7 ms·

If nukes prevented that many deaths, imagine how many solar + wind will prevent. The point here is that each $10B spent on new generating capacity displaces so

by ncmncm 5y ago

If nukes prevented that many deaths, imagine how many solar + wind will prevent. The point here is that each $10B spent on new generating capacity displaces some amount of coal generation. If you spend your $10B building nukes, it displaces A million tons / year of coal output, if you spend $10B building renewables, it instead displaces B million tons. And B is much larger than A, because a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke. The corollary is that each $ diverted from renewables to nukes is not just harmful, but brings climate disaster nearer. Best, of course, would be to stop diverting money to fossils, but all we can do about that is build out renewables + storage as fast as we can. Renewables will be running at 100% at all times, and each kWh produced displaces a kWh of fossil generation. Displaced fossil generation in most markets is methane gas, because methane gas is cheaper and therefore preferred. But! anywhere coal is being used at all, they will prefer to cut coal output because cutting coal saves more money than cutting gas. A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like nobody's business. Every last kWh of renewables + storage that can be put on the German grid, provided it is steady-enough output, displaces exactly that much coal. The cost of storage is plummeting even faster than of solar or wind ever did, so there is some short-term sense in delaying storage build-out until it is cheaper, so you can buy more of it. But in the big picture, building out storage at any price is much, much better than waiting.

