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Personally I’m skeptical of nuclear power given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity (sure, intermittence is a problem, but I think we

Personally I’m skeptical of nuclear power given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity (sure, intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer). But anyway, if anybody (other than the government, which gave up long ago) can pay the upfront costs of nuclear, it is the big tech companies like Google. > […] Google has set 2030 goals to reach net zero emissions across its operations and value chain, […] Man, I remember when 2030 seemed like the future. But now it seems downright aggressive. Good luck Google.

melling 2y ago
US Net Zero is 2050. With 25 years remaining, I think shooting for 2030 seems reasonable. We’ve just about hit peak coal. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to-reach-new-peak-and-remain-at-near-record-levels-for-years https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...
- titzer 2y ago
  > The world’s coal use is expected to reach a fresh high of 8.7bn tonnes this year, and remain at near-record levels for years as a result of a global gas crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Not sure that counts as "just about hit peak coal".
rcpt 2y ago
Renewables are only easy if you ignore regulations. For whatever stupid reason local busybodies lose their shit about windmills regularly and they are frustratingly hard to ignore.
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  Doesn't revenue sharing often turn those frowns upside down? More inclusive business models might help?
  - tough 2y ago
    Usually what happens is they buy out one local government, pay them, and usually fuck up the neighbors as the local government being paid not only has the incentive of money but can say put that hazardous facility just at the circumvention to their neighboring places, which get 0.
  - ryathal 2y ago
    For the farmer that owns the land the windmill got built on it's great. The handful of houses in the area get fuck all though and actually have to deal with the externalities.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
- pjc50 2y ago
  Nuclear has an even worse local credibility problem, but I suppose you need fewer plants.
1980phipsi 2y ago
Google can’t have blackouts. So helps to have some nuclear in the energy mix.
- croes 2y ago
  France has nuclear and had a blackout.
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    Misleading I’d say > Residents of Andorra and parts of France bordering Spain were also reporting being hit by the blackout. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
    - croes 2y ago
      My point is blackouts habe more to do with net stability then with the power source. A sudden rise in demand would have the same effect because nuclear power plants can’t react that quickly.
  - ttfkam 2y ago
    The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of the top electricity exporters for Western Europe. Because of nuclear. By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression. Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France. Because of nuclear.
    - croes 2y ago
      Germany is a net importer since 2023, what was also 2023 in France? >2023 when several reactors were switched off for longer unexpected maintenance periods. Who exploited Niger for four decades for its Uranium? France https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/how-dependent-is-france-on-niger-s-uranium_6080772_8.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h... Who is the main buyer in the EU of Russian Uranium? France https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-reduce-russian-uranium-and-nuclear-fuel-purchases-in-2024 https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re... If they aren’t dependent on Russian fossile fuels why do they still buy from Russia? https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250414-greenpeace-report-reveals-france-s-double-standards-in-dealing-with-russia https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250414-greenpeace-report-reve...
preisschild 2y ago
> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Skill issue, there’s no such thing as too much energy, we need to get better at steering the stuff.
- ViewTrick1002 2y ago
  Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity. Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days. That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is. [1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storage-capacity-surges-to-74-gw-168-gwh-in-2024-up-130-yoy/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag... [2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 [3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-announces-winning-bidders-in-10-gwh-bess-tender/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?" If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1] So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably. [1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME
dmm 2y ago
> intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer Solar power is great but intermittence is the main issue with it. If you look at 30 year historical weather data, many highly populated regions have two week periods with almost complete cloud cover. Storage and intercontinental power transmission are usually listed as the solutions to this, but the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
- linhns 2y ago
  Yes, and people have been as clever as possible dealing with this issue. There is just no good way to solve it.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  > the costs of these solutions are rarely included. Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Not in any realistic sense. This report https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2025.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night. So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously. The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather. I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?") With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)
nandomrumber 2y ago
You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have. If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes. You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume. But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being aware of your energy consumption.
- ViewTrick1002 2y ago
  You do know that nuclear power has experienced negative learning by doing throughout its entire life? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry. Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.
  - dporter 2y ago
    Renewable power is cheap because it also receives massive government handouts in the form of tax credits.
    - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
      Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their renewable subsidies because they aren’t needed anymore. Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas. The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
      - nandomrumber 2y ago
        What storage? Where? At what price? Where are all these 14 day full load capable storage plants being built? I’m not saying they aren’t, I am saying I don’t see the data.
ttfkam 2y ago
"…by being cleverer." Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes! Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable, so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the next 150 years).
barbazoo 2y ago
We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Not if the data centers consume all this new energy of course which seems to be what’s happening. Maybe after everyone has turned their own portrait into a studio ghibli picture we can go back and use that new, clean energy to solve the climate crisis.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Will it be built before we have sufficient renewable capacity?
- crote 2y ago
  The deployment of solar is growing exponentially, with its total capacity doubling roughly every three years. Wind is growing at a similar rate. Renewables currently already account for 30% of the global electricity production, and we're seeing projections of over 45% in 2030. Assuming the projected 2025-2030 installation speed is realistic and flattens out - bit "if", but not completely unrealistic - that means we'd be looking at 75% renewables in 2040 and 90% renewables in 2045. Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity. If we go all-out on nuclear now, that means significant nuclear power starts coming online in 20-25 years - so 2045-2050. At that point there is no more renewables gap left to bridge. There might be a small niche left for it if there is going to be essentially zero innovation in storage and short-term peaker plants, but who's going to bet billions on that? Nuclear would've been nice if we built massive amounts of it 30 years ago, but we didn't. But starting a large-scale nuclear rollout in 2025? It just doesn't make sense.
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    > Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity. I just don't know if that assumption is true. Looking at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor-nuclear-power-ontario-construction-1.7529338 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor... > The timeline is to finish construction of the first reactor by the end of 2029, and connect it to the grid in 2030. Sure, let's add 100% buffer because it's a major project, that's between 8-10 years from now. Not bad. Are we talking about different kinds of reactors maybe?

