’s a nice thought.
Renewables once surpassed fossil fuels, until some brave knight killed all the windmills.
You’re right to reject the logic behind that because it’s nonsense. Its not making sense to them because they still presume some kind of good faith when it come to these sorts of things.
The reason we haven’t built more nuclear power stations is because oil, gas and coal companies will make less money, if we build more nuclear power stations.
They have the means, the motive and they have a well recorded history of being that cartoonishly villainous. Nothing else makes sense.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl really did change things. Prior to those incidents there were plans to build over 50 more nuclear plants in place which got canceled as a result. Currently oil and gas industries will do all they can to keep nuclear from making a come back, but for a long time they didn’t have to do shit thanks to those catastrophes.
They didn’t have to but they did anyway.
Don’t forget Fukushima bring an excellent reminder
It’s crazy that Mr. Burns from the Simpsons was in nuclear and not coal or oil. Probably a product of the propaganda at the time.
It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.
Paraphrased but this is right.
And the people were taught to talk about the horrible nuclear accidents that killed a few but completely glance over the unimaginable millions perished in the name of oil, mustn’t even mention the mass extinction events we launched with oil.
We even spread exaggerated bullshit about radiation mutation (wtf? thats superhero comic books fiction!!) and cancer rates (only one really), ignoring how much overwhelmingly more of the both we get from fossil fuel products.
We are like prehistoric people going extinct bcs of the tales how generations ago someone burned down their house so fire bad. Well, actually not like that - we are taking with us a lot of species & entire ecosystems too.
It’s more like “Bob and Jim died in a fire a while ago, so everyone decided to put up with heaps of people dying to hypothermia and uncooked meat”
The local undertaker family tells the story about Bob and Jim once a week to the whole village (attendance is mandatory).
We’re all stories in the end.
“Ted Kennedy killed more people than Three Mile Island” - Bumper sticker.
That’s said, I facepalm at Fukushima. And desperately want more modern systems
An argument against fossil fuels is not an argument for nuclear.
The problem isn’t that they exploded one time. The problem is that that one explosion is still happening and likely will be for quite a while.
On the other hand, modern rock exploding plant designs are so much better that it’s very unlikely to repeat itself, so there’s that.
I’m sure the other rock/liquid/gas burning plants have had no issues along their lifetime and had no hand in demonizing the “new” slowly exploding rock technology after extreme negligence let the one big one happen. /s
I’d take the band aid of nuclear in my backyard vs what we rely on now after learning all of the insider knowledge of someone who personally worked in energy generation that did all of this plus renewables almost their entire professional life.
A hydro damn breaking has killed more people than Chernobyl before, and probably will again. Renewables are not perfect either unfortunately. Though some are slightly safer than nuclear.
Nobody wants dams. It’s not just dangerous, It’s also ecocide.
Since when? There are dams all over the place.
Most are safer than nuclear, but until the environmental cost of manufacturing them is outweighed by the benefit of their use then nuclear is the least intolerable stopgap.
Wait are you saying that renewables have too much environmental cost to make?
Some do. Hydro is a net positive, not sure about wind but probably, but last I heard solar not so much. That may have changed since.
I know manufacturing panels and batteries have a significant environmental cost. Being a net negative though I am not sure about. Could you link some sources?
No it’s about nuclear waste and where to store it, it’s about how expensive it is to build a nuclear power plant (bc of regulations so they don’t goo boom) and it’s about how much you have to subsidize it to make the electricity it produces affordable at all. Economically it’s just not worth it. Renewables are just WAY cheaper.
Funny how people think waste is why we don’t use nuclear power.
You noticed how we’re all fine breathing in poison and carcinogens? Still haven’t banned burning fossil fuels.
It’s a money problem and a PR problem
And much of the PR problem is related to waste. The main push towards alternative energy sources comes from people worried about the long term consequences of burning fossil fuels. These same people worry about the long term consequences of nuclear waste production, so nuclear sabotages itself on this front.
Exactly, bad PR.
Waste isn’t actually much of a problem - it’s just been portrayed as one.
You noticed how we’re all fine breathing in poison and carcinogens? Still haven’t banned burning fossil fuels.
Who is “we”? How “fine” are you with breathing poison and carcinogens?
Fire’s waste is just all particulates in the air which we all share.
Yeah but we got lungs to filter that all out … or smth idk how this works
I am Jack’s Lungs. I breath in soot and particles and eventually they cause cancer and I kill Jack.
That’s how that shit works, homes. Not a thing to “idk whatev” about.
