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What I'm missing in this conclusion is weighing it against other options. At all. Sure, it's expensive. It is also expensive as compared to buying farmland for
by Aachen 4y ago
What I'm missing in this conclusion is weighing it against other options. At all.
Sure, it's expensive. It is also expensive as compared to buying farmland for solar panels and getting food from elsewhere? And as compared to finding enough people that are okay with wind turbines nearby? (If you can't just get it all from the sea of course.) From my point of view we ought to work on both fronts, I'm not sure this was addressed elsewhere in the video but at least it's not hinted at in the conclusion.
The suggestion of leaving it to the market sounds good in principle, but forgets that we've been using the "low hanging fruit" space so far, making nuclear seem like a terrible investment for any market party that optimizes short/medium-term gain. It also ignores the political aspect: try building one of these things and getting a license to handle enriched uranium or whatever and see what the German government suddenly thinks about leaving it to the market. No sane investor is going to waste billions on that gamble, so a government needs to publish assurances at minimum. Both of these things ought to be factored in when you want to create a level playing field to let the market figure it out. Kinda weird to opine that creating a level playing field is "insane".
That said, it's a more accurate conclusion than I expected from a link-only comment. Usually such comments link sources rather than speaking for themselves due to extreme opinions, but that's not exactly the case here.
- cturner 4y agoIn general, solar is not in the same category of energy generation as nuclear because it can't carry the base load of the energy grid, because it is so inconsistent. We do not currently have a general-purpose battery for solar and wind that could power the grid when they stop producing. (Some regions can through pumped storage hydro.) Nuclear compares against base-load power sources: coal, gas, oil, hydro, geothermal.
- Aachen 4y agoThat's an additional issue I didn't think of when writing my comment. Another omission in the linked video I guess? Though I am kinda expecting we can fix this with batteries, pumped hydro, flywheels, load shifting, interconnects, molten salt future tech idk, it generally seems like we have solutions here that should, however, be factored in (as you correctly comment) when comparing most renewables to nuclear.