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How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in

How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in a country that has invested heavily in it. Where i live people has to use an app to see when they can afford to wash their clothes, run the dishwasher, charge the car at any given time of the week and and hour. The government is praying to the weather gods for a warm and windy winter so that we might avoid rolling blackouts and insane energy prices. We as humans can simply not afford to rely on the current state of mother Nature. Who knows what might happen? Wind patterns could change over time or because of climate change, heck a super vulcano an asteroid or nuclear fallout could block out the sun for years. As long as we can't control the weather, plate tectonics or deflect asteroids let's invest in a technology that is very well understood and has stood the test of time, works in space, the most energy dense, the most efficient and there's enough of it on earth to keep us going for thousands of years.

pfdietz 4y ago
If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity. If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.
- Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
  Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem. BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality. (Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)
    - Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
      Could you point to a source claiming there's not enough uranium ? As far as i can find uranium is not considered rare https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/uranium-mining-overview.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant part of that is rare earth. As far as I've seen the best bet for wind so far is power to x . X because we haven't figured out of it should be hydrogen, ammonia or something else, both of which would be very impractical as we've got no infrastructure to support it and it's also very inefficient in reality you'd loose like 80% of the energy generated so you'd have to build so much more capacity.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes. Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium. 6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years. So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both. As for your other questions: The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well. As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.
        Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
        Of course we need new types of reactors, we already have reactors that can use the waste from old reactors types like CANDU. Most reactors in use today are ancient and inefficient using only 4% or so of the potential in the fuel. Your back of a napkin calculation is disingenuous and misleading, for example it's estimated that sea water contains 4.5 billion tons tons of uranium. At the very least we have plenty of uranium to last until thorium reactors are ready. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

pfdietz 4y ago

If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity. If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.

Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem. BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality. (Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)
  - Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
    Could you point to a source claiming there's not enough uranium ? As far as i can find uranium is not considered rare https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/uranium-mining-overview.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant part of that is rare earth. As far as I've seen the best bet for wind so far is power to x . X because we haven't figured out of it should be hydrogen, ammonia or something else, both of which would be very impractical as we've got no infrastructure to support it and it's also very inefficient in reality you'd loose like 80% of the energy generated so you'd have to build so much more capacity.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes. Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium. 6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years. So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both. As for your other questions: The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well. As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.
      - Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
        Of course we need new types of reactors, we already have reactors that can use the waste from old reactors types like CANDU. Most reactors in use today are ancient and inefficient using only 4% or so of the potential in the fuel. Your back of a napkin calculation is disingenuous and misleading, for example it's estimated that sea water contains 4.5 billion tons tons of uranium. At the very least we have plenty of uranium to last until thorium reactors are ready. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium