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It’s actually pretty easy to build a nuclear reactor, but is as expensive to make it safe today as it is to maintain a Windows NT 4.0 server in 2021 when it com

It’s actually pretty easy to build a nuclear reactor, but is as expensive to make it safe today as it is to maintain a Windows NT 4.0 server in 2021 when it comes to making it regulatory compliant. Also when comparing nuclear to “renewable” energy, you are really comparing distributed low density investments with monolithic ones. Nuclear is 1e6 the energy density of chemical reactions. And wind/solar is basically heat exchangers positioned 8 light minutes from the nuclear reactor. The Sun incidentally, is just as renewable as that Uranium we are discussing. What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)

oblio 6y ago
> What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :) I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic assumption you could dismantle: 1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for transporting electricity where it's needed. So shouldn't that stitching be quite solid anyway? Also, at a national level, I'd imagine solar and wind probably have rather solid statistical patterns, and those random factors can be abstracted away to a degree (the whole "what happens when the wind is not blowing?" - kind of hard to have the wind stop blowing all over 300k sqkm, all at once :-) ). 2. Once that power grid is solid, does it matter how small and distributed those solar and wind patches are? 3. I don't think Lithium-Ion is the only/main energy storage tech being investigated/invested in for grid purposes. And why couldn't it become a solid alternative for base load? Are base load-capacity energy storage facilities not competitive with gas/nuclear/coal power plants, factoring in pollution or other risks?
- rhodozelia 6y ago
  Imagine how overbuilt and under utilized a communications network would have to be in order for it to work the same way people imagine solar and wind power can be transported across the country. Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Aren't communication networks also overbuilt and underutilized ? After all that's why retail ISPs oversubscribe so much, and why we had issues at the start of the lockdowns. If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.

oblio 6y ago

> What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :) I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic assumption you could dismantle: 1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for transporting electricity where it's needed. So shouldn't that stitching be quite solid anyway? Also, at a national level, I'd imagine solar and wind probably have rather solid statistical patterns, and those random factors can be abstracted away to a degree (the whole "what happens when the wind is not blowing?" - kind of hard to have the wind stop blowing all over 300k sqkm, all at once :-) ). 2. Once that power grid is solid, does it matter how small and distributed those solar and wind patches are? 3. I don't think Lithium-Ion is the only/main energy storage tech being investigated/invested in for grid purposes. And why couldn't it become a solid alternative for base load? Are base load-capacity energy storage facilities not competitive with gas/nuclear/coal power plants, factoring in pollution or other risks?

rhodozelia 6y ago
Imagine how overbuilt and under utilized a communications network would have to be in order for it to work the same way people imagine solar and wind power can be transported across the country. Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.
- oblio 6y ago
  Aren't communication networks also overbuilt and underutilized ? After all that's why retail ISPs oversubscribe so much, and why we had issues at the start of the lockdowns. If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.