20 ms·

Thing with Nuclear is its long term. It's 10 years to plan (theres always some customisation), fund, develop and train then another 5-10 before you move to prof

Thing with Nuclear is its long term. It's 10 years to plan (theres always some customisation), fund, develop and train then another 5-10 before you move to profitability. Then through the life cycle there's constant government scrutiny and regulation before a complex decommissioning process that is pre-paid. This doesnt fit well with political election cycles. Solar and wind are winning not because they are cheaper or more balanced for the grid but because you can buy off the shelf components, install them quickly and make it to profitability sooner. There's just a whole lot less time and risk.

MostlyStable 3y ago
If we subjected solar and wind to the same level of regulatory burden (as in: ensured that they would have the same level of expected harms/deaths/accidents as nuclear), they also would be completely unprofitable. If we subjected all our generation to the same regulatory burden, nuclear would be profitable again because our power would be drastically more expensive.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I am very pro nuclear but I am also very pro stringent regulation around nuclear. I don’t find the argument that nuclear reactors could be regulated as windmills super compelling, but that’s just me.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    While I personally think nuclear is overregulated, my point wasn't even that you need to decrease regulation. I was just pointing that if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated, since they both kill more people/MWh generated than nuclear does.
    - jacobedawson 3y ago
      Genuine question - I wasn't aware of this (fatalities per mwh for wind & solar), what would be the best source to find out more?
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        It's bullshit. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... Even using sources from a decade ago, pro nuclear sources like world in data couldn't find any credible sources to back that claim. And solar and wind were just getting started a decade ago.
        MostlyStable 3y ago
        INteresting that they cite this exact paper in that figure but it has very different numbers (and is the newest of their citations). [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... -edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar. I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects. In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.
      - MostlyStable 3y ago
        This was the first publication I found from a google scholar search (there are others as well)[0] Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates. I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive) However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events. [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      >> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited. By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. ) One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries. So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.
      - Manuel_D 3y ago
        To the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2]. 1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear-evacuation-order-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
        bruce511 3y ago
  - pstuart 3y ago
    Small Modular Reactors should make regulation a lot easier vs bespoke behemoth power plants. Unfortunately they still seem to be all promise and no deliveries.
    - mharig 3y ago
      AFAIK they are all breeder reactors. So they can be rather easy modified to breed Plutonium and the likes. Good luck, if one of them shows up in the hands of Daesh or other religious-ideologically or political-ideologically disturbed minds. Edit: Furthermore, small reactors produce more radioactive waste than big ones. Although the study I read was about conventional reactors, IIRC.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  Except there isn’t a reason to do this. Solar panels do not have radiantion leaks. Wind turbines do not meltdown. Hydro damns don’t need millennia long storage plans for their waste. Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    The reason we care about those things is that they kill people. It turns out that, even with those things, nuclear kills fewer people than everything else. Wind turbines kill people other ways. Hydro dams literally have the record for the single most catastrophic energy related disaster in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And even dams that don't fail are so much worse for the environment that I can't even explain it. Dams on the west coast are probably the single biggest reason for the collapse of west coast salmon populations (among countless other species). Dams are an ecological disaster even when they are working perfectly. Nuclear at least has to fail before it causes major issues.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      > nuclear kills fewer people than everything else For some reason, this seems to have omitted solar power from the list of examples of technologies that have a higher body count than nuclear power. In the meantime, let's examine how many cities have needed to be evacuated due to the catastrophic failure of solar plants.
      - orwin 3y ago
        You're probably joking, but solar installation killed my uncle's employee (he had 3), which made him sell his installation business (he still has 2 solar farms I think). I'm pretty sur solar kill more per generated MW than wind. The main difference is that solar/wind only kill or inconvenience/maim blue collar workers. It's like chemical spills in North America, you only hear about it if it inconvenience white collar or large owners, if it's only 30k blue collar workers, it'll hardly make national news.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
- imtringued 3y ago
  You do realize that nobody dies during the operation of a solar farm? Yes people fall off roofs during installation, but effective regulation for that is far cheaper than you would think.
macspoofing 3y ago
[flagged]
- firecall 3y ago
  Solar plus Battery can power a Modern Domestic House in a Modern Economy. Not saying it’s environmentally friendly, but if you have sunshine all year round it’s easily doable. Here in South Australia we also have a massive Tesla battery to stabilise grid output. I’m all for Nuclear though.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    Solar plus Battery can power a Modern Domestic House in a Modern Economy. 1) I simply dont think that is true unless you are willing to be powerless 5% of the year or have backup generators
    - firecall 3y ago
      Why 5%? It is doable and people do it. Here in Australia anyway. You just need enough Solar, enough battery, and controls on your power load. Not saying it’s easy or commonplace right now, but if you really want to, you can go off-grid! In Australia at least.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        I agree it's doable by some rich and Niche individuals, but it's not socially scalable, let alone efficient. Of course with enough money you can put in three times the panels you need on average to account for winter days. Similarly, you could put in a week's storage battery in case a nasty storm comes through.
        firecall 3y ago
        That's basically it :-) But you can, if you want to...
  - 3y ago
parl_match 3y ago
> Solar and wind are winning They will not and cannot win until we have cheap, highly dense, efficient power storage. That is, unfortunately, at least 20 years off (if we're lucky). They will continue to be an important part of our energy ecosystem, and we should aggressively build them out, but we still need the fundamental power solution.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Why does the storage has to be dense, if they are stationary?
