9 ms·

Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar, requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space for the same amount of available energy. Plus this

by wazoox 5y ago

Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar, requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space for the same amount of available energy. Plus this is entirely controllable production, requiring only minimal hydro power for production smoothing (French nukes can ramp up from 0 to 100% or the reverse in 10 minutes), while wind and solar produce whenever they want, and therefore require either storage (no technology exists at scale, particularly nothing that could be massively available and producing in the next couple of decades) or backup production (usually gas, which is really bad from a CO2 point of view). That's why Germany's Energiewende is going into the wall: it's already much more expensive than planned, and will require humongous additional investment, so far for very limited impact on absolute emissions. Remember that what counts for the climate are absolute emissions, not relative proportions of low-carbon and high-carbon production!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CapsAdmin 5y ago
Damming a river has a negative environmental impact on its wildlife too.
- justanotherguy0 5y ago
  And wind turbines kill birds. And solar fields disrupt habitats. What about it?
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    Wind turbines kill maybe 500,000 birds a year. [1]. Birds flying into windows kills up to 1,000,000,000 birds per year. [2] [1] https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions/wind-turbines.php#:~:text=The%20most%20comprehensive%20and%20statistically,and%20500%2C000%20birds%20per%20year https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/.... [2] https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/being-a-good-wildlife-neighbor/birds-and-windows/#:~:text=Up%20to%20one%20billion%20birds,of%20window%20collisions%20are%20fatal https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b....
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Birds flying into windows kills up to 1,000,000,000 birds per year >[2] https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b.... That seems like a very high bound. Another source says there are 7.2B birds in US and canada[1], so 1B birds would be 14% of all birds, which is really high. I also feel like 7.2B dead birds would be very noticeable in the form of dead birds on sidewalks, which I'm not seeing. [1] https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/20/bird-population-decrease-third-fewer/ https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/20/bird-population-decrea...
      - MagnumOpus 5y ago
        It might surprise you, but buildings in places other than the US and Canada now have windows too. By some estimates 95% of the world's windows are outside of US/CA! (Not that it matters, birds are a pretext, nobody really cares about birds, otherwise outdoor cats as pets would not be a thing.)
        gruez 5y ago
        The source linked in the parent post says the 1 billion figure is for US only. Maybe the number is more plausible if it's applied worldwide, but the source should be considered as unreliable.
    - baryphonic 5y ago
      Shouldn't this be scaled to the drastic difference in proportion? I'm willing to accept the hypothesis that turbines are no more dangerous (or even less dangerous) than windows, but with raw numbers it feels like we're comparing apples and oranges. I don't have accurate counts for the number of windows globally, but I'm fairly confident it's much higher than the number of wind turbines.
  - Glavnokoman 5y ago
    I do not understand why solar fields do not take the ample roof areas. That is usually just wasted, even worse the roofs are mostly of some dark color where I live, they heat up the area for no good reason at all.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      The main impediment to roof-top solar is actually the roof tops themselves. Most were not constructed with the weight of solar panels in mind, nor are all roofs built to a common standard. Thus every roof needs an expensive inspection to see if it can have solar panels mounted as-is, and if not you also need an expensive custom plan to reinforce the roof. Also the grid is really not designed for large amounts of decentralized power generation. While modifying the grid is probably easier than replacing roofs en masse, it's still expensive. Dedicated solar plants can take advantage of economies of scale.
      - Glavnokoman 5y ago
        You are right. But isn't it sad and wrong that destroying wilderness is less expensive than fixing the roof?
    - jabl 5y ago
      That's true, but a non-trivial factor driving down the cost of solar electricity is not only the panels themselves, but economy of scale in all the rest, like electrical systems to connect them to the grid, support structures for the panels, installation and maintenance, etc. etc. So rooftop solar, while attractive from the perspective of not industrializing the wilderness, is more expensive than utility-scale solar. But yes, it would be nice with building codes requiring to either have solar or green roofs. That would certainly help drive down costs, and in the case of green roofs, reduce cooling demands as well as providing (depending on what you plant, granted) a haven for biodiversity.
  - jascii 5y ago
    The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible (Negative per W/Hr if we count oil spills) Solar fields do disrupt habitats, but less so then other commercial uses of the same land. Dams have a species eradicating impact on Salmonoids. There would be no Salmon left on the west-coast if we didn't specifically breed and plant them.
    - nico_h 5y ago
