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Actually that "modern tech" of yours is the subsidized one. President Obama was basically trumpeting how many new and awesome futuristic jobs those solar parks

Actually that "modern tech" of yours is the subsidized one. President Obama was basically trumpeting how many new and awesome futuristic jobs those solar parks will create when the government unleashes the cash flood. Nothing competes with nuclear. It's just pure physics - atom is the biggest source of energy on this planet according to current physics. Whoever can't agree with that reality fact should see a psychiatrist. Despite all the obstacles, nuclear constantly develops and will continue to do so, because market. Industries can't run on calculator batteries. Sorry.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
I think you would benefit from reading TFA. It looks at the actual operating costs of current designs and the dropping price of renewables and points out that the fundamental economics of the nuclear industry are not great right now. It also points out that most of the high-priced daytime usage is about to be scooped up by renewables. This may or may not be fatal to the nuclear industry, but it points to the need for substantial innovation or subsidies.
- sto_hristo 4y ago
  Sorry. Largest power density is still in the atom. Can't work your magic around this. The only reasonable and sane strategy is to R&D around nuclear. Whoever gets it right will rule, the others will be ruled. Not single bubble kept its integrity; renewables will burst as well.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Wishing doesn't work.
  - lovemenot 4y ago
    You are right about power density, If only we had an absolutely massive fusion reactor that could passively manage its own containment. It would be so powerful that one such nuclear reactor would produce millions of times more power than we could ever consume. The reactor could be designed to run indefinitely. No fuel or decommissioning costs incurred. We could site the reactor at a large enough distance from population centers that we would not need to deal with its waste. We could decouple the reactor from power generation. Just use safe EM radiation to freely distribute power wherever it would be needed. The reactor itself, perhaps funded by some benevolent quadrillionaire, having no operating costs would be literally "too cheap to meter".
    - kogok89 4y ago
      I see what you did there.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Why are you choosing a meaningless metric to decide on the technology? Utilities or consumers don't care about energy density of fuels, they care about cost.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      High energy density can in principle matter, a lot, from a societal point of view. If you only need a tiny amount of fuel to make the world's energy, then the overall impact on land, minerals, ecosystems, wildlife, etc. can potentially be very small, assuming you deliver the rest of the fuel cycle and reactors with reasonably small footprints as well. The fact that current markets don't yet value these things is more a issue with the current markets than a critique of energy density.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        A sackcloth and ashes approach to civilization, where nuclear's low land use is preferred because we're also going to (for example) ban agriculture because it uses land, is a nonstarter. Society has decided that agriculture is ok, because the concerns of people are more important than the putative concerns of unfettered nature. And if agriculture is ok, so is the land use of PV and wind (which produce much more value per unit area than agriculture does.) (A similar argument applies to materials. Compare the materials used by a renewable energy system to the materials used by industrial society as a whole.)
        acidburnNSA 4y ago
        At global scale, these kinds of things end up mattering a huge amount. This is the basis of Komanoff's "price scales primarily with fleet size" argument. No one remembers that rule, but at planetary scale even seemingly small externalities end up driving costs. Case in point: do you know how many individual anti-wind organizations there are in Germany?
        pfdietz 4y ago
        No, they don't. At a global scale, land is enormously available. So are the materials from which renewable energy sources can be built. Are you worried about running out of silicon, iron, or aluminum? If so, stop being silly. Focusing on these is just to ignore the physical realities of what's available to work with.
  - biorach 4y ago
    Read the article. The advantages of the high power density are negated by the inefficiencies of the heat cycle, construction costs etc. Yes, it makes sense to focus some R&D on nuclear. However after seven decades, it would seem that an alternative to turbines is not so straightforward. The alternatives mentioned in the article are at least a decade (and probably much more) away from commercial use. Even then the other overheads would remain. As with many engineering problems, an apparently decisive advantage can be overwhelmed by secondary effects.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Running only at night makes each kWh twice as costly, because a nuke costs almost the same, producing or not. Same is true of renewables, but the cost is enormously lower.
missedthecue 4y ago
Not sure what you mean by "nothing competes with them". There are fewer nuclear power stations in the world than there were five years ago, and there will be fewer in five years than there are today. Hardly anyone wants to build them anymore. They just don't make sense.
- sto_hristo 4y ago
  That is just politics speaking. Massively subsidizing renewables and smack talking nuclear is an easy pass to a political career. But reality is immutable - nuclear energy is without competition. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Check the above. Denmark is 100% nuclear free (runs on mostly renewables but it imports), Germany i think runs on about 10% nuclear. France runs in 70% nuclear. The cost speaks for itself.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

