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Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Big honking power plants of all fl

• scotty79 6y ago
  You can overbuild and burn excess energy mining crypto. I think crypto will be what dictates future energy prices and investments.
• sir_bearington 6y ago
  > Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else. But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7. > RIP, only France did nuclear right :( And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
  • willis936 6y ago
    Pumped hydro is pretty interesting, but highly dependent on natural elevation changes to be considered remotely economical.
  • jashephe 6y ago
    Isn't pumped storage hydro kind of that "silver bullet"? At least in places with the right geography?
    • sir_bearington 6y ago
      Pumped hydroelectric has good capacity, but doesn't scale well. The right geography is the main limiting factor, accessibility is a second. The places with good hydroelectric potential tend to be very remote, in the mountains. It's extremely hard to do large earthmoving and concrete construction in remote places. The places that have simultaneously the right topology and relatively easy accessibility are limited.
      • AstralStorm 6y ago
        The alternative is essentially big water towers, and that has serious construction challenges not solved yet.
    • pfdietz 6y ago
      Pumped thermal storage has no geographic limits. The idea is: compress argon, transfer the heat to thermal store, expand the argon back to the starting pressure to recover some work, then transfer the "cold" to another thermal store. For long term storage, use very cheap materials, like rocks, for the thermal stores. To discharge, reverse the flow, so argon is cooled, then compressed, then heated, then expanded. All this can be done with existing technologies and with a round trip efficiency of perhaps 60%.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    > Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. What physical limit prevents this? It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
• andromeduck 6y ago
  Economies of scale and a heavy reliance on forced labor. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-solar-companies-forced-labor-xinjiang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...
  • imtringued 6y ago
    Forced labor reminds me of Nazi labor programs. However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.
• gameman144 6y ago
  One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar, and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy production without reverting to the equally land-efficient methods of coal and gas. That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
  • abruzzi 6y ago
    This is very interesting to me. On of my (perhaps irrational) fears with solar and wind is how much land it potentially could take to supply power. I live in a very sparsely populated state because my greatest joy in life is being as far as possible from "civilization." I spend a lot of my free time traveling through craggy jeep trails to visit obscure locations (and photograph them.) If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
    • gameman144 6y ago
      Sure, it's at https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf. I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
      • pfdietz 6y ago
        Solar does not use rare earth metals. Please stop propagating this canard.
        • gameman144 6y ago
          Ah, honest mistake, lithium (not rare earths) is the metal that the US doesn't have a sufficient stockpile of. The rest of the point should still stand though, essentially having an energy grid that can react to supply shocks.
• ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
  France did it right-ish. They have to import peak power as their reactors cannot ramp quickly enough.