7 ms·

Fossil-free is a more relevant metric in general. Since Portugal doesn't have any active commercial nuclear power the two metrics would show the same. Congrats

• Krasnol 3y ago
  Congrats on bringing in nuclear in this topic even though it's not relevant at all. A discussion about renewable energy wouldn't be the same without it!
  • pydry 3y ago
    It is striking to see real life examples of countries achieving high rates of renewable energy production with large amounts of pumped storage and without nuclear power.
    • troupo 3y ago
      Right now, when it's a calm night, Portugal imports 18% of electricity from Spain which at this moment produces most energy from oil and nuclear. You cannot have a proper good faith discussion about renewables without nuclear and fossil fuels.
      • onethought 3y ago
        Yes you can. The good faith question to ask is: is the cost of nuclear higher than renewable +storage? I don’t know the answer, but renewable +storage is trending down. Nuclear is up. So at some point (which may have already happened) nuclear is just going to be a bad faith argument.
        • troupo 3y ago
          > So at some point (which may have already happened) nuclear is just going to be a bad faith argument. When nuclear (and other forms of fuel) stop providing base loads when main types of renewables don't work (aka a night with no wind), then this will have happened.
          • onethought 3y ago
            Storage can handle the base load. If the sun doesn’t rise one day… we have bigger problems.
            • littlestymaar 3y ago
              Still not having heard of clouds, eh?
              • onethought 3y ago
                you know solar still works even through clouds right?
                • littlestymaar 3y ago
                  Sure they “work” if you don't expect them to actually produce power…
                  • onethought 3y ago
                    No, they work anywhere from 80 to 20% efficiency depending on the density of the cloud. But the vast majority of cloud cover is obviously the less dense kind (dense kind falls out of the sky). So you could say 60% efficiency on a typical overcast day.
                    • littlestymaar 3y ago
                      I mean, why to even bother with facts when you can pull numbers from your b*tt… In most countries, during most seasons and on most hours of the day you don't even get 80% efficiency on a sunny day! Heck, even in the most sunny deserts, the average daytime efficiency of a solar panel is barely 60%… But yeah sure in fantasy land solar panels give you a daily average 80% efficiency on a cloudy day…
                      • 3y ago
      • MarkMarine 3y ago
        Sure you can. Personally, I view the fossil fuel plants differently than nuclear, I would much prefer that the majority of steady state power generation was nuclear, but that does present quite a target and threat to the rest of the world during a time of war. I don’t have all the answers here, just wanted to start with my thinking. Getting away from fossil fuels is not a pie in the sky proposal these days. You could look at the success of the lithium storage battery in Australia, previously serviced by fossil fuel peaker plants. There is pumped hydro, and all manner of other non-chemical storage that is possible. There are certainly a range of options that are 100% renewable with storage, but at this moment don’t compete on price with natural gas or even coal if you only factor the cost of the input to the system. Can we agree on that? I would say the inexpensive nature of fossil fuels ignores the total cost of the fuel. We’re basically setting up future generations for a complicated terraforming process to recover the atmosphere to something that supports our farming needs and temperature needs to support life, not just our own but the natural world we rely on. This cost might not factor in to the per/MW cost of coal or NG, but it should. This is factored into nuclear (waste storage) so to ignore its cost for fossil fuels is disingenuous.
        • troupo 3y ago
          > I would say the inexpensive nature of fossil fuels ignores the total cost of the fuel. So do most calculations of renewables. Most of them don't ask how much it costs to build enough storage for the energy, or how much terraforming needs to be dun for pumped hydro storage, or how much we need to overbuild (and most renewables take up a lot of land) etc. > This is factored into nuclear (waste storage) so to ignore its cost for fossil fuels is disingenuous. That I definitely agree with.
      • pydry 3y ago
        Spain produces more from renewable energy (14%) than it does from nuclear energy (12%): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Spain
        • troupo 3y ago
          Except at night. According to [1] at 6:00 this morning Spain was producing its electricity from: - 42% gas - 26% nuclear - 20% wind - 4.4% hydro - 0.5% solar - "negative" from hydro storage (as it was depleted by this time, and was being filled back up) And Spain only has 7GW of nuclear installed, so it's not difficult to surpass that https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES
  • epistasis 3y ago
    My hope is that some day that the passion for the political side of nuclear translates into passion for the logistical and project management challenges of nuclear. There's this false belief that if people just wanted nuclear, politically, it would be built in large amounts. In reality, in advanced economies with high labor costs, nuclear is nearly impossible to build. This is true even in countries like France, that complete large construction projects like public transit and trains without cost disease. In the US, we are beset with an additional challenge beyond the inherent high costs of high-labor demands for precision construction; we also have difficulty with any sort of project management of large construction projects. If nuclear has a future in the US, we need to start construction on 100GW of reactors in the next few years to replace reactors at their end of life. But we only have a few tiny projects for SMRs, with designs that are barely complete, if at all. The US is going to lose most of its nuclear power before it will build it back, if it ever does build back more nuclear. This is a stark contrast to renewables and storage, which are mature technologies that are on the TW scale, a magnitude that the nuclear industry can only dream of.
    • Krasnol 3y ago
      I doubt this day will come. The technology has been replaced and energy generation on this planet has turned toward renewable energies. Time to move on and care about the radioactive remains of this technology from the past.
      • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > technology has been replaced and energy generation on this planet has turned toward renewable energies This is totally untrue. Presently, in advanced economies, it’s cheaper to build solar and wind. If those economics change, what’s deployed will as well. (Or a country risks fuckup à la Deutschland.)
        • Krasnol 3y ago
          "Totally untrue"? Just face the facts...https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electricity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr... it's over. > If those economics change How are those economics supposed to change? Prices for renewables keep on falling, while those for nuclear never stopped rising. You should come up with some sources for those claims far away from reality... And what "fuckup" is this supposed to be? Germany build 7.9 Megawatt only solar in 7 months this year, and it's just the beginning after 16 years of stagnation. Wake up. https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/stromproduktion-sonne-solaranlagen-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/stromproduk... https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-deutschland-gaspreis-spritpreis-energieversorgung https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-deutschland-ga...