6 ms·

I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up (like building iphones), I'm f

I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up (like building iphones), I'm fully on board with the Elon strategy of solar + powerbanks for storage.

api 2y ago
The problem with nuclear is that it likes to be big, which means big capital-intensive projects and therefore a slow iteration time. Even if there are some things that are superior about nuclear, like land and raw resource use, it's going to get run over by a fast-iterating solution with small minimum capital investment. At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all locations except perhaps places with low levels of sunlight combined with high demand, like maybe very high Northern latitudes.
- EcommerceFlow 2y ago
  Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.
  - beembeem 2y ago
    1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - tuna74 2y ago
      Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates to electricity).
      - beembeem 2y ago
        Firm refers to the generation profile of the power source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.
        BobaFloutist 2y ago
        How often/much do you realistically need to heat a house with high, quality, modern insulation? Does your house have triple-paned windows, a vestibule for each entryway, well insulated walls, attic, and roof, etc? Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much forever - even if you have to replace components, you probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which is a huge factor in the cost.
        beembeem 2y ago
        > a house with high, quality, modern insulation? How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly. Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.
        BobaFloutist 2y ago
        It's not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner, but if we're looking at a path to a society-wide greener tomorrow, it's worth looking at. I wonder how much upgraded insulation and geothermal heat pump(/district heating) could be paid for by the cost to build a new nuclear power plant - or even by the difference in cost to build that power plant versus to get sufficient solar and batteries to, in combination with the insulation, generate comparable temperature control.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      > 1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. There is far more desert land than we would need. It doesn't have to be infinite for it not to be a significant constraint. > Dispatchable power Batteries + burning e-fuels in turbines or fuel cells
    - Qwertious 2y ago
      1) yes there is 2) nuclear also needs dispatchable power, it doesn't work well if it needs to constantly ramp up and down. Batteries are vital to full nuclear for this exact reason.
  - jahnu 2y ago
    The best argument for new nukes I heard was to drop in replace coal furnaces in existing thermal coal power plants in china. https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps
- pstuart 2y ago
  Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) were supposed to address this concern. Unfortunately even with this strategy it doesn't seem to be able to compete cost-wise in the market. I hope that can be worked out, as I think we'd be well-served by having as many eggs in our energy basket as possible.
  - api 2y ago
    SMRs are still huge compared to putting $10k worth of solar panels on a house. They also require a lot of big expensive infrastructure like reprocessing facilities, expensive safety-escorted transportation, secure facilities, etc.
    - pstuart 2y ago
      Yes those things are true; albeit the apple to oranges comparison of a home setup vs community baseload provider. One of the compelling deployment cases is to revamp existing coal fired plants with SMRs, which would be a huge win in addressing climate change. None of this is meant to disparage or dismiss solar and other renewables; it's meant to be complementary.
      - api 2y ago
        What I was really getting at was the effect that low incremental cost has on the evolution of the technology. A technology with low incremental unit cost can evolve very rapidly, while high unit cost capital-intensive technologies are slow to evolve. Which will win? Some technologies are inherently high unit cost and capital-intensive. Aerospace is a classic example, and it's why we're still flying on 1970s-tech airplanes and why rockets are just now becoming reusable. Aerospace advances at a crawl because each unit is so expensive.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  And "land and raw resource use" is just a backhanded way to imply cost, used because the actual cost doesn't favor nuclear at all.
oezi 2y ago
Elon has dropped out of this game pretty much. Its Chinese manufacturing for pretty much all components. But as the article says: the hardware is now less than half of the cost and shrinking further.
- jandrese 2y ago
  Elon gave up on panels, but Tesla batteries are still a big player in home and grid scale storage.
  - energy123 2y ago
    Also 50% tariffs are going to hit Chinese battery manufacturers soon. The Biden admin considers it a national security priority to have energy done onshore.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
  Energy is the fastest(only?) growing part of Tesla? Megapack and solar are all made in US.
hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 2y ago
[dead]
shusaku 2y ago
As the article mentions, labor is now the dominate cost for solar. In poor countries where labor costs are cheap (panel costs still need to go down for this case), we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty using cheap solar. That was never an option with nuclear (who wants an unstable regime managing a power plant?)
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  > we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty Please elaborate how? In my understanding electricity access is a problem in many poor countries but what makes the people poor is the lack of any ressources (food, tool, book, pills, land, shelter, money for proxy those…). Electricity may be on the list but it’s far from the first.
credit_guy 2y ago
I continue to be radically pro-nuclear (but I'm also pro-solar and pro-wind). Especially given Elon's example with SpaceX, how you can drop the cost of some technology by a factor of 10 or 100. Elon's idea was that the floor on the price of something is the cost of the raw materials. Everything else can be optimized. The cost of a nuclear power plant is most likely one thousand times the cost of the raw materials. Can we drive it down by a factor of 10 or 100? If not, why not? And if we can, can we increase the world's energy production by a factor of 10, or 100?
- csomar 2y ago
  You make the ultimate point. In a "sane?" world, once nuclear has been discovered, every country should have gone the way of France or the Soviet Union. Build nuclear everywhere with over-capacity built-in. The problem is, once Chernobyl happened (which might have bankrupted a struggling USSR), every country became wary of nuclear as some hidden costs are now more apparent. The Fukushima disaster didn't help either: Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb. So we are back to basics, collecting photons from far away. Using quantity instead of sci-fi stuff. It's quite safe too, at least the panels themselves.
  - Galaxeblaffer 2y ago
    Please tell me how an earthquake can turn a relatively modern nuclear pp into a nuclear bomb ?
  - nine_k 2y ago
    For Chernobyl to happen, the team on the NPP had to do a number of crazy things, and disable a number of security systems which otherwise would stop the crazy things from being done. Certainly RBMK reactors are old and have some shortcomings, but a number of them is still running without incidents. Newer designs are significantly more safe by construction. But the public, sadly, is beholden to legends and emotions, as it has been for millennia. Having an educated opinion is work, it takes time and effort, and a human only has a limited amount of both.
  - 2y ago
rr808 2y ago
> solar + powerbanks for storage Works great for California, not so much for the Northern long dark cold winters.