No it’s about nuclear waste and where to store it,
Is this video inaccurate? This isn’t meant as a gotcha comment. https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
Renewable are so cheap, especially when we don’t need as much energy! Fortunately we won’t need as much energy in winter now. :-)
Step 1: Get magic rocks.
Step 2: Now design the rest of the nuclear reactor.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.
yes
Step 5: Bury cursed stuff somewhere and forget about it.
That is an extreme over simplification of a very complicated subject, it’s never that simple.
Having said that: yeah. It was stupid to stop using nuclear energy
I hate this thread.
One time? Wikipedia says over 100 serious incidents and lists about 30 of them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents&wprov=rarw1
It’s fine if you like nuclear, just don’t try and claim it was one time. It poses serious risk and should be treated as such.
Look up deaths per kWHr of different energy sources and come back to me
It has that low death rate precisely because it is heavily regulated.
The typical nuclear booster argument works on the following circular logic:
“Nuclear is perfectly safe.”
“But that’s not the problem with nuclear. The problem with nuclear is its too expensive.”
“Nuclear is expensive because it’s overly regulated!”
“But nuclear is only safe because of those heavy regulations!”
“We would have everything powered by nuclear by now if it weren’t for Greenpeace.”
This exactly. But they keep shilling nuclear power regardless. Super silly tribalism.
That’s not my point and I’m already aware.
Most of those didn’t involve the magic rocks, and most didn’t hurt anyone.
More people die creating the building materials for a powerplant (or a windmills, or a solar panel) than ever during operation. The numbers really don’t matter.
I honestly don’t care what we do, as long as we stop burning coal, oil and gas. The way I see it, every nuclear plant and windmill means we all die a little later.
This is the way. Nuclear is actually one of the safer energy sources, and one of the more reliable. It’s also more expensive than most renewables. As always it comes down to local conditions and situations that favor one power source over another - like countries with lots of geothermal that can be exploited or solar probably won’t go nuclear.
The house burning probably happened more than one time too.
The alternative is not necessarily oil.
It feels like it is otherwise we wouldn’t possibly use it.
Imagine dangerous drilling, all the complex refining, the mass transpiration systems around the world moving billions of tonnes, etc. It’s stupid and complex. The system to enable it was somewhat forced & def forced to maintain it, it’s well documented actually.
Just put it somewhere noone lives like the Dakotas or places people who don’t matter live, like west Virginia. All the coal miners getting cancer anyway, why not double tap?
Low blow on West Virginia. Cool state and nice people. Hoping to move there someday.
The coal mining industry employs about 38,000 people. Dunkin Donuts alone employs seven times as many people as the whole coal mining industry. There just aren’t that many coal miners anymore. And everyone currently involved with it joined up knowing full well the days of coal were numbered.
Depends. Is there a McElroy brother nearby? Awesome. No? Hmm. Not as sure.
Yet it still has much lower deaths per energy generated than fossil fuels, and even less than some renewables. A single hydro accident can kill more people than even the worst nuclear disasters. It’s not fair to pretend that all the other sources are perfectly safe.
Who’s pretending they’re safe? The only pretending I see in the meme is about nuclear. But if you want to argue with something I didn’t say, have at it I guess.
You can’t call nuclear dangerous when it’s literally safer than many other energy sources. It’s like calling Caffeine dangerous when meth exists.
Caffeine is dangerous and can kill humans in large doses AND meth exists. It’s not one or the other, genius. Please mainline some caffeine to prove your point. Meth exists, you’ll be fine.
Yes it can. Pretending it’s that dangerous in doses normally consumed by humans in say coffee would be silly though and that’s exactly what you are doing. Like you could make a dirty bomb from spent fuel rods, but that’s irresponsible. You could build outdated and unsafe reactors, but again that’s irresponsible. You could also burn people to death using the power of the sun and some mirrors. Do you get my point?
doses normally consumed
So we can just put an much caffeine into a person as we want because it’s ok in normal dosages? That’s wrong. Your analogy sucks. You can’t discount danger because of normal conditions. Tsunamis weren’t normal for Fukushima. Do you understand?
Do we get to ignore things that get labeled irresponsible? Plus, if there’s been a hundred incidents, that pretty much says we aren’t and cannot be responsible enough to prevent them.
Your points aren’t worth arguing further. I will not be engaging anymore. Feel free to continue to think that your analogies are clever; I will not.
How many of those incidents killed anyone? It’s the same with aviation, lots of incidents but few are actually fatal. We still fly everyday.
You can argue all you want but unless you have something that’s actually significantly safer then what are you going to do?