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Solar and wind are great, but they don't provide continuous power. We need them, and nuclear.
by pmarca 6y ago
Solar and wind are great, but they don't provide continuous power. We need them, and nuclear.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoWe don't need continuous power. We need peaking power.
- adventured 6y agoNuclear provides guaranteed minimum power production, which is what you actually want. You also want a more diversified system than just eg solar and wind. It's not acceptable to depend on renewables like solar and wind to try to fill that minimum guaranteed role. They are low on the guaranteed scale, whereas nuclear is high on the guaranteed scale. Grid scale batteries do not fill that role either, not under any scenario short of magic batteries that self-fill perpetually. Paying the added cost for nuclear at 20-30% of total national energy production, is a reasonable price to pay for higher diversification and higher guaranteed minimum energy production. We should also boost the grid and build nuclear in low-risk weather locations and distribute from there to everywhere else. Climate change is going to hammer the coasts, right? Perhaps a super hurricane knocks out solar and wind across multiple states around Florida. We bring the lines back up and immediately have nuclear power flowing in from weather-safe foreign states to re-start everything with (those out of state nuclear plants are already handling 20-30% of Florida's power in this concept; if rebalanced properly, they could handle 50-60%+ of all the now-lower power demands in the early re-start phase after such an emergency). You can get high-concentration of power output capability in a weather-safe area with nuclear, in this model, which solar and wind can't even remotely come close to competing with.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago> Nuclear provides guaranteed minimum power production, which is what you actually want. No, you want power production that meets demand, aka peakers. Baseline power is only interesting when it's cheaper than peak power. Your point about weather protection is a good one. Which is best handled through over capacity and interconnection IMO.
- decasteve 6y agoThe Sun is always shining somewhere on Earth. We have the luxury of a nuclear furnace about ~92 million miles away and not going anywhere. Build a Ultra-High-Voltage World Electric Grid as Bucky Fuller described 40+ years ago and we'll make better use of it as a continuous power source.
- natch 6y agoAnother person who dismisses or is unaware of the existence of grid scale batteries. Nuclear could help but it is so centralized it really puts all control in the hands of big corporate and government types, with cost overruns and bankruptcies funded by ratepayers and taxpayers. “Too cheap to meter” was a lie yet the same lie continues to be recycled when talking about the next promised generation. No thank you. I’ll take local control, local and individual ownership, and individual freedom and self determination thank you very much.