api 2y ago

The problem with nuclear is that it likes to be big, which means big capital-intensive projects and therefore a slow iteration time. Even if there are some things that are superior about nuclear, like land and raw resource use, it's going to get run over by a fast-iterating solution with small minimum capital investment. At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all locations except perhaps places with low levels of sunlight combined with high demand, like maybe very high Northern latitudes.

EcommerceFlow 2y ago
Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.
- beembeem 2y ago
  1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tuna74 2y ago
    Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates to electricity).
    - beembeem 2y ago
      Firm refers to the generation profile of the power source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.
      - BobaFloutist 2y ago
        How often/much do you realistically need to heat a house with high, quality, modern insulation? Does your house have triple-paned windows, a vestibule for each entryway, well insulated walls, attic, and roof, etc? Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much forever - even if you have to replace components, you probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which is a huge factor in the cost.
        beembeem 2y ago
        > a house with high, quality, modern insulation? How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly. Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.
        BobaFloutist 2y ago
        It's not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner, but if we're looking at a path to a society-wide greener tomorrow, it's worth looking at. I wonder how much upgraded insulation and geothermal heat pump(/district heating) could be paid for by the cost to build a new nuclear power plant - or even by the difference in cost to build that power plant versus to get sufficient solar and batteries to, in combination with the insulation, generate comparable temperature control.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    > 1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. There is far more desert land than we would need. It doesn't have to be infinite for it not to be a significant constraint. > Dispatchable power Batteries + burning e-fuels in turbines or fuel cells
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    1) yes there is 2) nuclear also needs dispatchable power, it doesn't work well if it needs to constantly ramp up and down. Batteries are vital to full nuclear for this exact reason.
- jahnu 2y ago
  The best argument for new nukes I heard was to drop in replace coal furnaces in existing thermal coal power plants in china. https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps
pstuart 2y ago
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) were supposed to address this concern. Unfortunately even with this strategy it doesn't seem to be able to compete cost-wise in the market. I hope that can be worked out, as I think we'd be well-served by having as many eggs in our energy basket as possible.
- api 2y ago
  SMRs are still huge compared to putting $10k worth of solar panels on a house. They also require a lot of big expensive infrastructure like reprocessing facilities, expensive safety-escorted transportation, secure facilities, etc.
  - pstuart 2y ago
    Yes those things are true; albeit the apple to oranges comparison of a home setup vs community baseload provider. One of the compelling deployment cases is to revamp existing coal fired plants with SMRs, which would be a huge win in addressing climate change. None of this is meant to disparage or dismiss solar and other renewables; it's meant to be complementary.
    - api 2y ago
      What I was really getting at was the effect that low incremental cost has on the evolution of the technology. A technology with low incremental unit cost can evolve very rapidly, while high unit cost capital-intensive technologies are slow to evolve. Which will win? Some technologies are inherently high unit cost and capital-intensive. Aerospace is a classic example, and it's why we're still flying on 1970s-tech airplanes and why rockets are just now becoming reusable. Aerospace advances at a crawl because each unit is so expensive.
pfdietz 2y ago
And "land and raw resource use" is just a backhanded way to imply cost, used because the actual cost doesn't favor nuclear at all.