  - kuratkull 3y ago
    Dense means they have a good size to kw/h ratio. If it's too low, nobody will install them. Space is a premium after all.
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      Space in the cities is premium. Space in rural areas is not. I really don't think space is the problem, mass producing maybe, but otherwise have a big powerbank in every basement and you are done.
      - pengaru 3y ago
        > have a big powerbank in every basement and you are done. Especially in the case of flooding, Fukushima style.
        hutzlibu 3y ago
        Flooding destroys alsl batteries obviously, but the slightly important difference to Fukoshima is, a saltwater batterie does not contaminate the area.
        _ph_ 3y ago
        Besides that most areas aren't in the risk of flooding, there is litte preventing you to water proof your batteries to the point that submerging them into water has no ill effects. The housing of the batteries usually is water-proof anyway. Just look at all the Teslas driving through deep water. Oil tanks for heating are a huge problem with flooding though, as they tend to leak oil into the environment.
Manuel_D 3y ago
Nuclear produces more electricity than wind and solar combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation I do agree wind and solar are cheaper presently. But this is primarily because they're being deployed in the context of supplementing a fossil-fuel backed grid. Provisioning more wind and solar starts becoming much dicier when you start saturating the grid during hours of peak production. In theory, negative electricity prices will prompt people to provision storage and capture the free (cheaper than free!) energy. But in practice, energy storage at grid scale is expensive and there are much better uses for batteries - chiefly in electric vehicles. Nuclear, on the other hand, is one of the few carbon-free energy sources that is non-intermittent. The only others are geographically limited: hydropower and geothermal power.
- danhor 3y ago
  Interestingly enough the source for the first graph in the article shows the opposite: https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/electricity/electricity-generation https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/electricity/ele... Even more staggering is that from 2020 to 2021 solar+wind grew by ~15%.
- jes5199 3y ago
  battery production will keep increasing, and eventually the EV-battery market will be saturated recycled EV batteries could be a major source for cheap grid battery storage
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    Currently only 1% of vehicles are electric. So it’s going to be a while.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Given how often I see the EVs though, it seems EVs must be more in active use.
kuratkull 3y ago
Do you have solar panels? I do. Not that cheap nor profitable in nordic climate as you'd think.
- epistasis 3y ago
  What makes sense for Sweden may not make sense for the vast majority of energy production in the world. It makes a lot of sense for Sweden to buy nuclear, even if it is exceptionally pricy and slow to deliver, if they don't have better options. But the fraction of the world population in that situation is not large, either, so we shouldn't extrapolate from Sweden to too many other places.
  - natmaka 3y ago
    Sweden: 1/ no new nuclear reactor since 1985, despite hydro being the best existing storage system for nuclear (hydro resources there are fantastic), and hydro remaining there the main source of electricity 2/ wind is very quickly gaining traction https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?country=~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... 3/ Some may remember the Forsmark'2006 near-miss ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... ) and fight against this project.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
grecy 3y ago
> then another 5-10 before you move to profitability Why does it have to be run at a profit? Surely it could be just like healthcare or the defence forces - never designed or intended to run a profit.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Well now, that depends on what country you are in. In the US for example health care and military most definitely are for-profit exercises. In the context of Sweden though, with social health care, and a modest military your question makes more sense. And of course as long as it has govt funding it doesn't need to make a profit, or even break even. Once you look to private capital though, investors expect that capital to generate a return. Assuming no govt subsidy yo provide that return, it has to come from an excess after operational expenses. (aka profit)
- tuatoru 3y ago
  Profit imposes discipline on consumption of the product. River water is classically treated as "free" which leads to great waste in agriculture and horitculture. Requiring a resource to be sold at a profit ensures it goes to where it is most needed, and that it is used efficiently.
  - grecy 3y ago
    Sounds like you've read up on your capitalism. If your little tale was true, the USA would have cheaper and better healthcare than developed countries that have free healthcare. That is not the case. Your little tale doesn't have to always be true, there are other ways of doing things in this world.
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      Where do you get "cheaper" from that? It certainly has "better" care for individuals ... at a price. Population health starts with urban design that forces people to walk.
      - 3y ago
yodsanklai 3y ago
> Solar and wind are winning Genuine question. What kind of solar/wind installation could generate 2GW of power on demand (including when no wind or sun) and how much would that cost? is it even feasible with actual technology?
- epistasis 3y ago
  Is that really a genuine question? 2GW of batteries attached to solar installations, spread over multiple sites, is quite common in 2023. What do you mean by "what kind"? Its just the normal kind.
  - yodsanklai 3y ago
    If there's no sun, how long can the battery deliver? And if there's too much sun, where's the extra power dissipated? I'm wondering if it's possible to provide a service equivalent to a nuclear powerplant today, and if so, how much it costs.
    - _ph_ 3y ago
      The thing is, the question doesn't really make sense. Yes you could design a closed system of solar production and battery storage, which delivers power 24/7. But that is not reasonable. Solar is only one part of the electricity supply to the grid. Wind is another. Add to that water, biomass, etc. and you have multiple sources which complement each other. You would need battery storage only for those remaining amounts of electricity which cannot be served by the combination above. And this amount is easily an order of magnitude (or more) lower than a solar+storage system alone. This also heavily depends on your local climate. The closer to the equator you get, the more a solar storage only needs to supply energy over the night. There a solar+storage only grid would be the no brainer.
      - yodsanklai 3y ago
        The question makes sense. When people claim that wind + solar wins over nuclear. They compare apple and orange. Nobody is able to explain what wind/solar (+ other renewable) installation is doable right night in Sweden (not near the equator), that would provide the same guarantee as a nuclear powerplant: 2GW of power, all year long. Or at least any time when the people need that power and there hasn't been sun/wind for a while.
epistasis 3y ago
One other disadvantage of the long term nature of nuclear is that you lock in high prices for a very very very long time. Whereas when you report your wind farm or solar farm after 30 years you can take advantage the fall in component prices.
baix777 3y ago
Also, the learning curve on wind and solar is so much faster than nuclear.

