14 ms·

It seems so clear that nuclear is our ultimate energy source. We're wasting so much time on toy windmills and solar panels, and all the batteries required to co

by windows2020 3y ago

It seems so clear that nuclear is our ultimate energy source. We're wasting so much time on toy windmills and solar panels, and all the batteries required to compensate. There's so many complaints about cost overruns, etc. OK... let's figure it out! Let's put more focus into this and make safe, efficient and clean nuclear happen! This article indicates we're moving closer to that.

afterburner 3y ago
> let's figure it out Renewables already figured it out. They're already cheaper. Nuclear already lost. Until next-gen nuclear is developed, it's over. They're welcome to keep researching it though. Meanwhile, renewables are also getting better, and much faster. And they're already better than nuclear.
- barney54 3y ago
  Riding a bike is cheaper than driving. Driving a car is dead.
  - beretguy 3y ago
    Unless you are in USA because we like to live each in a separate house instead of apartment complex.
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      I'd want a separate house, too, if my neighbors are Americans.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    China produces more power from renewables than the entire generation capacity of the UK. You can build more firm generation capacity with solar and batteries than a typical nuclear generator, in a year, at a cheaper price. Hell of a bike. Nuclear has a niche, but it got steamrolled by the S curve of solar, wind, and batteries.
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      Slight amendment: China is installing more wind and solar PV generation capacity this year than the entire generation capacity of the UK. The increment, not the total. Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century. But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there. If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Citation: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb... > The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020. > The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.
      - dalyons 3y ago
        You won’t get an answer to this. The energy world has changed very quickly in the past few years, and many can’t adjust their opinions to take new data and trends into account.
      - csomar 3y ago
        It would be interesting to see what the consequences of that would be. China solar addition scale is from another fourth dimension. Not only it is massive but it seems to be accelerating too. They added more in PV Solar in 2022 than the whole PV installations of Germany. It seems that the politicians there realize that being dependent on unstable regions (ie: Middle-East) for fuel is not wise. They are not B.S.ing their population with green propaganda and instead going full speed for PV solar and electric vehicles. Edit: I found the 2022 numbers on Wikipedia and got curious what the 2023 outlook is going to be. It is shocking: https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-surges-expected-to-top-1-tw-by-2026 https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-sur... Their 2023 numbers are double the 2022.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Riding a bike requires you to live in a shoebox-sized apartment. Shoeboxes are dead.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Electricity is fungible.
    - barney54 3y ago
      But not easily storable.
      - somenameforme 3y ago
        Not entirely true. There's all sorts of mechanical storage systems, the most common being artificial hydroelectric and flywheels - spin something really fast and than extract energy from its rotational velocity later. But a practical issue here is that there hasn't really been much motivation to develop this industry, because there's been relatively little critical necessity for high capacity at-scale energy storage.
      - poorlyknit 3y ago
        Just store it by selling it to your neighbor state or country and buying it back when their renewables are at peak :)
      - epistasis 3y ago
        It is very easily storable, and in energy markets that are driven by free markets (rather than utility biases or legislative mandates), storage is one of the biggest investments on the grid: > Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/1017 https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/1017
  - afterburner 3y ago
    Terrible metaphor, obviously. All electricity generating methods are compared in the same way, cost per power generated.
  - brianaker 3y ago
    Privileged myopia is certainly is alive in thriving! I say this as someone who bikes their kid around most of the time; I love biking but it is way of life that only a minority of people can make work.
- civilitty 3y ago
  Next gen nuclear was developed fifty years ago for the Mars program before it was cancelled. See nuclear lightbulb research. It’s taken that long for renewables to get marginally cheaper without solving the base load problem one bit. Meanwhile natural gas has dominated both.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    You conveniently remember that nuclear power was unfairly sidelined for decades, and then conveniently forget that solar power was also unfairly sidelined for decades. "By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous... Also, "marginally cheaper" can't help but sound like sour grapes; the cost-per-watt of solar has fallen by 500x in the past 50 years (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-solar-pv-module-cost-by-data-source-1970-2020 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...). How many hundreds of times cheaper per-watt is nuclear since then?
