5 ms·
Yes, amazing how things are more expensive when your competition can emit unlimited carbon without paying anything for the externalities. Or when you're stuck
by bpodgursky 5y ago
Yes, amazing how things are more expensive when your competition can emit unlimited carbon without paying anything for the externalities.
Or when you're stuck running on 1960s technology because nothing new has been built in 60 years.
- briffle 5y agoI would love to see them fund (and drastically cut back the red tape) for some of the newer reactor designs that are looking very promising, like Nuscale Power. I know they are working on new plant in Idaho, seems like it should be sped up. (currently looking at 2029 and 2030)
- kingkawn 5y agoAll that pesky red tape preventing so called ‘disasters’ from ending so called ‘habitability of the planet’
- djohnston 5y agoWhich is killing more people per year, nuclear or coal? Nuclear or gas? Nuclear or oil?
- lesuorac 5y agoSo your argument is that we should remove safety requirements for Nuclear until it kills as many per year as other energy sources? Crazy requirements like being able to survive a 1-10000 earthquake and etc seem overly cumbersome until it happens. Sure a giant oil spill is not great but you were allowed to go to the Gulf of Mexico post-spill(s) and not so much for Chernobyl. So the DOE should keep its red tape so it can keep its (better than the military, see Spain) record with nuclear power.
- briffle 5y agoat what point did I talk about removing safety requirements? I said to reduce red tape. Things like peforming multiple regulatory approvals at the same time. (do you really need to wait for the environment review to finish before you start the reactor safety review?) Or pre-approve reactor designs, so they don't all have to be redone from scratch for every new reactor. There is a TON of ways to speed up approvals in a way that don't comprimise safety.. but that was a great strawman agrument!
- cellis 5y agoSomewhat disingenuous, you should take into account nuclear black swans which could easily make a whole state uninhabitable forever. That said, what I’ve read ( not much, haha ) about newer nuclear thorium tech seems to indicate this argument does not have a future…
- djohnston 5y agoI don't think it's disingenuous at all. The reality is more people are dying every day from pollution caused by fossil fuels than all nuclear power plant accidents combined. The fact that pollution doesn't make a big boom pushes our animal instinct to focus on nuclear as dangerous but it's not even close.
- caoilte 5y agoThe funniest thing is that climate change is now unavoidable and will make nuclear meltdowns even more likely because of the extreme weather events it will trigger. Now seems like the worst possible moment to remove safety restrictions...
- bpodgursky 5y agoThis is a ridiculous stretch.
- renewiltord 5y agoHave you considered that increasing warm temperatures will increase conflict(1) causing people to have road rage? It is quite plausible that a nuclear engineer having a road rage incident is not paying attention and blows up a reactor. Presumably, with increasing temperature, the regulators also have increased chances of road rage causing them to ignore fatal flaws. 1: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=heat+and+aggression&oq=heat+and+aggr#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DJ3BhFnVZGIAJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=heat...
- 5y ago
- lippel82 5y agoThey're advocating for "drastically cutting the red tape", which could certainly influence one side of these inequalities quite strongly.
- Gwypaas 5y agoWhy even compare to fossil fuels? That is simply disingenuous to make it look good by choosing irrelevant opponents. Compare nuclear to wind and solar and try to find any case it makes sense in.
- djohnston 5y agoWind stops and the sun doesn't shine
- kingkawn 5y agoNot sure why the awfulness of oil means we have to go for the option that makes the earth uninhabitable if anything goes slightly wrong. False forced choice to satisfy nuke fantasies
- djohnston 5y agoSlightly wrong? Catastrophically wrong. Earth uninhabitable? No, every nuclear plant in the world failing at once wouldn't make 1% of the earth uninhabitable, cut the hyperbole. Nuke fantasies? Vs what, the fantasy that somehow wind and solar are going to be always-on sources of energy? You need a reliable backup, right now it's either fossil fuels or nuclear. The fantasy is thinking that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear - they are not.
- kingkawn 5y agoYes but who is going to sign up to be the ones who end up with uninhabitable earth. You're thinking in generalizations, when always it will end up being in someone's backyard who doesn't want to live with the risk of losing their land for hundreds of years.
- bpodgursky 5y agoEvery nuclear reactor on earth could simultaneously go critical and melt down and it would still be a tiny blip on the habitability of the planet as compared to the impact of global warming.
- kingkawn 5y agotextbook whataboutism. Both options are shit. That means choose neither of them, not that we gotta take one.
- kurthr 5y agoI'm a big supporter of solar power, but in 60 years most installs will be garbage. Not only will the cells themselves be much lower efficiency, but the conversion electronics is also failure prone over the 20-30 year timespan. I'm waiting for the breathless reporting of the "Solar Garbage Disaster", and other non-News.
- endisneigh 5y agoEven if the efficiency of solar goes to 25% in 100 years, there's no reason why you couldn't still use them.
- loeg 5y agoAt some point, it’s not a cost efficient use of land. Other, more valuable users of the land will buy it and junk the panels.
- caoilte 5y agoa lot of land can be dual use (eg reservoirs / building roofs) or is of negligable value for anything else (desert)
- endisneigh 5y agoSolar panels can be on top of things tho
- pfdietz 5y agoIn many places in the US, even in the East, you can buy land for $1000/acre. An acre is 4046 square meters. A solar module is maybe $75 per square meter. If we cover half the acre with modules, the modules alone cost $150,000/acre. Now add in cost of mounting hardware and inverters. Land cost is close to negligible for solar, unless you're building it in very expensive places. If land cost ever did become generally significant, PV would be so cheap it would already have driven all other energy sources off the market.
- ncmncm 5y ago
- kjksf 5y agoThe competition is not just coal and gas but also solar / wind. Solar and wind is the cheapest energy. Then gas, then coal then nuclear. Yes, we should (and will, the trend makes it inevitable) replace coal and gas with solar and wind. We should also replace the most expensive (nuclear) energy with cheap and clean solar and wind. We're not grading on a curve here. It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago>It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it. That is a absurd thing to say. If the reason is "because we intentionally made it that way" then of course it matters because we can address that reason with the (nearly free) stroke of a pen.
- ncmncm 5y agoCorruption turns out to be quite hard to root out, particularly when it has been made wholly legal. Certainly, it takes more than a pen stroke. And you won't bring down nuke cost without cutting out the corruption. And, even if you did, it would remain uncompetitive with the storage that will have been long since built out by the time you could bring one online.
- zdragnar 5y agoSolar and wind are only the cheapest because we have dumped massive amounts of subsidies into them, and continue to do so at greater levels than nuclear. No matter how much money we throw at them, though, they produce zero when the sun isnt shining or the wind isnt blowing. Factor in the cost of batteries, and aside from a few exceptional locations, they aren't all that cheap anymore.
- pfdietz 5y agoThat doesn't explain why so much solar and wind are being installed elsewhere. Did you think we're subsidizing them globally? Factor in the cost of batteries and longer term storage and they're still going to be cheaper than new nuclear power plants.