I think you would benefit from reading TFA. It looks at the actual operating costs of current designs and the dropping price of renewables and points out that the fundamental economics of the nuclear industry are not great right now. It also points out that most of the high-priced daytime usage is about to be scooped up by renewables. This may or may not be fatal to the nuclear industry, but it points to the need for substantial innovation or subsidies.

sto_hristo 4y ago
Sorry. Largest power density is still in the atom. Can't work your magic around this. The only reasonable and sane strategy is to R&D around nuclear. Whoever gets it right will rule, the others will be ruled. Not single bubble kept its integrity; renewables will burst as well.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Wishing doesn't work.
- lovemenot 4y ago
  You are right about power density, If only we had an absolutely massive fusion reactor that could passively manage its own containment. It would be so powerful that one such nuclear reactor would produce millions of times more power than we could ever consume. The reactor could be designed to run indefinitely. No fuel or decommissioning costs incurred. We could site the reactor at a large enough distance from population centers that we would not need to deal with its waste. We could decouple the reactor from power generation. Just use safe EM radiation to freely distribute power wherever it would be needed. The reactor itself, perhaps funded by some benevolent quadrillionaire, having no operating costs would be literally "too cheap to meter".
  - kogok89 4y ago
    I see what you did there.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Why are you choosing a meaningless metric to decide on the technology? Utilities or consumers don't care about energy density of fuels, they care about cost.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    High energy density can in principle matter, a lot, from a societal point of view. If you only need a tiny amount of fuel to make the world's energy, then the overall impact on land, minerals, ecosystems, wildlife, etc. can potentially be very small, assuming you deliver the rest of the fuel cycle and reactors with reasonably small footprints as well. The fact that current markets don't yet value these things is more a issue with the current markets than a critique of energy density.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      A sackcloth and ashes approach to civilization, where nuclear's low land use is preferred because we're also going to (for example) ban agriculture because it uses land, is a nonstarter. Society has decided that agriculture is ok, because the concerns of people are more important than the putative concerns of unfettered nature. And if agriculture is ok, so is the land use of PV and wind (which produce much more value per unit area than agriculture does.) (A similar argument applies to materials. Compare the materials used by a renewable energy system to the materials used by industrial society as a whole.)
      - acidburnNSA 4y ago
        At global scale, these kinds of things end up mattering a huge amount. This is the basis of Komanoff's "price scales primarily with fleet size" argument. No one remembers that rule, but at planetary scale even seemingly small externalities end up driving costs. Case in point: do you know how many individual anti-wind organizations there are in Germany?
        pfdietz 4y ago
        No, they don't. At a global scale, land is enormously available. So are the materials from which renewable energy sources can be built. Are you worried about running out of silicon, iron, or aluminum? If so, stop being silly. Focusing on these is just to ignore the physical realities of what's available to work with.
- biorach 4y ago
  Read the article. The advantages of the high power density are negated by the inefficiencies of the heat cycle, construction costs etc. Yes, it makes sense to focus some R&D on nuclear. However after seven decades, it would seem that an alternative to turbines is not so straightforward. The alternatives mentioned in the article are at least a decade (and probably much more) away from commercial use. Even then the other overheads would remain. As with many engineering problems, an apparently decisive advantage can be overwhelmed by secondary effects.
ncmncm 4y ago
Running only at night makes each kWh twice as costly, because a nuke costs almost the same, producing or not. Same is true of renewables, but the cost is enormously lower.

missedthecue 4y ago

Not sure what you mean by "nothing competes with them". There are fewer nuclear power stations in the world than there were five years ago, and there will be fewer in five years than there are today. Hardly anyone wants to build them anymore. They just don't make sense.

sto_hristo 4y ago
That is just politics speaking. Massively subsidizing renewables and smack talking nuclear is an easy pass to a political career. But reality is immutable - nuclear energy is without competition. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Check the above. Denmark is 100% nuclear free (runs on mostly renewables but it imports), Germany i think runs on about 10% nuclear. France runs in 70% nuclear. The cost speaks for itself.