4 ms·
It seems to me that having a couple of nuclear reactors as base load spread throughout the country would be more useful than having a massive spread out battery
by gustavus 3y ago
It seems to me that having a couple of nuclear reactors as base load spread throughout the country would be more useful than having a massive spread out battery & solar infrastructure.
I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.
Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.
- dexwiz 3y agoGrid level solar has batteries installed on site. The site acts as a power generator that sells energy to PG&E, they don’t manage it themselves. If anything a solar field requires much less operation expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive exclusion zone.
- Retric 3y agoNuclear is extremely dependent on long distance power transmission. Nobody wants a reactor in the middle of a city, and 1-5 GW of power needs to be sent long distances before it’s used. Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap land, but they aren’t the only option just a trade off in terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoChicago is mostly on nuclear and the reactor is quite close to the city, just over the Indiana border.
- Retric 3y agoClosest is Braidwood which is ~60 miles from downtown. NYC has large power plants in Manhattan (East River 1, 2, 6, and 7), Queens (650MW Astoria Energy II power station), and Brooklyn (Narrows 1–1 to 2-8) plus a few more.
- dexwiz 3y agoThere are no active nuclear power plants in Indiana. It had two planned plants that were cancelled in the 80s. Purdue has a very small power plant for research.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cco 3y agoWould you prefer PG&E defer critical maintenance on a field of solar panels or a nuclear plant? That question dovetails into nuclear's biggest hurdle; the risk for catastrophe is high, both in reality and especially politically, so regulation is high, and thus the cost to build, operate, and decommission is immense.