13 ms·

It's so frustrating seeing nuclear pitted against renewables, while fossil fuel powerplants are still operating/being built, whose baseline power could be repla

It's so frustrating seeing nuclear pitted against renewables, while fossil fuel powerplants are still operating/being built, whose baseline power could be replaced by nuclear. But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal.

ianai 5y ago
Especially when the incumbent, fossil fuel energy, has been propped up by subsidies and unpaid externalities for centuries.
- SllX 5y ago
  A century, I could maybe see. A century and maybe a plural amount of decades, perhaps. Gonna need you to cite that plural centuries though.
  - apendleton 5y ago
    Coal was already in reasonably widespread use in industrial processes 200 years ago, and produced unpaid-for externalities then just as it does now (actually worse ones, presumably, given that air quality was not yet regulated in any meaningful way).
    - atroche 5y ago
      But was it being "propped up" two centuries ago?
      - Brian_K_White 5y ago
        Unpaid externalities is a fancy way of saying propped up.
    - SllX 5y ago
      Where’s my citation I asked for? I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: his comment reads as hyperbole because of the vagueness of what centuries even means here. Even if it has been technically two centuries, century plural technically, that’s overstating his case. Overstating your case is a good way to get people to turn off to what you are saying if they perceive it that way.
      - adrianN 5y ago
        It is very easy to look up the history of coal use and see that it had metallurgical applications in antiquity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#History
        randomswede 5y ago
        A lot of the coal used in Swedish metal-working (up to relatively late, but I don't actually have dates, here, gut feel is 18050s) was charcoal, rather than mined coal. With quite advanced cooperatives[1] producing the charcoal for the mining/refining cooperatives[1]. [1] Somewhat loose translation of "kolare" and "bergslag", here.
- DisjointedHunt 5y ago
  Please don’t fall for the villianization that the media adopt to push an agenda. Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish. Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around. We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sources have a negative connotation attached sets us up for failure.
  - Goety 5y ago
    >Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish. Energy is needed for basic modern services. Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Not for eight billion people. Just look at what happens when we stop loading trucks for a little while. Now imagine if you expanded all that "going without" to everything that uses energy. You'd have days at most before mass chaos.
      - Goety 5y ago
        Can we engineer a human backbone behind these services to be resistant to corruption and complacency for security sake? We did an ok job with nuclear weapons but only just.
    - varajelle 5y ago
      In what condition? Without the energy of the fossil fuel, lots of the energy came from human labor. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten rid of slavery. Most people were doing a manual labor, which is also more discriminatory to the weaker ones (e.g. woman) So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
      - 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
arrrg 5y ago
With renewables baseline doesn’t make sense. Nuclear doesn’t combine well with renewables, not in a way that would complete the picture. Meaning: you can’t build something that works with only those two building blocks. Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that. Talking about baseline power – as if that‘s needed – is highly misleading in that context.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Why not? Unless you're ok with not having reliable baseline power at all.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    For that we should look at what baseline is. Ideally all our power sources would adjust instantaneously to demand. In reality that is not possible. Traditionally, power plants which can be run constantly at fixed output (i.e. coal plants, nuclear power plants), have been cheaper to operate, so we used those for "baseline" power and more expensive adjustable plants (e.g. gas turbines) to follow the load. However, the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants. Now wind/solar do not supply us a with a constant power like those old baseline plants, but instead with variable supply as well. So we still need fast adjustable sources (or storage), which now even out both variable supply and demand. By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      > By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible. Overprovisioning by how much? Currently ( at least since a month or so) across Europe there's a meteorological phenomenon that makes for cold temperatures, lower than usual wind speeds, and clouds. 2 out of the 3 main renewable power sources ( solar, wind, tidal) are heavily impacted ( wind most of all iirc) and producing less electricity than usual, while people need to warm themselves. And this is expected to continue into the winter. To combat such a scenario if everyone was on renewables+storage+interconnects, you'd have to built massive storage ( which we don't have the tech/space for) or massive interconnects from really far away places like Africa.
shawnz 5y ago
> But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal. Nobody wants to admit they are still considering coal, but everyone wants to take credit for blocking nuclear and building renewables. So at a glance it seems like it's nuclear vs renewables, when it's always been nuclear vs coal.
phicoh 5y ago
The problem is that hardly anybody does a clear cost calculation of a nuclear powerplant. We know roughtly what it costs to build solar or wind. There is a bit of subsidies and commercial parties take care of the rest. In the short term we need natural gas as a backup for solar and wind. But even that is not hard to build. And then we have nuclear. Projects that are late, projects cost way more than projected. Building a nuclear powerplant takes so much time that financing the project is almost impossible. Today, nuclear is just not a practical option. We need to build as much non-fossil capacity as we can and as quick as we can. In future, we have to solve the storage problem for wind and solar. If that becomes a problem, then nuclear may make a comeback. At least, if somebody can figure out how to accurately project the cost and construction time.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Every big construction project type has big cost overruns etc, even coal powerplants. For example: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/billion-dollar-kemper-clean-coal-energy-project-000015/ https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/billion-dollar... > And as the plant blows through deadlines, the cost has ballooned dramatically: An original price tag of $1.8 billion has swelled to $6.2 billion.

ianai 5y ago

Especially when the incumbent, fossil fuel energy, has been propped up by subsidies and unpaid externalities for centuries.