jopsen 5y ago
In the meantime it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea. We should just have doubled down on it 50 years ago. So much geopolitical trouble would have been avoided if bad actors in the middle east and Russia wasn't flushed with cash.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  So who do you think is one of the largest providers of uranium in Europe? The arguments of Germany not being so dependent on Russia if they would have left their nuclear power plants running longer has been debunked several times. I believe this is largely nuclear power lobbyist taken advantage of the current situation. The EU is even more dependent on Uranium from Russia than gas. 20% of the natural Uranium and 26% of the enriched Uranium used in the EU comes from Russia and Kazastan [1] [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-ist-auch-von-russischem-uran-abhaengig-a-d9575895-93da-4274-a5e5-167f4d9d2f0f https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-...
  - Maakuth 5y ago
    That is only because that's the cheapest source, compared to gas which is bought from where the pipelines are coming from. The amount of uranium needed for power plants is fairly small, it can be transported from wherever and there's plenty available from Canada, Australia and South Africa for example. There are potential mines in continental Europe too, it is a matter of cost and politics to choose where to source it from.
  - kwere 5y ago
    its easier to stock decades of energy supplies in uranium than in oil/gas
  - erentz 5y ago
    As below commenters have pointed out this is a choice. Uranium can be sourced from many locations. It can also be processed in Germany if they had wanted (Germany is a part owner of Urenco which also has a small enrichment plant in Germany amongst other locations). To steel man your argument though in the context of funding Russia’s genocide in Ukraine when comparing Germany’s use of gas vs if it kept its nuclear plants operating we should look at the Euro per joule cost of the gas bought from Russia vs the Euro per joule cost of enriched U bought from Russia. I suspect we are talking orders of magnitude difference. But that information is conveniently not being provided in this article. Neither is discussed the ability to easily stockpile a couple of years of fuel supply as many plants have done, which right now would enable you to continue operating while spinning up supplies from elsewhere. Another note regarding the claim in the article: “For the operators of so-called WWER reactors, Russia is therefore even the only supplier of custom-made hexagonal fuel rods.” Westinghouse can make these fuel assemblies, they started on this for Ukraine. Framatome I believe has also offered to do this. There’s nothing secret about Rosatom fuel assemblies.
- this_user 5y ago
  If nuclear power is such a great idea, then why has it never become the dominant technology globally despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry? Technologies that are strictly superior tend to dominate in the long run. Yet, nuclear power has always remained a niche player even in countries where there was not a lot of strong, organised opposition. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that nuclear power suffers from a lot of issues that have never properly been solved. And despite claims to the contrary, it is certainly not completely safe. The fact that dozens of Russian soldiers in Ukraine recently suffered radiation poisoning after digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone just highlights how long-lasting the environmental impact of nuclear accidents is. Admittedly, they should have known better, but how many exclusion zones like that can we afford to have globally from future nuclear accidents that are virtually guaranteed to happen eventually?
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    > why has it never become the dominant technology globally despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry? Because the anti-nuclear lobby is more powerful? Also the oil/gas lobby has had people in pretty damn high positions affecting these things. Belgium had an ex-Gazprom consultant as their minister of energy. Who - to no-one's surprise - wanted to shut down nuclear plants and move to Russian gas while they build up renewables. Also the incident in Chernobyl was 99% a political problem, not a technical one. No-one dared to tell their superiors "no" or "I fucked up" or "I have a problem". This compared with the lack of notification caused most of the eventual deaths. Just telling everyone to take iodine for a few weeks and not eat any of the currently growing plants would've cut down the amount of cancers in the area by at least half.
    - 7952 5y ago
      But humans are irrational and politics does exist. Poor communication and politics is a bigger challenge than engineering or technology. And if you actually want to build something then you have to work within the constraints of society. Sometimes you have to pick C# or Java even though you know that Lisp is the best. Getting something built is more important than technical idealism.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  > it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea. And just 20.000 years to celebrate that the area will be as safe as it was before 1970. 180 years at least if we feel optimistic.
nicolaslem 5y ago
> a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke. Storage is far from a solved problem. There are many solutions for storage but we have yet to see one truly work at scale.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  False. Pumped hydro is already working at scale, and being built out as fast as capital can be scared up for it. Pumped hydro can be used in what may be a surprisingly larger range of places than usually imagined. First, it does not need an existing dam in an existing watershed. It doesn't need any watershed, just a hill, ideally with a depression. A circular dam can even be built on top of a hill, and that is being done, although it is better if you don't need to build all the sides. Pumped hydro can be used where there is no hill, if a deep cavity exists underground. Then, you pump water up and out of the cavity to charge it, and let it back in when you need power. Deep cavities exist all over the world. You can combine a hill reservoir and a deep-cavity reservoir to get enormously more energy storage. Pumped hydro has been demonstrated using a spherical tank deep under the ocean. There, you have a pump/turbine at the bottom of the tank, and you pump the water out to charge it. Amazingly, you don't need a pipe down to the tank, because water vapor fills vacated space in the tank. You just need a wire. The tank doesn't need to be very big if it is placed deep enough; the deeper it is, the more "head" you have. Liquifying air is extremely mature tech. So, storing liquified air is something already done at scale, for decades, and can absorb peak renewable power. Power is released by letting the gas vaporize through a turbine, warmed by ambient air, or even by heat pumped out in the first place, if banked. A 100 MW liquified-air storage facility is under construction in Chile. Synthetic ammonia is mature tech. A GW-scale ammonia electric-synthesizer plant is under construction in Norway. Anhydrous ammonia can be burned in a gas turbine. Synthetic hydrogen is mature tech, and being built out in volume. Efficiency will only ever increase, as better catalysts are discovered and put in service. You can store hydrogen in the same underground reservoirs where natural gas is stored today. Iron-air batteries are mature enough tech that mega-factories to produce iron-air batteries are already under construction, to deliver in volume in 2023.