oezi 2y ago

Elon has dropped out of this game pretty much. Its Chinese manufacturing for pretty much all components. But as the article says: the hardware is now less than half of the cost and shrinking further.

jandrese 2y ago
Elon gave up on panels, but Tesla batteries are still a big player in home and grid scale storage.
- energy123 2y ago
  Also 50% tariffs are going to hit Chinese battery manufacturers soon. The Biden admin considers it a national security priority to have energy done onshore.
TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
Energy is the fastest(only?) growing part of Tesla? Megapack and solar are all made in US.

hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 2y ago

[dead]

shusaku 2y ago

As the article mentions, labor is now the dominate cost for solar. In poor countries where labor costs are cheap (panel costs still need to go down for this case), we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty using cheap solar. That was never an option with nuclear (who wants an unstable regime managing a power plant?)

aziaziazi 2y ago
> we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty Please elaborate how? In my understanding electricity access is a problem in many poor countries but what makes the people poor is the lack of any ressources (food, tool, book, pills, land, shelter, money for proxy those…). Electricity may be on the list but it’s far from the first.

credit_guy 2y ago

I continue to be radically pro-nuclear (but I'm also pro-solar and pro-wind). Especially given Elon's example with SpaceX, how you can drop the cost of some technology by a factor of 10 or 100. Elon's idea was that the floor on the price of something is the cost of the raw materials. Everything else can be optimized. The cost of a nuclear power plant is most likely one thousand times the cost of the raw materials. Can we drive it down by a factor of 10 or 100? If not, why not? And if we can, can we increase the world's energy production by a factor of 10, or 100?

csomar 2y ago
You make the ultimate point. In a "sane?" world, once nuclear has been discovered, every country should have gone the way of France or the Soviet Union. Build nuclear everywhere with over-capacity built-in. The problem is, once Chernobyl happened (which might have bankrupted a struggling USSR), every country became wary of nuclear as some hidden costs are now more apparent. The Fukushima disaster didn't help either: Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb. So we are back to basics, collecting photons from far away. Using quantity instead of sci-fi stuff. It's quite safe too, at least the panels themselves.
- Galaxeblaffer 2y ago
  Please tell me how an earthquake can turn a relatively modern nuclear pp into a nuclear bomb ?
- nine_k 2y ago
  For Chernobyl to happen, the team on the NPP had to do a number of crazy things, and disable a number of security systems which otherwise would stop the crazy things from being done. Certainly RBMK reactors are old and have some shortcomings, but a number of them is still running without incidents. Newer designs are significantly more safe by construction. But the public, sadly, is beholden to legends and emotions, as it has been for millennia. Having an educated opinion is work, it takes time and effort, and a human only has a limited amount of both.
- 2y ago

rr808 2y ago

> solar + powerbanks for storage Works great for California, not so much for the Northern long dark cold winters.