    - civilitty 3y ago
      Solar was never “unfairly sidelined” because it was never regulated to death. That’s why it’s gotten cheaper while nuclear has stagnated.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        Why is solar 3x more expensive in the US then, say, Australia? Because it is indeed regulated out of and into existence. Will the utility let you even connect solar to power your house, will the utility charge excessive fixed per-month fees for the privilege, how many hoops will your local municipality make you jump through for permitting, how many weeks or months of delay will there be, how many pointless and useless diagrams will they make you submit, how will a large installer every gain efficiency while dealing with every single city's pointless differences in . Or even, will you silly HOA allow panels, and if so, where and at what visibility?
- rr808 3y ago
  They are not cheaper. They appeared cheaper for a while when there was a bubble and interest rates are zero. Now wind and solar farm projects are failing.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    How is it that nuclear didn't benefit from the same bubble?
    - eru 3y ago
      Mostly red tape. It's much tighter regulated, and takes longer to get any project off the ground.
  - r00fus 3y ago
    The problem isn’t due to bubble economics but contractual fixed rates that no longer make sense given post-covid rampant inflation. Higher interest rates make everything more difficult of course - ask the auto or mortgage industries.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    I’ve now posted this three times, but I don’t think people on this site are aware of it, since we’re still seeing the same obsolete debate. China built 415 TWh of wind and solar in the first 9 months of 2023 (adjusted for capacity factor), more than the combined total of all 26 nuclear plants under construction. Based on this surge of construction, Chinese emissions are expected to begin a structural decline next year. The debate at this point isn’t about whether renewables will scale: China has already answered that question. There is a very real question about whether the West will be able to keep up. There seem to be a lot of people who want to sit around and fantasize about 1970s-era nuclear tech while our neighbors undergo what is effectively a second Industrial Revolution.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - rr808 3y ago
reaperman 3y ago
I foresee fusion though, ultimately. I think it mostly solves the nuclear waste "problem" and should promise huge cheap energy, I'm excited by some outlandish things which could become feasible if electricity is truly cheap.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  What do you consider the biggest remaining challenge associated with the nuclear waste problem?
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Personally, I think Yucca mountain is a great place to store it in the USA but that will likely never be politically viable. And I'm not sure what solutions exist for nations outside of North America. I'm also personally still concerned about transportation accidents resulting in permanently contaminated areas.
    - acidburnNSA 3y ago
      Outside the US, Finland's Onkalo repository is on track to be the first operational commercial repository [1]. We have some operating military ones, like WIPP already. [1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ
      - eru 3y ago
        For comparison, we have chemicals like mercury (and much worse) that stay dangerous forever, and we mostly handle them just fine. There's only a tiny amount of high level nuclear waste.
  - 3y ago
matheusmoreira 3y ago
I agree with you about windmills, they just waste way too much useful space. I don't think solar panels are a problem though. Massive solar plants make no sense but they're great roof replacements for homes and provide distributed energy generation.
- dalyons 3y ago
  Please explain how we are running out of space for windmills, especially offshore ones? Or why solar plants make no sense
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Windmills use tiny amounts of land. Drive through Indiana and they’ll be scattered about within cornfields; drive through Pennsylvania and they’ll be on otherwise unproductive hillsides. In both cases using like 20x20 foot pedestals.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Wind turbines require a lot of space between each other. Any dedicated wind farm is going to have a ton of empty space. If you just plant a single wind turbine in some unused space of an otherwise productive piece of land you can obviously derive value from it. That's not what I was talking about though. I was talking about massive wind farm power generation operations. There's better uses for that area. Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area. Better to put them on everyone's roofs.
    - tstrimple 3y ago
      > Any dedicated wind farm is going to have a ton of empty space. You seem to have a funny definition of "empty space" when the post you're replying to explicitly called out the uses for land in between wind turbines or leveraging wind turbines in areas where much of the land isn't usable for much else. If your argument requires completely ignoring points made by someone else, you probably don't have very strong of an argument.
    - 3y ago
candiddevmike 3y ago