  - moooo99 5y ago
ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
There are some counter arguments to what you said, but I agree for the most part. The exact numbers are below for anyone curious. The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
- hedora 5y ago
  Those prices don't include storage or over-provisioning for cloudy / still days. Nuclear is still likely cost effective at night, or in the rainy season. The only other carbon neutral technologies rely on special geographical features (geothermal, hydro). One way to think about energy moving forward is reducing the problem to heating houses with heat pumps during stormy weather, or at night. Solar, wind and batteries basically imply we'll have surplus energy in all other scenarios.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Yes and nuclear power also needs overprovisioning, storage etc (nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just generate constantly). The question than is would the cost for nuclear overprovisioning or solar/wind overprovisioning be higher. BTW there have been several publications that performed modelling on large integrated grids that found there would be very little overprovisioning needed if we have a Europe wide grid (it always blows somewhere). Fortunately, the European grid is moving in this direction anyway.
    - HyperRational 5y ago
    - Vaphell 5y ago
      > nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just generate constantly nuh-uh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc... Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.
gregwebs 5y ago
There’s still a significant environmental cost to renewables. Mining the materials for wind/solar and then to produce them (often this is powered by coal). And there’s no real plan for how we will safely dispose of used solar panels. And there are land use issues with solar unless it is done on rooftops, which is much more expensive. We need nuclear and solar and wind and storage. One is not always better than the others. They all have trade offs and a role to play.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  This is all false. Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the tellurium get recycled. There is absolutely no land-use issue for solar: solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue stream and better yield. Wind, also, coexists neatly with pasture and farming. In any case, even were all solar farms single-use, the amount used up for that, for all our needs, would be less than is devoted to fossil fuel extraction today. So the land-use claim is simple FUD. Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now.
  - gregwebs 5y ago
    > Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now. It's really odd to see these arguments being made right now. Germany is burning mostly fossil fuels now and and in an energy crisis because they decided to shut down all their nuclear and do renewables. We can install 50% of our new generation as solar and 10% as battery storage, but just as building a nuclear plant takes a decade, it would also take decades to replace our existing generation with solar and wind. The ability to produce solar panels is not going to increase by 10x overnight regardless of demand. Building solar and wind implies needing other sources of power for when the sun isn't shining in the wind is not blowing. If you don't build nuclear you build natural gas or keep using coal. Energy storage can help a lot, but we are maxing out our battery production as is. Maybe pumped hydro is the solution, but we aren't really building any changing this is going to take a lot of time as well. > solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue stream and better yield Most of these scenarios will more than double the cost of a solar install compared to a utility solar farm and require heavy subsidies. I have seen the stories about mixing solar with farming in arid climates, and I am hopeful that can be adopted as a practice, but I think you are front-running what is just an experiment right now. > Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the tellurium get recycled. Do you have any evidence that this is actually being done at scale now? Who do I can call to remove my solar panels and recycle them? For example, this article says "In the United States, there are only a few businesses specializing in the recycling of solar panels, so most panels that are submitted for recycling are being warehoused until a solution is found for the U.S." [1] [1] https://solarpowergenie.com/how-to-dispose-of-solar-panels-a-complete-green-guide/ https://solarpowergenie.com/how-to-dispose-of-solar-panels-a...
ineedasername 5y ago
The current problem for renewables is storage for times when solar/wind aren't producing. There's some promising work being done there, but nuclear power is existing tech that can fill that gap. The fastest path off carbon should have both renewable and nuclear investments working in paralll. Too much NIMBY, too much irrational fear if it, so it's unlikely to happen in the US. The current Russian/Ukraine war makes me wonder if European countries might reconsider their stance on it. It's not too late, for plants scheduled to be shutdown 2+ years from now, to make plans to keep them online. It also gives them motivation to build new ones, which France announced it would do just this past February. Perhaps the biggest challenge for countries that haven't built one in a few decades is experienced engineers. The US for example may have people experienced with operating them, but probably not building them at scale. France's original Messmer Plan shows it's possibly to ramp up relatively quickly though.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Storage just needs to be built out. It takes time to build out. But nowhere near as much time as it would take to build out nukes.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I'm not aware of good storage options that scale to that level. Lithium batteries might conceivably do it but we can barely make enough to supply the EV market And if the Chevy Bolt is any indicator, we need to be extremely careful when we build massive novel battery storage systems like this. The few sites I'm aware of that are trying this are still only, at maximum charge, able to supply 4-6 hours of power for their location, and they're the largest in the world. If getting off carbon is an existential threat, there's no reason that nuclear shouldn't be part of the solution in getting us there faster.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Obviously batteries are not right for utility storage. Even mentioning batteries in this context means you are not seriously engaged. If you really think we don't have good storage options that scale, you just haven't been paying attention. Building nukes does not get us there faster, because it takes many years to even start displacing fossil fuels, and then it costs so much you get only a small fraction of the power renewables would produce--provided it ends up producing any power at all, which they often do not.
orangecat 5y ago
A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like nobody's business. Which follows their insane decision to shut down their nuclear plants.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Germany's need for natural gas to fire furnaces in people's houses would not be served by power from nuke plants.
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    But it would be if they were to switch to electric heat