      >The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible (Negative per W/Hr if we count oil spills) It can be further decreased by painting one of the blades in black (https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May_EcolEvol_2020.pdf https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May...) and in any case they are way less lethal than domestic / feral cats. > Solar fields do disrupt habitats, but less so then other commercial uses of the same land. We could use the south facing windows of sky scrapers, the roofs of parking or other already industrialised locales. If planting in the countryside, it can be used for growing stuff in the shade depending on the installation height, or feeding sheep.
    - tzs 5y ago
      > The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible. Wind turbines don't equally affect all species. Raptors are much more vulnerable to them than are other birds in the area. When raptors are hunting they are looking down to spot prey, and they have an eye ridge and feathers that try to block out other directions (to keep the sun out so as to not interfere with spotting small prey down below). This means that they have trouble seeing what is in front of them, reducing their chances of noticing that they are going to fly right into something. Some wind farms are trying to address this by having spotters that keep a watch and when they see a raptor approaching shut down the section of the wind farm the bird is hunting in. There's a company that has a system for automating this, using cameras and computer vision software to spot the approaching raptors [1]. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/29/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut-by-82-percent-ai-optical-technology/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/29/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut-by...
Reason077 5y ago
> "Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar" With current technology, nuclear is significantly less efficient than solar and wind in one very important metric: cost. Or to put it another way, a dollar invested in solar or wind will produce more energy and offset more carbon emissions more quickly than if that dollar was invested in nuclear. This may change when we're chasing after the last 10-20% of grid emissions, but for now there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit.
- option 5y ago
  that “cost” in nuclear has more to do with regulations rather than technology.
  - apcragg 5y ago
    What regulations, specifically, do you mean?
  - danhor 5y ago
    The regulations are a consequence of the technology being risky if not properly regulated. This does not apply to most renewables (with the exception of dams for electricity generation)
    - bassman9000 5y ago
      I don't think we've even started to account the immense costs of reciclying solar panels. Not even mentioning wind turbines, which today are partly not even recyclable. A nuclear power plant can last 50-75 years. What are we going to do with millions of heavy-metal filled solar panels?
      - Reason077 5y ago
        > "immense costs of reciclying solar panels ... A nuclear power plant can last 50-75 years." How long do you think it takes to "recycle" a nuclear power plant after it finishes operation? Decommissioning an old nuclear power plant can take more than 100 years and costs billions. Decommissioning and clean-up of the UK's fleet of 17 retired Magnox reactors, built between the 1950s and 1970s, is estimated to cost in excess of £100 billion, and will still be ongoing well into the 22nd century: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-UK-nuclear-clean-up-cost-estimate-dips-to-154-billion-15071602.html https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-UK-nuclear-clean-up-co... Is it really fair for us to keep offloading these costs and problems onto future generations?
pydry 5y ago
advanced nuclear - $6000/kW (2019)[9] gas/oil combined cycle power plant - $1000/kW (2019)[9] combustion turbine - $710/kW (2020)[9] onshore wind - $1600/kW (2019)[9] offshore wind - $6500/kW (2019)[9] solar PV (fixed) - $1060/kW (utility),[10] $1800/kW (2019)[9] solar PV (tracking)- $1130/kW (utility)[10] $2000/kW (2019)[9] battery storage power - $1380/kW (2020)[9] conventional hydropower - $2752/kW (2020)[9] geothermal - $2800/kW (2019)[9] coal (with SO2 and NOx controls)- $3500–3800/kW[11] fuel cells - $7200/kW (2019)[9] -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... It sure is expensive for something so efficient.
- option 5y ago
  how much is a kW of solar at night?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pydry 5y ago
    looks like $2,440 if you add battery to solar. still quite a bit below $6,000
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      And that’s current battery prices, which are declining rapidly with manufacturing capacity rapidly increasing to support EV production. Batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear, and can be built faster with very little regulatory requirements.
      - bassman9000 5y ago
        Again, recycling. What's the lifecycle of a solar panel, and the aforementioned batteries. 10 years? 20? What do we do with millions of them then?
jascii 5y ago
"requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space for the same amount of available energy" Does this include long-term storage of the waste products?
- dgregd 5y ago
  In two decades we’ll be sending nuclear waste into deep space.
  - jascii 5y ago
    https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/why-cant-nuclear-waste-be-sent-into-outer-space/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/why-cant-nuclear-w...
- junon 5y ago
  Please check out some up-to-date information about nuclear waste storage. We've gotten to the point refinement has taken reactant levels down to acceptable levels for low-risk storage and can even re-use them in other reactor designs.