NuScale is the company to watch here. Modular reactors are the future.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Sadly they're in very rough shape. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/nuscale-shares-plunge-as-it-cancels-flagship-small-nuclear-reactor-project/ar-AA1jFljU https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/nuscale-shares-plung...
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    AFAIK they have quite a few MOUs with other utilities, may not be down for the count yet. Seems like the US government is all in on SMRs, so they could end up subsidizing...
    - breckenedge 3y ago
      I doubt we will see federal subsidization for nuclear in the near term with the GOP poised to take over the Senate and House still up for grabs. It’ll be “drill-baby-drill.”
    - RNAlfons 3y ago
      They have other problems too: https://www.barrons.com/articles/nuscale-power-corp-investigated-by-block-leviton-for-potential-securities-law-violations-investors-who-have-lost-money-are-encouraged-to-contact-the-firm-ac80ab0f https://www.barrons.com/articles/nuscale-power-corp-investig...
epistasis 3y ago
The strongest argument in favor of nuclear seems to be that it sounds futuristic and it's what we grew up believing would be the future of energy. However in practice it has never turned out to be that great. There's little to recommend it: it requires massive amounts of labor, double checking high skill welds, documentation, and nobody in the industry seems the least bit interested in making this an efficiency process. Nuclear rockets sound cool. Nuclear electricity plants are pretty awful in practice. Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, it will greatly enhance reliability as they are super scalable and have the potential to massively increase the efficiency of grid transmission and distribution, the most expensive part of electricity for most. Nuclear has none of those benefits.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  > Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to. Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it. Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    > > Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, > Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to. That's a nice way of saying that nuclear power is much too expensive to not run plants at maximum capacity all the time. >Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it. Citation needed. Considering the price of wind or solar, investors are much mor elikley to over provision using those technologies. Nuscale just had to axe their SMR (supposedly the future of nuclear) project in Idaho, because they couldn't find subscribers and their cost of overrunning massively. > Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries. Except you don't need to store the power to run all of the US for a night, you're just making a strawman.
tuatoru 3y ago
> There's so many complaints about cost overruns, etc. This is ironic. I recommend you read How Big Things Get Done[1], by Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's foremost expert on megaprojects. The book discusses an analysis of about 10,000 projects of over a billion dollars each. Which projects were most likely to come in on time and on budget, and deliver the promised returns? PV solar. Which projects were third most likely to overrun by 100% or more, be 100% late or more, and deliver only a fraction of the promised returns? Nuclear power plants. Edit: The book's ratings are based on construction phase only, after all the permitting and other planning work has been completed. (Third worst? What could be worse? Answer: nuclear waste storage sites, and Olympic Games hosting.) 1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-things-get-done-by-bent-flyvbjerg-and-dan-gardner/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-thin...
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Who'd have thought that the targets of perhaps the world's largest anti-anything campaign can slow them down so much? In the 1991 the anti-nuclear industry published its strategy to use everything in their power to slow down nuclear plants and especially nuclear waste sites. It's in black and white. [1] [1] https://atomicinsights.com/anti-nuclear-movement-strategy-circa-april-1991/ https://atomicinsights.com/anti-nuclear-movement-strategy-ci...
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    How does that work in China and Russia?
    - acidburnNSA 3y ago
      China and Russia regularly deliver nuclear plants (VVERs, Hualong One) roughly on time and budget.
      - tuatoru 3y ago
        But not at a rate that can keep up with the growth in demand, especially in China. Demand in China has grown more than 20-fold over the 21st Century but nuclear installs have not come close to keeping up with that. In contrast solar PV and wind have now grown to the point where they are overtaking the growth in demand, meaning that fossil plants can soon start to be be retired.
darklycan51 3y ago
Building reactors TODAY would take way longer than we have to hit net neutrality let alone reducing anything. China built as much solar as the US has entirely last year alone, it can be done
- vuln 3y ago
  With what workforce?
  - epistasis 3y ago
    A much much smaller workforce than it would take to make the equivalent amount of nuclear power generation. We have the money to afford it, ergo we have enough of a workforce to do it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
7373737373 3y ago
You are not factoring in resiliency
tempestn 3y ago
Fortunately we don't need to choose between nuclear and solar or wind. We can do both.