by ncmncm 5y ago

jopsen 5y ago

In the meantime it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea. We should just have doubled down on it 50 years ago. So much geopolitical trouble would have been avoided if bad actors in the middle east and Russia wasn't flushed with cash.

cycomanic 5y ago
So who do you think is one of the largest providers of uranium in Europe? The arguments of Germany not being so dependent on Russia if they would have left their nuclear power plants running longer has been debunked several times. I believe this is largely nuclear power lobbyist taken advantage of the current situation. The EU is even more dependent on Uranium from Russia than gas. 20% of the natural Uranium and 26% of the enriched Uranium used in the EU comes from Russia and Kazastan [1] [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-ist-auch-von-russischem-uran-abhaengig-a-d9575895-93da-4274-a5e5-167f4d9d2f0f https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-...
- Maakuth 5y ago
  That is only because that's the cheapest source, compared to gas which is bought from where the pipelines are coming from. The amount of uranium needed for power plants is fairly small, it can be transported from wherever and there's plenty available from Canada, Australia and South Africa for example. There are potential mines in continental Europe too, it is a matter of cost and politics to choose where to source it from.
- kwere 5y ago
  its easier to stock decades of energy supplies in uranium than in oil/gas
- erentz 5y ago
  As below commenters have pointed out this is a choice. Uranium can be sourced from many locations. It can also be processed in Germany if they had wanted (Germany is a part owner of Urenco which also has a small enrichment plant in Germany amongst other locations). To steel man your argument though in the context of funding Russia’s genocide in Ukraine when comparing Germany’s use of gas vs if it kept its nuclear plants operating we should look at the Euro per joule cost of the gas bought from Russia vs the Euro per joule cost of enriched U bought from Russia. I suspect we are talking orders of magnitude difference. But that information is conveniently not being provided in this article. Neither is discussed the ability to easily stockpile a couple of years of fuel supply as many plants have done, which right now would enable you to continue operating while spinning up supplies from elsewhere. Another note regarding the claim in the article: “For the operators of so-called WWER reactors, Russia is therefore even the only supplier of custom-made hexagonal fuel rods.” Westinghouse can make these fuel assemblies, they started on this for Ukraine. Framatome I believe has also offered to do this. There’s nothing secret about Rosatom fuel assemblies.
this_user 5y ago
If nuclear power is such a great idea, then why has it never become the dominant technology globally despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry? Technologies that are strictly superior tend to dominate in the long run. Yet, nuclear power has always remained a niche player even in countries where there was not a lot of strong, organised opposition. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that nuclear power suffers from a lot of issues that have never properly been solved. And despite claims to the contrary, it is certainly not completely safe. The fact that dozens of Russian soldiers in Ukraine recently suffered radiation poisoning after digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone just highlights how long-lasting the environmental impact of nuclear accidents is. Admittedly, they should have known better, but how many exclusion zones like that can we afford to have globally from future nuclear accidents that are virtually guaranteed to happen eventually?
- theshrike79 5y ago
  > why has it never become the dominant technology globally despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry? Because the anti-nuclear lobby is more powerful? Also the oil/gas lobby has had people in pretty damn high positions affecting these things. Belgium had an ex-Gazprom consultant as their minister of energy. Who - to no-one's surprise - wanted to shut down nuclear plants and move to Russian gas while they build up renewables. Also the incident in Chernobyl was 99% a political problem, not a technical one. No-one dared to tell their superiors "no" or "I fucked up" or "I have a problem". This compared with the lack of notification caused most of the eventual deaths. Just telling everyone to take iodine for a few weeks and not eat any of the currently growing plants would've cut down the amount of cancers in the area by at least half.
  - 7952 5y ago
    But humans are irrational and politics does exist. Poor communication and politics is a bigger challenge than engineering or technology. And if you actually want to build something then you have to work within the constraints of society. Sometimes you have to pick C# or Java even though you know that Lisp is the best. Getting something built is more important than technical idealism.
pvaldes 5y ago
> it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea. And just 20.000 years to celebrate that the area will be as safe as it was before 1970. 180 years at least if we feel optimistic.

