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> The green folks have already started reinstating reactor licenses because of shortfalls in capacity and storage Then it's mighty odd that in the US, install
by KennyBlanken 3y ago
> The green folks have already started reinstating reactor licenses because of shortfalls in capacity and storage
Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.
> And it’s either that or fossil fuels.
...aside from wind, solar, hydro, etc which are all cheaper, safer, and do not represent anywhere near the danger and risk.
- lazide 3y agoNot at all - solar isn’t base load, and can never be base load. Same with wind. And hydro has already been built out in almost every location it’s useful in the US. And your cost numbers are junk because they aren’t ’cost per kWh when we actually need it’, they’re ’cost per kWh when nature cooperates’. Which is not reliable. So over provisioning and storage costs start kicking in, and which, somehow, never get included in a those numbers. Weird huh? Predictable base load is useful, as California (and other locations) has been finding out, again, now that they have to actually do the math and can’t just hand wave things away. It’s going to take awhile and a lot of churn before this all stabilizes though IMO. A lot of folks haven’t had to do the math yet.
- sarchertech 3y agoWhere are you getting that hydro power is safer? Hydropower accidents have killed far more people than nuclear accidents both in real numbers and normalized for energy produced. The ecological downsides to hydro are also hard to overstate.
- akoboldfrying 3y agoThis is interesting and news to me -- got any links?
- sarchertech 3y agohttps://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy Just this year there was a dam failure in Libya that killed between 5k-20k people. And a series of dam failures on a reservoir in China in 1975 likely killed somewhere north of 200k, destroyed more than 5 million homes, and displaced more than 10 million people.
- mikeyouse 3y agoEh.. dam failures are indeed catastrophic but the Derna dams in Libya were just clay embankments that had nothing to do with hydropower.
- sarchertech 3y agoEarth filled embankment dams are used around the world for hydropower. The primary danger from hydropower is flooding due to dam failure, so it stands to reason you’d look at all dam failures when quantifying the risk.
- lazide 3y agoAs one of many examples: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam] With bonus 'recently almost failed due to construction defects and would have killed thousands of Californians if it did' history.
- terribleperson 3y agoDam collapses are rare, but when they happen they can kill thousands. Go through the wikipedia list article "list of hydroelectric power station failures" and look for the ones that are actual dam collapses.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cyberax 3y ago> Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs. In _nameplate_ GWs. If you actually want your power to work during winter time or polar vortexes, you need WAY more than that.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoYes, a minimum doubling of nameplate capacity (much more than that in most areas), plus a lot of expensive and environmentally-nasty storage to boot.
- lightedman 3y ago"hydro" Not even close to being safer. Dam failures have killed magnitudes of order more people than nuclear plants.