SllX 5y ago
A century, I could maybe see. A century and maybe a plural amount of decades, perhaps. Gonna need you to cite that plural centuries though.
- apendleton 5y ago
  Coal was already in reasonably widespread use in industrial processes 200 years ago, and produced unpaid-for externalities then just as it does now (actually worse ones, presumably, given that air quality was not yet regulated in any meaningful way).
  - atroche 5y ago
    But was it being "propped up" two centuries ago?
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      Unpaid externalities is a fancy way of saying propped up.
  - SllX 5y ago
    Where’s my citation I asked for? I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: his comment reads as hyperbole because of the vagueness of what centuries even means here. Even if it has been technically two centuries, century plural technically, that’s overstating his case. Overstating your case is a good way to get people to turn off to what you are saying if they perceive it that way.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      It is very easy to look up the history of coal use and see that it had metallurgical applications in antiquity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#History
      - randomswede 5y ago
        A lot of the coal used in Swedish metal-working (up to relatively late, but I don't actually have dates, here, gut feel is 18050s) was charcoal, rather than mined coal. With quite advanced cooperatives[1] producing the charcoal for the mining/refining cooperatives[1]. [1] Somewhat loose translation of "kolare" and "bergslag", here.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
Please don’t fall for the villianization that the media adopt to push an agenda. Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish. Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around. We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sources have a negative connotation attached sets us up for failure.
- Goety 5y ago
  >Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish. Energy is needed for basic modern services. Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Not for eight billion people. Just look at what happens when we stop loading trucks for a little while. Now imagine if you expanded all that "going without" to everything that uses energy. You'd have days at most before mass chaos.
    - Goety 5y ago
      Can we engineer a human backbone behind these services to be resistant to corruption and complacency for security sake? We did an ok job with nuclear weapons but only just.
  - varajelle 5y ago
    In what condition? Without the energy of the fossil fuel, lots of the energy came from human labor. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten rid of slavery. Most people were doing a manual labor, which is also more discriminatory to the weaker ones (e.g. woman) So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

arrrg 5y ago

With renewables baseline doesn’t make sense. Nuclear doesn’t combine well with renewables, not in a way that would complete the picture. Meaning: you can’t build something that works with only those two building blocks. Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide that. Talking about baseline power – as if that‘s needed – is highly misleading in that context.

pdonis 5y ago
> baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Why not? Unless you're ok with not having reliable baseline power at all.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  For that we should look at what baseline is. Ideally all our power sources would adjust instantaneously to demand. In reality that is not possible. Traditionally, power plants which can be run constantly at fixed output (i.e. coal plants, nuclear power plants), have been cheaper to operate, so we used those for "baseline" power and more expensive adjustable plants (e.g. gas turbines) to follow the load. However, the new reality is that wind/solar are cheaper than the old baseline plants. Now wind/solar do not supply us a with a constant power like those old baseline plants, but instead with variable supply as well. So we still need fast adjustable sources (or storage), which now even out both variable supply and demand. By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    > By over provisioning (and net interconnectivity) we can reduce the need for adjustable sources. Essentially if you have enough renewable sources to cover the high demands at low wind/sun you can always turn off the sources when you overshoot and because they are cheap it is economical unfeasible. Overprovisioning by how much? Currently ( at least since a month or so) across Europe there's a meteorological phenomenon that makes for cold temperatures, lower than usual wind speeds, and clouds. 2 out of the 3 main renewable power sources ( solar, wind, tidal) are heavily impacted ( wind most of all iirc) and producing less electricity than usual, while people need to warm themselves. And this is expected to continue into the winter. To combat such a scenario if everyone was on renewables+storage+interconnects, you'd have to built massive storage ( which we don't have the tech/space for) or massive interconnects from really far away places like Africa.

shawnz 5y ago

> But somehow the idea took hold that nuclear would be built instead of solar, and not instead of coal. Nobody wants to admit they are still considering coal, but everyone wants to take credit for blocking nuclear and building renewables. So at a glance it seems like it's nuclear vs renewables, when it's always been nuclear vs coal.

phicoh 5y ago

The problem is that hardly anybody does a clear cost calculation of a nuclear powerplant. We know roughtly what it costs to build solar or wind. There is a bit of subsidies and commercial parties take care of the rest. In the short term we need natural gas as a backup for solar and wind. But even that is not hard to build. And then we have nuclear. Projects that are late, projects cost way more than projected. Building a nuclear powerplant takes so much time that financing the project is almost impossible. Today, nuclear is just not a practical option. We need to build as much non-fossil capacity as we can and as quick as we can. In future, we have to solve the storage problem for wind and solar. If that becomes a problem, then nuclear may make a comeback. At least, if somebody can figure out how to accurately project the cost and construction time.

Jensson 5y ago
Every big construction project type has big cost overruns etc, even coal powerplants. For example: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/billion-dollar-kemper-clean-coal-energy-project-000015/ https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/billion-dollar... > And as the plant blows through deadlines, the cost has ballooned dramatically: An original price tag of $1.8 billion has swelled to $6.2 billion.