MostlyStable 3y ago

If we subjected solar and wind to the same level of regulatory burden (as in: ensured that they would have the same level of expected harms/deaths/accidents as nuclear), they also would be completely unprofitable. If we subjected all our generation to the same regulatory burden, nuclear would be profitable again because our power would be drastically more expensive.

ethanbond 3y ago
I am very pro nuclear but I am also very pro stringent regulation around nuclear. I don’t find the argument that nuclear reactors could be regulated as windmills super compelling, but that’s just me.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  While I personally think nuclear is overregulated, my point wasn't even that you need to decrease regulation. I was just pointing that if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated, since they both kill more people/MWh generated than nuclear does.
  - jacobedawson 3y ago
    Genuine question - I wasn't aware of this (fatalities per mwh for wind & solar), what would be the best source to find out more?
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      It's bullshit. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... Even using sources from a decade ago, pro nuclear sources like world in data couldn't find any credible sources to back that claim. And solar and wind were just getting started a decade ago.
      - MostlyStable 3y ago
        INteresting that they cite this exact paper in that figure but it has very different numbers (and is the newest of their citations). [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... -edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar. I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects. In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      This was the first publication I found from a google scholar search (there are others as well)[0] Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates. I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive) However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events. [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615009877?casa_token=qzTuLBZWBCgAAAAA:IMGNr1TlDdpGB5EknuzeGLfYqkQXNOwbdXfkXizQVoUfQW9cFqQbaTh2z-93-6XD2W_oPwTEKGY#fig1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    >> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited. By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. ) One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries. So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      To the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2]. 1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear-evacuation-order-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
      - bruce511 3y ago
- pstuart 3y ago
  Small Modular Reactors should make regulation a lot easier vs bespoke behemoth power plants. Unfortunately they still seem to be all promise and no deliveries.
  - mharig 3y ago
    AFAIK they are all breeder reactors. So they can be rather easy modified to breed Plutonium and the likes. Good luck, if one of them shows up in the hands of Daesh or other religious-ideologically or political-ideologically disturbed minds. Edit: Furthermore, small reactors produce more radioactive waste than big ones. Although the study I read was about conventional reactors, IIRC.
_aavaa_ 3y ago
Except there isn’t a reason to do this. Solar panels do not have radiantion leaks. Wind turbines do not meltdown. Hydro damns don’t need millennia long storage plans for their waste. Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  The reason we care about those things is that they kill people. It turns out that, even with those things, nuclear kills fewer people than everything else. Wind turbines kill people other ways. Hydro dams literally have the record for the single most catastrophic energy related disaster in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And even dams that don't fail are so much worse for the environment that I can't even explain it. Dams on the west coast are probably the single biggest reason for the collapse of west coast salmon populations (among countless other species). Dams are an ecological disaster even when they are working perfectly. Nuclear at least has to fail before it causes major issues.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    > nuclear kills fewer people than everything else For some reason, this seems to have omitted solar power from the list of examples of technologies that have a higher body count than nuclear power. In the meantime, let's examine how many cities have needed to be evacuated due to the catastrophic failure of solar plants.
    - orwin 3y ago
      You're probably joking, but solar installation killed my uncle's employee (he had 3), which made him sell his installation business (he still has 2 solar farms I think). I'm pretty sur solar kill more per generated MW than wind. The main difference is that solar/wind only kill or inconvenience/maim blue collar workers. It's like chemical spills in North America, you only hear about it if it inconvenience white collar or large owners, if it's only 30k blue collar workers, it'll hardly make national news.
- fuzztester 3y ago
imtringued 3y ago
You do realize that nobody dies during the operation of a solar farm? Yes people fall off roofs during installation, but effective regulation for that is far cheaper than you would think.