nicolaslem 5y ago

> a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke. Storage is far from a solved problem. There are many solutions for storage but we have yet to see one truly work at scale.

ncmncm 5y ago
False. Pumped hydro is already working at scale, and being built out as fast as capital can be scared up for it. Pumped hydro can be used in what may be a surprisingly larger range of places than usually imagined. First, it does not need an existing dam in an existing watershed. It doesn't need any watershed, just a hill, ideally with a depression. A circular dam can even be built on top of a hill, and that is being done, although it is better if you don't need to build all the sides. Pumped hydro can be used where there is no hill, if a deep cavity exists underground. Then, you pump water up and out of the cavity to charge it, and let it back in when you need power. Deep cavities exist all over the world. You can combine a hill reservoir and a deep-cavity reservoir to get enormously more energy storage. Pumped hydro has been demonstrated using a spherical tank deep under the ocean. There, you have a pump/turbine at the bottom of the tank, and you pump the water out to charge it. Amazingly, you don't need a pipe down to the tank, because water vapor fills vacated space in the tank. You just need a wire. The tank doesn't need to be very big if it is placed deep enough; the deeper it is, the more "head" you have. Liquifying air is extremely mature tech. So, storing liquified air is something already done at scale, for decades, and can absorb peak renewable power. Power is released by letting the gas vaporize through a turbine, warmed by ambient air, or even by heat pumped out in the first place, if banked. A 100 MW liquified-air storage facility is under construction in Chile. Synthetic ammonia is mature tech. A GW-scale ammonia electric-synthesizer plant is under construction in Norway. Anhydrous ammonia can be burned in a gas turbine. Synthetic hydrogen is mature tech, and being built out in volume. Efficiency will only ever increase, as better catalysts are discovered and put in service. You can store hydrogen in the same underground reservoirs where natural gas is stored today. Iron-air batteries are mature enough tech that mega-factories to produce iron-air batteries are already under construction, to deliver in volume in 2023.
- moooo99 5y ago

ghostbrainalpha 5y ago

There are some counter arguments to what you said, but I agree for the most part. The exact numbers are below for anyone curious. The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

hedora 5y ago
Those prices don't include storage or over-provisioning for cloudy / still days. Nuclear is still likely cost effective at night, or in the rainy season. The only other carbon neutral technologies rely on special geographical features (geothermal, hydro). One way to think about energy moving forward is reducing the problem to heating houses with heat pumps during stormy weather, or at night. Solar, wind and batteries basically imply we'll have surplus energy in all other scenarios.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Yes and nuclear power also needs overprovisioning, storage etc (nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just generate constantly). The question than is would the cost for nuclear overprovisioning or solar/wind overprovisioning be higher. BTW there have been several publications that performed modelling on large integrated grids that found there would be very little overprovisioning needed if we have a Europe wide grid (it always blows somewhere). Fortunately, the European grid is moving in this direction anyway.
  - HyperRational 5y ago
  - Vaphell 5y ago
    > nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just generate constantly nuh-uh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc... Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.

gregwebs 5y ago

There’s still a significant environmental cost to renewables. Mining the materials for wind/solar and then to produce them (often this is powered by coal). And there’s no real plan for how we will safely dispose of used solar panels. And there are land use issues with solar unless it is done on rooftops, which is much more expensive. We need nuclear and solar and wind and storage. One is not always better than the others. They all have trade offs and a role to play.