afterburner 3y ago

> let's figure it out Renewables already figured it out. They're already cheaper. Nuclear already lost. Until next-gen nuclear is developed, it's over. They're welcome to keep researching it though. Meanwhile, renewables are also getting better, and much faster. And they're already better than nuclear.

barney54 3y ago
Riding a bike is cheaper than driving. Driving a car is dead.
- beretguy 3y ago
  Unless you are in USA because we like to live each in a separate house instead of apartment complex.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    I'd want a separate house, too, if my neighbors are Americans.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  China produces more power from renewables than the entire generation capacity of the UK. You can build more firm generation capacity with solar and batteries than a typical nuclear generator, in a year, at a cheaper price. Hell of a bike. Nuclear has a niche, but it got steamrolled by the S curve of solar, wind, and batteries.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    Slight amendment: China is installing more wind and solar PV generation capacity this year than the entire generation capacity of the UK. The increment, not the total. Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century. But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there. If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Citation: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb... > The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020. > The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.
    - dalyons 3y ago
      You won’t get an answer to this. The energy world has changed very quickly in the past few years, and many can’t adjust their opinions to take new data and trends into account.
    - csomar 3y ago
      It would be interesting to see what the consequences of that would be. China solar addition scale is from another fourth dimension. Not only it is massive but it seems to be accelerating too. They added more in PV Solar in 2022 than the whole PV installations of Germany. It seems that the politicians there realize that being dependent on unstable regions (ie: Middle-East) for fuel is not wise. They are not B.S.ing their population with green propaganda and instead going full speed for PV solar and electric vehicles. Edit: I found the 2022 numbers on Wikipedia and got curious what the 2023 outlook is going to be. It is shocking: https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-surges-expected-to-top-1-tw-by-2026 https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-sur... Their 2023 numbers are double the 2022.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Riding a bike requires you to live in a shoebox-sized apartment. Shoeboxes are dead.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Electricity is fungible.
  - barney54 3y ago
    But not easily storable.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Not entirely true. There's all sorts of mechanical storage systems, the most common being artificial hydroelectric and flywheels - spin something really fast and than extract energy from its rotational velocity later. But a practical issue here is that there hasn't really been much motivation to develop this industry, because there's been relatively little critical necessity for high capacity at-scale energy storage.
    - poorlyknit 3y ago
      Just store it by selling it to your neighbor state or country and buying it back when their renewables are at peak :)
    - epistasis 3y ago
      It is very easily storable, and in energy markets that are driven by free markets (rather than utility biases or legislative mandates), storage is one of the biggest investments on the grid: > Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/1017 https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/1017
- afterburner 3y ago
  Terrible metaphor, obviously. All electricity generating methods are compared in the same way, cost per power generated.
- brianaker 3y ago
  Privileged myopia is certainly is alive in thriving! I say this as someone who bikes their kid around most of the time; I love biking but it is way of life that only a minority of people can make work.
civilitty 3y ago
Next gen nuclear was developed fifty years ago for the Mars program before it was cancelled. See nuclear lightbulb research. It’s taken that long for renewables to get marginally cheaper without solving the base load problem one bit. Meanwhile natural gas has dominated both.
- kibwen 3y ago
  You conveniently remember that nuclear power was unfairly sidelined for decades, and then conveniently forget that solar power was also unfairly sidelined for decades. "By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous... Also, "marginally cheaper" can't help but sound like sour grapes; the cost-per-watt of solar has fallen by 500x in the past 50 years (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-solar-pv-module-cost-by-data-source-1970-2020 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...). How many hundreds of times cheaper per-watt is nuclear since then?
  - civilitty 3y ago
    Solar was never “unfairly sidelined” because it was never regulated to death. That’s why it’s gotten cheaper while nuclear has stagnated.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Why is solar 3x more expensive in the US then, say, Australia? Because it is indeed regulated out of and into existence. Will the utility let you even connect solar to power your house, will the utility charge excessive fixed per-month fees for the privilege, how many hoops will your local municipality make you jump through for permitting, how many weeks or months of delay will there be, how many pointless and useless diagrams will they make you submit, how will a large installer every gain efficiency while dealing with every single city's pointless differences in . Or even, will you silly HOA allow panels, and if so, where and at what visibility?
rr808 3y ago
They are not cheaper. They appeared cheaper for a while when there was a bubble and interest rates are zero. Now wind and solar farm projects are failing.
- jayd16 3y ago
  How is it that nuclear didn't benefit from the same bubble?
  - eru 3y ago
    Mostly red tape. It's much tighter regulated, and takes longer to get any project off the ground.
- r00fus 3y ago
  The problem isn’t due to bubble economics but contractual fixed rates that no longer make sense given post-covid rampant inflation. Higher interest rates make everything more difficult of course - ask the auto or mortgage industries.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  I’ve now posted this three times, but I don’t think people on this site are aware of it, since we’re still seeing the same obsolete debate. China built 415 TWh of wind and solar in the first 9 months of 2023 (adjusted for capacity factor), more than the combined total of all 26 nuclear plants under construction. Based on this surge of construction, Chinese emissions are expected to begin a structural decline next year. The debate at this point isn’t about whether renewables will scale: China has already answered that question. There is a very real question about whether the West will be able to keep up. There seem to be a lot of people who want to sit around and fantasize about 1970s-era nuclear tech while our neighbors undergo what is effectively a second Industrial Revolution.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rr808 3y ago