macspoofing 3y ago

[flagged]

firecall 3y ago
Solar plus Battery can power a Modern Domestic House in a Modern Economy. Not saying it’s environmentally friendly, but if you have sunshine all year round it’s easily doable. Here in South Australia we also have a massive Tesla battery to stabilise grid output. I’m all for Nuclear though.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Solar plus Battery can power a Modern Domestic House in a Modern Economy. 1) I simply dont think that is true unless you are willing to be powerless 5% of the year or have backup generators
  - firecall 3y ago
    Why 5%? It is doable and people do it. Here in Australia anyway. You just need enough Solar, enough battery, and controls on your power load. Not saying it’s easy or commonplace right now, but if you really want to, you can go off-grid! In Australia at least.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I agree it's doable by some rich and Niche individuals, but it's not socially scalable, let alone efficient. Of course with enough money you can put in three times the panels you need on average to account for winter days. Similarly, you could put in a week's storage battery in case a nasty storm comes through.
      - firecall 3y ago
        That's basically it :-) But you can, if you want to...
- 3y ago

parl_match 3y ago

> Solar and wind are winning They will not and cannot win until we have cheap, highly dense, efficient power storage. That is, unfortunately, at least 20 years off (if we're lucky). They will continue to be an important part of our energy ecosystem, and we should aggressively build them out, but we still need the fundamental power solution.

hutzlibu 3y ago
Why does the storage has to be dense, if they are stationary?
- kuratkull 3y ago
  Dense means they have a good size to kw/h ratio. If it's too low, nobody will install them. Space is a premium after all.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Space in the cities is premium. Space in rural areas is not. I really don't think space is the problem, mass producing maybe, but otherwise have a big powerbank in every basement and you are done.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      > have a big powerbank in every basement and you are done. Especially in the case of flooding, Fukushima style.
      - hutzlibu 3y ago
        Flooding destroys alsl batteries obviously, but the slightly important difference to Fukoshima is, a saltwater batterie does not contaminate the area.
      - _ph_ 3y ago
        Besides that most areas aren't in the risk of flooding, there is litte preventing you to water proof your batteries to the point that submerging them into water has no ill effects. The housing of the batteries usually is water-proof anyway. Just look at all the Teslas driving through deep water. Oil tanks for heating are a huge problem with flooding though, as they tend to leak oil into the environment.