  - jascii 5y ago
    Any specific sources of up-to-date information you recommend?
  - jascii 5y ago
    So, it looks like re-processing other then for weapon production only gets done on a very small, experimental scale because it is simply not economical, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing). This still leaves us with an endlessly growing stockpile of dangerous nuclear waste products.
danhor 5y ago
Efficient by what standard? The ones you listed? One of the largest negatives of nuclear is it's cost efficiency, namely it being pretty bad and not dropping, compared to renewables > no technology exists at scale, particularly nothing that could be massively available and producing in the next couple of decade P2G? Hydrogen can be produced, stored and given back to the grid at scale. Do also keep in mind that it currently take decades before new nuclear power plants go from beginning the planning phase to producing energy (at least in the west), so it may be even worse for nuclear power Regarding germany's Energiewende: A large part is that the EEG-Umlage is very expensive while not helping much in the last decade. If you look at the increase in wind & solar, it has pretty much stagnated the last few years while costs didn't. It's just not a very good instrument. Additionally, new rules (at least for wind) decimated available land and the "Ausbaukorridor" (added in 2013) also ensured that there couldn't be much growth for renewables.
kiliantics 5y ago
Have you got any citations to support these claim? Nuclear usually requires vast subsidies to operate and imposes costs that go on for decades or more in waste management. And according to this data, all the nuclear energy output reduced in Germany has already been more than made up for with non-hydro renewables, which are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time: https://energytransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/non-hydro-RE.png https://energytransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/non-...
- wazoox 5y ago
  Yeah, and they didn't do much to reduce their CO2 emissions. They even brought a new pipeline online (NordStream2) to get more gas (because sometimes there's no sun or no wind). What counts for climate is absolute emissions, you know. Investing 300 billions € to get out of nuclear and hardly lower emissions is the very definition of madness to me.
- wazoox 5y ago
  More on the Energiewende fiasco: https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/en/audit-reports/products/special-reports/2021-special-reports/federal-government2019s-governance-of-energy-transition-still-inadequate https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/en/audit-reports/products/...
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  > "all the nuclear energy output reduced in Germany has already been more than made up for with non-hydro renewables". Which means despite all the efforts and billions spent the renewables have helped zero in reducing carbon emissions, because they were used to replace nuclear rather than coal. > Nuclear usually requires vast subsidies to operate This is not true, notably unlike non-hydro renewables.
iSnow 5y ago
Then again, France is unable to get their EPR design implemented in time and on budget in their own country, let alone in the UK. Even in France, there's a growing trend towards renewables.
- wazoox 5y ago
  The reasons are political, and German meddling isn't exactly innocent in this matter. Wind turbines are MASSIVELY subsidized and are actually an elaborate form of scam against taxpayer money; plus EDF has been coerced into selling its cheap nuclear power to its "challengers" with a loss, to create a "market" with "competition" that was supposed to drive costs down, and instead increased dramatically electricity prices (+60% in 14 years).
  - iSnow 5y ago
    Yeah, no. You can't sell energy that you are not producing and the EPR in France and the UK is still not running. Just check the price in EUR/kWh and start to weep. I'm not in principle against nuclear, but it's just not economically feasible to run on full nuclear, not when renewables are much cheaper.
    - wazoox 5y ago
      Renewable can't provide energy on demand. They work only as long as you have an equivalent alternate source for times with no wind or no sun. A grid running 100% on renewables isn't physically feasible, or at a prohibitively expensive price.
      - iSnow 5y ago
        That doesn't make nuclear any more feasible. Hinkley Point C is estimated to cost $32.5 bn and is expected to take 18y from go-ahead till operation. You'd need 15 NPPs of the same class to satisfy the UK's electricity demand at close to 100% utilization ratio. That's $4.9tn or 150% of the UK's GDP, just in capex. And there's no way EDF could simply build 15 of the things till 2030 or 2050 or whatever our climate goals for decarbonisation demand. And please don't reply with "it's getting a lot cheaper if we build more" - that has never really worked for nuclear.
Abimelex 5y ago
So how "cheap" is it to store nuclear waste for the next 50 Thousand years in a secure place? Or should we do it as always and just dump in into the ocean?
unknown_error 5y ago
> Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar, requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space That's like saying "solar is vastly more efficient than hydropower because it requires less water, concrete, and river space." Neither nuclear nor renewables are limited by those things, compared to things like cost, regulatory hurdles, political factors, fossil fuel lobbies, etc. Then there's the actual specific hurdles per energy type, like limited storage/battery tech/lithium/cobalt for solar, volatility for wind, nuclear waste and long-term capital risk for nuclear, etc.

