3 ms·

I mostly hear nuclear talking points of the fact that it’s a guaranteed GW/year production versus intermittent weather-dependent allocation.

• pfdietz 4y ago
  As if various storage schemes to deal with that don't or can't exist.
  • pstrateman 4y ago
    Energy storage at scales necessary to buffer solar/wind at 100% of the grid do not exist.
    • pfdietz 4y ago
      Nor does nuclear at the scale necessary to power the world. Today's commercial reactors can't do it; breeding is needed. This would mean scaling up breeder reactors by roughly a factor of 1000. This is actually a larger scaleup than would be needed for storage, I believe. What, you're allowing nuclear to scale up, but not storage? Very high double standards you all have in Nuclearstan.
      • narrator 4y ago
        Breeder reactors are such an overlooked technology. Only Russia and India are seriously pursuing them. The thing about breeder reactors is they can get rid of the nuclear waste problem and use 100x the energy of the input fuel vs conventional reactors. It's much more technically complicated, and the biggest ones are only 800 megawatts right now, but they could conceivably go much larger.
        • Schroedingersat 4y ago
          How much Pu240 does the BN800 fission? How much does it produce? No breeder program has ever closed the fuel cycle, and the "closed" cycle doesn't even aspire to get rid of the fertile isotopes which will just be more high level waste. What reprocessing does do though is let out all the Kr, Cs, Tc, T and so on that was safely contained in your spent fuel bundle. Much of which is just vented or dumped in the ocean.