reaperman 3y ago

I foresee fusion though, ultimately. I think it mostly solves the nuclear waste "problem" and should promise huge cheap energy, I'm excited by some outlandish things which could become feasible if electricity is truly cheap.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
What do you consider the biggest remaining challenge associated with the nuclear waste problem?
- reaperman 3y ago
  Personally, I think Yucca mountain is a great place to store it in the USA but that will likely never be politically viable. And I'm not sure what solutions exist for nations outside of North America. I'm also personally still concerned about transportation accidents resulting in permanently contaminated areas.
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    Outside the US, Finland's Onkalo repository is on track to be the first operational commercial repository [1]. We have some operating military ones, like WIPP already. [1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ
    - eru 3y ago
      For comparison, we have chemicals like mercury (and much worse) that stay dangerous forever, and we mostly handle them just fine. There's only a tiny amount of high level nuclear waste.
- 3y ago

matheusmoreira 3y ago

I agree with you about windmills, they just waste way too much useful space. I don't think solar panels are a problem though. Massive solar plants make no sense but they're great roof replacements for homes and provide distributed energy generation.

dalyons 3y ago
Please explain how we are running out of space for windmills, especially offshore ones? Or why solar plants make no sense
ceejayoz 3y ago
Windmills use tiny amounts of land. Drive through Indiana and they’ll be scattered about within cornfields; drive through Pennsylvania and they’ll be on otherwise unproductive hillsides. In both cases using like 20x20 foot pedestals.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Wind turbines require a lot of space between each other. Any dedicated wind farm is going to have a ton of empty space. If you just plant a single wind turbine in some unused space of an otherwise productive piece of land you can obviously derive value from it. That's not what I was talking about though. I was talking about massive wind farm power generation operations. There's better uses for that area. Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area. Better to put them on everyone's roofs.
  - tstrimple 3y ago
    > Any dedicated wind farm is going to have a ton of empty space. You seem to have a funny definition of "empty space" when the post you're replying to explicitly called out the uses for land in between wind turbines or leveraging wind turbines in areas where much of the land isn't usable for much else. If your argument requires completely ignoring points made by someone else, you probably don't have very strong of an argument.
  - 3y ago