Manuel_D 3y ago

Nuclear produces more electricity than wind and solar combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation I do agree wind and solar are cheaper presently. But this is primarily because they're being deployed in the context of supplementing a fossil-fuel backed grid. Provisioning more wind and solar starts becoming much dicier when you start saturating the grid during hours of peak production. In theory, negative electricity prices will prompt people to provision storage and capture the free (cheaper than free!) energy. But in practice, energy storage at grid scale is expensive and there are much better uses for batteries - chiefly in electric vehicles. Nuclear, on the other hand, is one of the few carbon-free energy sources that is non-intermittent. The only others are geographically limited: hydropower and geothermal power.

danhor 3y ago
Interestingly enough the source for the first graph in the article shows the opposite: https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/electricity/electricity-generation https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/electricity/ele... Even more staggering is that from 2020 to 2021 solar+wind grew by ~15%.
jes5199 3y ago
battery production will keep increasing, and eventually the EV-battery market will be saturated recycled EV batteries could be a major source for cheap grid battery storage
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Currently only 1% of vehicles are electric. So it’s going to be a while.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Given how often I see the EVs though, it seems EVs must be more in active use.

kuratkull 3y ago

Do you have solar panels? I do. Not that cheap nor profitable in nordic climate as you'd think.

epistasis 3y ago
What makes sense for Sweden may not make sense for the vast majority of energy production in the world. It makes a lot of sense for Sweden to buy nuclear, even if it is exceptionally pricy and slow to deliver, if they don't have better options. But the fraction of the world population in that situation is not large, either, so we shouldn't extrapolate from Sweden to too many other places.
- natmaka 3y ago
  Sweden: 1/ no new nuclear reactor since 1985, despite hydro being the best existing storage system for nuclear (hydro resources there are fantastic), and hydro remaining there the main source of electricity 2/ wind is very quickly gaining traction https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?country=~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... 3/ Some may remember the Forsmark'2006 near-miss ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... ) and fight against this project.

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grecy 3y ago

> then another 5-10 before you move to profitability Why does it have to be run at a profit? Surely it could be just like healthcare or the defence forces - never designed or intended to run a profit.

bruce511 3y ago
Well now, that depends on what country you are in. In the US for example health care and military most definitely are for-profit exercises. In the context of Sweden though, with social health care, and a modest military your question makes more sense. And of course as long as it has govt funding it doesn't need to make a profit, or even break even. Once you look to private capital though, investors expect that capital to generate a return. Assuming no govt subsidy yo provide that return, it has to come from an excess after operational expenses. (aka profit)
tuatoru 3y ago
Profit imposes discipline on consumption of the product. River water is classically treated as "free" which leads to great waste in agriculture and horitculture. Requiring a resource to be sold at a profit ensures it goes to where it is most needed, and that it is used efficiently.
- grecy 3y ago
  Sounds like you've read up on your capitalism. If your little tale was true, the USA would have cheaper and better healthcare than developed countries that have free healthcare. That is not the case. Your little tale doesn't have to always be true, there are other ways of doing things in this world.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    Where do you get "cheaper" from that? It certainly has "better" care for individuals ... at a price. Population health starts with urban design that forces people to walk.
    - 3y ago

yodsanklai 3y ago

> Solar and wind are winning Genuine question. What kind of solar/wind installation could generate 2GW of power on demand (including when no wind or sun) and how much would that cost? is it even feasible with actual technology?

epistasis 3y ago
Is that really a genuine question? 2GW of batteries attached to solar installations, spread over multiple sites, is quite common in 2023. What do you mean by "what kind"? Its just the normal kind.
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  If there's no sun, how long can the battery deliver? And if there's too much sun, where's the extra power dissipated? I'm wondering if it's possible to provide a service equivalent to a nuclear powerplant today, and if so, how much it costs.
  - _ph_ 3y ago
    The thing is, the question doesn't really make sense. Yes you could design a closed system of solar production and battery storage, which delivers power 24/7. But that is not reasonable. Solar is only one part of the electricity supply to the grid. Wind is another. Add to that water, biomass, etc. and you have multiple sources which complement each other. You would need battery storage only for those remaining amounts of electricity which cannot be served by the combination above. And this amount is easily an order of magnitude (or more) lower than a solar+storage system alone. This also heavily depends on your local climate. The closer to the equator you get, the more a solar storage only needs to supply energy over the night. There a solar+storage only grid would be the no brainer.
    - yodsanklai 3y ago
      The question makes sense. When people claim that wind + solar wins over nuclear. They compare apple and orange. Nobody is able to explain what wind/solar (+ other renewable) installation is doable right night in Sweden (not near the equator), that would provide the same guarantee as a nuclear powerplant: 2GW of power, all year long. Or at least any time when the people need that power and there hasn't been sun/wind for a while.

epistasis 3y ago

One other disadvantage of the long term nature of nuclear is that you lock in high prices for a very very very long time. Whereas when you report your wind farm or solar farm after 30 years you can take advantage the fall in component prices.

baix777 3y ago

Also, the learning curve on wind and solar is so much faster than nuclear.