3 ms·

> Deployment of solar and wind is just much faster and ends up being much more cost competitive. There's literally nothing stopping us from building _both_ sol

> Deployment of solar and wind is just much faster and ends up being much more cost competitive. There's literally nothing stopping us from building _both_ solar+wind and nuclear. There's no shortage of construction workers or materials. And it avoids the need to build large, expensive, and relatively short-lived (and resource-intensive) battery installations that are needed to displace fossil fuel-based energy generation. Solar and wind have an 80/20 problem, and nuclear easily slots in as a great solution for that 20%.

crote 3y ago
> There's no shortage of construction workers or materials. In many countries there is a shortage, actually. Especially for construction workers. And a big limiting factor is the lack of money: money isn't unlimited and you can only spend each dollar once. You have to choose, so better spend it on the option with the biggest impact.
XorNot 3y ago
While true, there's a question of why would you bother if you can build nuclear? 60-70% of my states' electricity use is 24/7 constant. Outside of that number, the downward slope between maxium and minimums is very long, and very slow and mostly at night. Nuclear plants are easily variable in fuel burn over these sorts of rates. The problem with solar and wind is that they can trip offline from the grid very quickly, so the entire question is whether you can plausibly backstop the grid for long enough without the need to spin up an extra powerplant. With a frontloaded capex asset like nuclear, once you are building it there's a big question as to how much value you get from not using it - i.e. the main benefit of solar and wind is if with storage they stop you needing to build a new nuclear plant. I would contend that the storage answer is very inadequate: it's not nearly good enough to have a grid which is only running with 1 day worth of banked power when you could have much longer periods of underproduction (which is the way most solar/wind storage solutions are presented). To safely have a distributed grid, you need months worth of stored power to average out the fluctuations. Storage just isn't cheap enough at that scale compared to nuclear reactors.
epistasis 3y ago
We have finite resources, and that is the main argument against nuclear. If cost was no object, if we could pay lackadaisical EPC to waste billions and throw timelines off track, if we could bankrupt more design firms like Westinghouse due to complete incompetence in delivery of design, sure, why not just fritter our finite labor pool and resources away. But if want to be effective as possible at fighting climate change, we need to Marshall our resources as if we were at war, and put all the effort into the most effective routes.

crote 3y ago

> There's no shortage of construction workers or materials. In many countries there is a shortage, actually. Especially for construction workers. And a big limiting factor is the lack of money: money isn't unlimited and you can only spend each dollar once. You have to choose, so better spend it on the option with the biggest impact.

XorNot 3y ago

While true, there's a question of why would you bother if you can build nuclear? 60-70% of my states' electricity use is 24/7 constant. Outside of that number, the downward slope between maxium and minimums is very long, and very slow and mostly at night. Nuclear plants are easily variable in fuel burn over these sorts of rates. The problem with solar and wind is that they can trip offline from the grid very quickly, so the entire question is whether you can plausibly backstop the grid for long enough without the need to spin up an extra powerplant. With a frontloaded capex asset like nuclear, once you are building it there's a big question as to how much value you get from not using it - i.e. the main benefit of solar and wind is if with storage they stop you needing to build a new nuclear plant. I would contend that the storage answer is very inadequate: it's not nearly good enough to have a grid which is only running with 1 day worth of banked power when you could have much longer periods of underproduction (which is the way most solar/wind storage solutions are presented). To safely have a distributed grid, you need months worth of stored power to average out the fluctuations. Storage just isn't cheap enough at that scale compared to nuclear reactors.

epistasis 3y ago

We have finite resources, and that is the main argument against nuclear. If cost was no object, if we could pay lackadaisical EPC to waste billions and throw timelines off track, if we could bankrupt more design firms like Westinghouse due to complete incompetence in delivery of design, sure, why not just fritter our finite labor pool and resources away. But if want to be effective as possible at fighting climate change, we need to Marshall our resources as if we were at war, and put all the effort into the most effective routes.