candiddevmike 3y ago

NuScale is the company to watch here. Modular reactors are the future.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Sadly they're in very rough shape. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/nuscale-shares-plunge-as-it-cancels-flagship-small-nuclear-reactor-project/ar-AA1jFljU https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/nuscale-shares-plung...
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  AFAIK they have quite a few MOUs with other utilities, may not be down for the count yet. Seems like the US government is all in on SMRs, so they could end up subsidizing...
  - breckenedge 3y ago
    I doubt we will see federal subsidization for nuclear in the near term with the GOP poised to take over the Senate and House still up for grabs. It’ll be “drill-baby-drill.”
  - RNAlfons 3y ago
    They have other problems too: https://www.barrons.com/articles/nuscale-power-corp-investigated-by-block-leviton-for-potential-securities-law-violations-investors-who-have-lost-money-are-encouraged-to-contact-the-firm-ac80ab0f https://www.barrons.com/articles/nuscale-power-corp-investig...

epistasis 3y ago

The strongest argument in favor of nuclear seems to be that it sounds futuristic and it's what we grew up believing would be the future of energy. However in practice it has never turned out to be that great. There's little to recommend it: it requires massive amounts of labor, double checking high skill welds, documentation, and nobody in the industry seems the least bit interested in making this an efficiency process. Nuclear rockets sound cool. Nuclear electricity plants are pretty awful in practice. Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, it will greatly enhance reliability as they are super scalable and have the potential to massively increase the efficiency of grid transmission and distribution, the most expensive part of electricity for most. Nuclear has none of those benefits.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
> Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to. Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it. Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  > > Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, > Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to. That's a nice way of saying that nuclear power is much too expensive to not run plants at maximum capacity all the time. >Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it. Citation needed. Considering the price of wind or solar, investors are much mor elikley to over provision using those technologies. Nuscale just had to axe their SMR (supposedly the future of nuclear) project in Idaho, because they couldn't find subscribers and their cost of overrunning massively. > Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries. Except you don't need to store the power to run all of the US for a night, you're just making a strawman.

tuatoru 3y ago

> There's so many complaints about cost overruns, etc. This is ironic. I recommend you read How Big Things Get Done[1], by Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's foremost expert on megaprojects. The book discusses an analysis of about 10,000 projects of over a billion dollars each. Which projects were most likely to come in on time and on budget, and deliver the promised returns? PV solar. Which projects were third most likely to overrun by 100% or more, be 100% late or more, and deliver only a fraction of the promised returns? Nuclear power plants. Edit: The book's ratings are based on construction phase only, after all the permitting and other planning work has been completed. (Third worst? What could be worse? Answer: nuclear waste storage sites, and Olympic Games hosting.) 1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-things-get-done-by-bent-flyvbjerg-and-dan-gardner/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-thin...

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Who'd have thought that the targets of perhaps the world's largest anti-anything campaign can slow them down so much? In the 1991 the anti-nuclear industry published its strategy to use everything in their power to slow down nuclear plants and especially nuclear waste sites. It's in black and white. [1] [1] https://atomicinsights.com/anti-nuclear-movement-strategy-circa-april-1991/ https://atomicinsights.com/anti-nuclear-movement-strategy-ci...
- tuatoru 3y ago
  How does that work in China and Russia?
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    China and Russia regularly deliver nuclear plants (VVERs, Hualong One) roughly on time and budget.
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      But not at a rate that can keep up with the growth in demand, especially in China. Demand in China has grown more than 20-fold over the 21st Century but nuclear installs have not come close to keeping up with that. In contrast solar PV and wind have now grown to the point where they are overtaking the growth in demand, meaning that fossil plants can soon start to be be retired.

darklycan51 3y ago

Building reactors TODAY would take way longer than we have to hit net neutrality let alone reducing anything. China built as much solar as the US has entirely last year alone, it can be done

vuln 3y ago
With what workforce?
- epistasis 3y ago
  A much much smaller workforce than it would take to make the equivalent amount of nuclear power generation. We have the money to afford it, ergo we have enough of a workforce to do it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

7373737373 3y ago

You are not factoring in resiliency

tempestn 3y ago

Fortunately we don't need to choose between nuclear and solar or wind. We can do both.