ncmncm 5y ago
This is all false. Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the tellurium get recycled. There is absolutely no land-use issue for solar: solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue stream and better yield. Wind, also, coexists neatly with pasture and farming. In any case, even were all solar farms single-use, the amount used up for that, for all our needs, would be less than is devoted to fossil fuel extraction today. So the land-use claim is simple FUD. Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  > Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now. It's really odd to see these arguments being made right now. Germany is burning mostly fossil fuels now and and in an energy crisis because they decided to shut down all their nuclear and do renewables. We can install 50% of our new generation as solar and 10% as battery storage, but just as building a nuclear plant takes a decade, it would also take decades to replace our existing generation with solar and wind. The ability to produce solar panels is not going to increase by 10x overnight regardless of demand. Building solar and wind implies needing other sources of power for when the sun isn't shining in the wind is not blowing. If you don't build nuclear you build natural gas or keep using coal. Energy storage can help a lot, but we are maxing out our battery production as is. Maybe pumped hydro is the solution, but we aren't really building any changing this is going to take a lot of time as well. > solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue stream and better yield Most of these scenarios will more than double the cost of a solar install compared to a utility solar farm and require heavy subsidies. I have seen the stories about mixing solar with farming in arid climates, and I am hopeful that can be adopted as a practice, but I think you are front-running what is just an experiment right now. > Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the tellurium get recycled. Do you have any evidence that this is actually being done at scale now? Who do I can call to remove my solar panels and recycle them? For example, this article says "In the United States, there are only a few businesses specializing in the recycling of solar panels, so most panels that are submitted for recycling are being warehoused until a solution is found for the U.S." [1] [1] https://solarpowergenie.com/how-to-dispose-of-solar-panels-a-complete-green-guide/ https://solarpowergenie.com/how-to-dispose-of-solar-panels-a...

ineedasername 5y ago

The current problem for renewables is storage for times when solar/wind aren't producing. There's some promising work being done there, but nuclear power is existing tech that can fill that gap. The fastest path off carbon should have both renewable and nuclear investments working in paralll. Too much NIMBY, too much irrational fear if it, so it's unlikely to happen in the US. The current Russian/Ukraine war makes me wonder if European countries might reconsider their stance on it. It's not too late, for plants scheduled to be shutdown 2+ years from now, to make plans to keep them online. It also gives them motivation to build new ones, which France announced it would do just this past February. Perhaps the biggest challenge for countries that haven't built one in a few decades is experienced engineers. The US for example may have people experienced with operating them, but probably not building them at scale. France's original Messmer Plan shows it's possibly to ramp up relatively quickly though.

ncmncm 5y ago
Storage just needs to be built out. It takes time to build out. But nowhere near as much time as it would take to build out nukes.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I'm not aware of good storage options that scale to that level. Lithium batteries might conceivably do it but we can barely make enough to supply the EV market And if the Chevy Bolt is any indicator, we need to be extremely careful when we build massive novel battery storage systems like this. The few sites I'm aware of that are trying this are still only, at maximum charge, able to supply 4-6 hours of power for their location, and they're the largest in the world. If getting off carbon is an existential threat, there's no reason that nuclear shouldn't be part of the solution in getting us there faster.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Obviously batteries are not right for utility storage. Even mentioning batteries in this context means you are not seriously engaged. If you really think we don't have good storage options that scale, you just haven't been paying attention. Building nukes does not get us there faster, because it takes many years to even start displacing fossil fuels, and then it costs so much you get only a small fraction of the power renewables would produce--provided it ends up producing any power at all, which they often do not.

orangecat 5y ago

A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like nobody's business. Which follows their insane decision to shut down their nuclear plants.

ncmncm 5y ago
Germany's need for natural gas to fire furnaces in people's houses would not be served by power from nuke plants.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  But it would be if they were to switch to electric heat