by wazoox 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CapsAdmin 5y ago

Damming a river has a negative environmental impact on its wildlife too.

justanotherguy0 5y ago
And wind turbines kill birds. And solar fields disrupt habitats. What about it?
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  Wind turbines kill maybe 500,000 birds a year. [1]. Birds flying into windows kills up to 1,000,000,000 birds per year. [2] [1] https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions/wind-turbines.php#:~:text=The%20most%20comprehensive%20and%20statistically,and%20500%2C000%20birds%20per%20year https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/.... [2] https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/being-a-good-wildlife-neighbor/birds-and-windows/#:~:text=Up%20to%20one%20billion%20birds,of%20window%20collisions%20are%20fatal https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b....
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Birds flying into windows kills up to 1,000,000,000 birds per year >[2] https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b.... That seems like a very high bound. Another source says there are 7.2B birds in US and canada[1], so 1B birds would be 14% of all birds, which is really high. I also feel like 7.2B dead birds would be very noticeable in the form of dead birds on sidewalks, which I'm not seeing. [1] https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/20/bird-population-decrease-third-fewer/ https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/20/bird-population-decrea...
    - MagnumOpus 5y ago
      It might surprise you, but buildings in places other than the US and Canada now have windows too. By some estimates 95% of the world's windows are outside of US/CA! (Not that it matters, birds are a pretext, nobody really cares about birds, otherwise outdoor cats as pets would not be a thing.)
      - gruez 5y ago
        The source linked in the parent post says the 1 billion figure is for US only. Maybe the number is more plausible if it's applied worldwide, but the source should be considered as unreliable.
  - baryphonic 5y ago
    Shouldn't this be scaled to the drastic difference in proportion? I'm willing to accept the hypothesis that turbines are no more dangerous (or even less dangerous) than windows, but with raw numbers it feels like we're comparing apples and oranges. I don't have accurate counts for the number of windows globally, but I'm fairly confident it's much higher than the number of wind turbines.
- Glavnokoman 5y ago
  I do not understand why solar fields do not take the ample roof areas. That is usually just wasted, even worse the roofs are mostly of some dark color where I live, they heat up the area for no good reason at all.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    The main impediment to roof-top solar is actually the roof tops themselves. Most were not constructed with the weight of solar panels in mind, nor are all roofs built to a common standard. Thus every roof needs an expensive inspection to see if it can have solar panels mounted as-is, and if not you also need an expensive custom plan to reinforce the roof. Also the grid is really not designed for large amounts of decentralized power generation. While modifying the grid is probably easier than replacing roofs en masse, it's still expensive. Dedicated solar plants can take advantage of economies of scale.
    - Glavnokoman 5y ago
      You are right. But isn't it sad and wrong that destroying wilderness is less expensive than fixing the roof?
  - jabl 5y ago
    That's true, but a non-trivial factor driving down the cost of solar electricity is not only the panels themselves, but economy of scale in all the rest, like electrical systems to connect them to the grid, support structures for the panels, installation and maintenance, etc. etc. So rooftop solar, while attractive from the perspective of not industrializing the wilderness, is more expensive than utility-scale solar. But yes, it would be nice with building codes requiring to either have solar or green roofs. That would certainly help drive down costs, and in the case of green roofs, reduce cooling demands as well as providing (depending on what you plant, granted) a haven for biodiversity.
- jascii 5y ago
  The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible (Negative per W/Hr if we count oil spills) Solar fields do disrupt habitats, but less so then other commercial uses of the same land. Dams have a species eradicating impact on Salmonoids. There would be no Salmon left on the west-coast if we didn't specifically breed and plant them.
  - nico_h 5y ago
    >The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible (Negative per W/Hr if we count oil spills) It can be further decreased by painting one of the blades in black (https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May_EcolEvol_2020.pdf https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May...) and in any case they are way less lethal than domestic / feral cats. > Solar fields do disrupt habitats, but less so then other commercial uses of the same land. We could use the south facing windows of sky scrapers, the roofs of parking or other already industrialised locales. If planting in the countryside, it can be used for growing stuff in the shade depending on the installation height, or feeding sheep.
  - tzs 5y ago
    > The amount of birds killed by wind turbines is non-zero but negligible. Wind turbines don't equally affect all species. Raptors are much more vulnerable to them than are other birds in the area. When raptors are hunting they are looking down to spot prey, and they have an eye ridge and feathers that try to block out other directions (to keep the sun out so as to not interfere with spotting small prey down below). This means that they have trouble seeing what is in front of them, reducing their chances of noticing that they are going to fly right into something. Some wind farms are trying to address this by having spotters that keep a watch and when they see a raptor approaching shut down the section of the wind farm the bird is hunting in. There's a company that has a system for automating this, using cameras and computer vision software to spot the approaching raptors [1]. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/29/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut-by-82-percent-ai-optical-technology/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/29/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut-by...

Reason077 5y ago

> "Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar" With current technology, nuclear is significantly less efficient than solar and wind in one very important metric: cost. Or to put it another way, a dollar invested in solar or wind will produce more energy and offset more carbon emissions more quickly than if that dollar was invested in nuclear. This may change when we're chasing after the last 10-20% of grid emissions, but for now there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit.

option 5y ago
that “cost” in nuclear has more to do with regulations rather than technology.
- apcragg 5y ago
  What regulations, specifically, do you mean?
- danhor 5y ago
  The regulations are a consequence of the technology being risky if not properly regulated. This does not apply to most renewables (with the exception of dams for electricity generation)
  - bassman9000 5y ago
    I don't think we've even started to account the immense costs of reciclying solar panels. Not even mentioning wind turbines, which today are partly not even recyclable. A nuclear power plant can last 50-75 years. What are we going to do with millions of heavy-metal filled solar panels?
    - Reason077 5y ago
      > "immense costs of reciclying solar panels ... A nuclear power plant can last 50-75 years." How long do you think it takes to "recycle" a nuclear power plant after it finishes operation? Decommissioning an old nuclear power plant can take more than 100 years and costs billions. Decommissioning and clean-up of the UK's fleet of 17 retired Magnox reactors, built between the 1950s and 1970s, is estimated to cost in excess of £100 billion, and will still be ongoing well into the 22nd century: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-UK-nuclear-clean-up-cost-estimate-dips-to-154-billion-15071602.html https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-UK-nuclear-clean-up-co... Is it really fair for us to keep offloading these costs and problems onto future generations?

pydry 5y ago

advanced nuclear - $6000/kW (2019)[9] gas/oil combined cycle power plant - $1000/kW (2019)[9] combustion turbine - $710/kW (2020)[9] onshore wind - $1600/kW (2019)[9] offshore wind - $6500/kW (2019)[9] solar PV (fixed) - $1060/kW (utility),[10] $1800/kW (2019)[9] solar PV (tracking)- $1130/kW (utility)[10] $2000/kW (2019)[9] battery storage power - $1380/kW (2020)[9] conventional hydropower - $2752/kW (2020)[9] geothermal - $2800/kW (2019)[9] coal (with SO2 and NOx controls)- $3500–3800/kW[11] fuel cells - $7200/kW (2019)[9] -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... It sure is expensive for something so efficient.

option 5y ago
how much is a kW of solar at night?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pydry 5y ago
  looks like $2,440 if you add battery to solar. still quite a bit below $6,000
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    And that’s current battery prices, which are declining rapidly with manufacturing capacity rapidly increasing to support EV production. Batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear, and can be built faster with very little regulatory requirements.
    - bassman9000 5y ago
      Again, recycling. What's the lifecycle of a solar panel, and the aforementioned batteries. 10 years? 20? What do we do with millions of them then?

jascii 5y ago

"requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space for the same amount of available energy" Does this include long-term storage of the waste products?

dgregd 5y ago
In two decades we’ll be sending nuclear waste into deep space.
- jascii 5y ago
  https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/why-cant-nuclear-waste-be-sent-into-outer-space/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/why-cant-nuclear-w...
junon 5y ago
Please check out some up-to-date information about nuclear waste storage. We've gotten to the point refinement has taken reactant levels down to acceptable levels for low-risk storage and can even re-use them in other reactor designs.
- jascii 5y ago
  Any specific sources of up-to-date information you recommend?
- jascii 5y ago
  So, it looks like re-processing other then for weapon production only gets done on a very small, experimental scale because it is simply not economical, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing). This still leaves us with an endlessly growing stockpile of dangerous nuclear waste products.

danhor 5y ago

Efficient by what standard? The ones you listed? One of the largest negatives of nuclear is it's cost efficiency, namely it being pretty bad and not dropping, compared to renewables > no technology exists at scale, particularly nothing that could be massively available and producing in the next couple of decade P2G? Hydrogen can be produced, stored and given back to the grid at scale. Do also keep in mind that it currently take decades before new nuclear power plants go from beginning the planning phase to producing energy (at least in the west), so it may be even worse for nuclear power Regarding germany's Energiewende: A large part is that the EEG-Umlage is very expensive while not helping much in the last decade. If you look at the increase in wind & solar, it has pretty much stagnated the last few years while costs didn't. It's just not a very good instrument. Additionally, new rules (at least for wind) decimated available land and the "Ausbaukorridor" (added in 2013) also ensured that there couldn't be much growth for renewables.

kiliantics 5y ago

Have you got any citations to support these claim? Nuclear usually requires vast subsidies to operate and imposes costs that go on for decades or more in waste management. And according to this data, all the nuclear energy output reduced in Germany has already been more than made up for with non-hydro renewables, which are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time: https://energytransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/non-hydro-RE.png https://energytransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/non-...

wazoox 5y ago
Yeah, and they didn't do much to reduce their CO2 emissions. They even brought a new pipeline online (NordStream2) to get more gas (because sometimes there's no sun or no wind). What counts for climate is absolute emissions, you know. Investing 300 billions € to get out of nuclear and hardly lower emissions is the very definition of madness to me.
wazoox 5y ago
More on the Energiewende fiasco: https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/en/audit-reports/products/special-reports/2021-special-reports/federal-government2019s-governance-of-energy-transition-still-inadequate https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/en/audit-reports/products/...
MagnumOpus 5y ago
> "all the nuclear energy output reduced in Germany has already been more than made up for with non-hydro renewables". Which means despite all the efforts and billions spent the renewables have helped zero in reducing carbon emissions, because they were used to replace nuclear rather than coal. > Nuclear usually requires vast subsidies to operate This is not true, notably unlike non-hydro renewables.

iSnow 5y ago

Then again, France is unable to get their EPR design implemented in time and on budget in their own country, let alone in the UK. Even in France, there's a growing trend towards renewables.

wazoox 5y ago
The reasons are political, and German meddling isn't exactly innocent in this matter. Wind turbines are MASSIVELY subsidized and are actually an elaborate form of scam against taxpayer money; plus EDF has been coerced into selling its cheap nuclear power to its "challengers" with a loss, to create a "market" with "competition" that was supposed to drive costs down, and instead increased dramatically electricity prices (+60% in 14 years).
- iSnow 5y ago
  Yeah, no. You can't sell energy that you are not producing and the EPR in France and the UK is still not running. Just check the price in EUR/kWh and start to weep. I'm not in principle against nuclear, but it's just not economically feasible to run on full nuclear, not when renewables are much cheaper.
  - wazoox 5y ago
    Renewable can't provide energy on demand. They work only as long as you have an equivalent alternate source for times with no wind or no sun. A grid running 100% on renewables isn't physically feasible, or at a prohibitively expensive price.
    - iSnow 5y ago
      That doesn't make nuclear any more feasible. Hinkley Point C is estimated to cost $32.5 bn and is expected to take 18y from go-ahead till operation. You'd need 15 NPPs of the same class to satisfy the UK's electricity demand at close to 100% utilization ratio. That's $4.9tn or 150% of the UK's GDP, just in capex. And there's no way EDF could simply build 15 of the things till 2030 or 2050 or whatever our climate goals for decarbonisation demand. And please don't reply with "it's getting a lot cheaper if we build more" - that has never really worked for nuclear.

Abimelex 5y ago

So how "cheap" is it to store nuclear waste for the next 50 Thousand years in a secure place? Or should we do it as always and just dump in into the ocean?

unknown_error 5y ago

> Nuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar, requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space That's like saying "solar is vastly more efficient than hydropower because it requires less water, concrete, and river space." Neither nuclear nor renewables are limited by those things, compared to things like cost, regulatory hurdles, political factors, fossil fuel lobbies, etc. Then there's the actual specific hurdles per energy type, like limited storage/battery tech/lithium/cobalt for solar, volatility for wind, nuclear waste and long-term capital risk for nuclear, etc.