melling 2y ago

US Net Zero is 2050. With 25 years remaining, I think shooting for 2030 seems reasonable. We’ve just about hit peak coal. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to-reach-new-peak-and-remain-at-near-record-levels-for-years https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...

titzer 2y ago
> The world’s coal use is expected to reach a fresh high of 8.7bn tonnes this year, and remain at near-record levels for years as a result of a global gas crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Not sure that counts as "just about hit peak coal".

rcpt 2y ago

Renewables are only easy if you ignore regulations. For whatever stupid reason local busybodies lose their shit about windmills regularly and they are frustratingly hard to ignore.

worldsayshi 2y ago
Doesn't revenue sharing often turn those frowns upside down? More inclusive business models might help?
- tough 2y ago
  Usually what happens is they buy out one local government, pay them, and usually fuck up the neighbors as the local government being paid not only has the incentive of money but can say put that hazardous facility just at the circumvention to their neighboring places, which get 0.
- ryathal 2y ago
  For the farmer that owns the land the windmill got built on it's great. The handful of houses in the area get fuck all though and actually have to deal with the externalities.
sieabahlpark 2y ago
[dead]
pjc50 2y ago
Nuclear has an even worse local credibility problem, but I suppose you need fewer plants.

1980phipsi 2y ago

Google can’t have blackouts. So helps to have some nuclear in the energy mix.

croes 2y ago
France has nuclear and had a blackout.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  Misleading I’d say > Residents of Andorra and parts of France bordering Spain were also reporting being hit by the blackout. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
  - croes 2y ago
    My point is blackouts habe more to do with net stability then with the power source. A sudden rise in demand would have the same effect because nuclear power plants can’t react that quickly.
- ttfkam 2y ago
  The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of the top electricity exporters for Western Europe. Because of nuclear. By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression. Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France. Because of nuclear.
  - croes 2y ago
    Germany is a net importer since 2023, what was also 2023 in France? >2023 when several reactors were switched off for longer unexpected maintenance periods. Who exploited Niger for four decades for its Uranium? France https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/how-dependent-is-france-on-niger-s-uranium_6080772_8.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h... Who is the main buyer in the EU of Russian Uranium? France https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-reduce-russian-uranium-and-nuclear-fuel-purchases-in-2024 https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re... If they aren’t dependent on Russian fossile fuels why do they still buy from Russia? https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250414-greenpeace-report-reveals-france-s-double-standards-in-dealing-with-russia https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250414-greenpeace-report-reve...

preisschild 2y ago

> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.

bee_rider 2y ago
Skill issue, there’s no such thing as too much energy, we need to get better at steering the stuff.
ViewTrick1002 2y ago
Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity. Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days. That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is. [1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storage-capacity-surges-to-74-gw-168-gwh-in-2024-up-130-yoy/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag... [2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 [3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-announces-winning-bidders-in-10-gwh-bess-tender/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?" If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1] So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably. [1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME

dmm 2y ago

> intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer Solar power is great but intermittence is the main issue with it. If you look at 30 year historical weather data, many highly populated regions have two week periods with almost complete cloud cover. Storage and intercontinental power transmission are usually listed as the solutions to this, but the costs of these solutions are rarely included.

linhns 2y ago
Yes, and people have been as clever as possible dealing with this issue. There is just no good way to solve it.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
> the costs of these solutions are rarely included. Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Not in any realistic sense. This report https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2025.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night. So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously. The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather. I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?") With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)

nandomrumber 2y ago

You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have. If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes. You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume. But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being aware of your energy consumption.

ViewTrick1002 2y ago
You do know that nuclear power has experienced negative learning by doing throughout its entire life? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry. Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.
- dporter 2y ago
  Renewable power is cheap because it also receives massive government handouts in the form of tax credits.
  - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
    Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their renewable subsidies because they aren’t needed anymore. Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas. The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
    - nandomrumber 2y ago
      What storage? Where? At what price? Where are all these 14 day full load capable storage plants being built? I’m not saying they aren’t, I am saying I don’t see the data.

ttfkam 2y ago

"…by being cleverer." Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes! Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable, so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the next 150 years).

barbazoo 2y ago

We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Not if the data centers consume all this new energy of course which seems to be what’s happening. Maybe after everyone has turned their own portrait into a studio ghibli picture we can go back and use that new, clean energy to solve the climate crisis.

mmooss 2y ago
> We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Will it be built before we have sufficient renewable capacity?
crote 2y ago
The deployment of solar is growing exponentially, with its total capacity doubling roughly every three years. Wind is growing at a similar rate. Renewables currently already account for 30% of the global electricity production, and we're seeing projections of over 45% in 2030. Assuming the projected 2025-2030 installation speed is realistic and flattens out - bit "if", but not completely unrealistic - that means we'd be looking at 75% renewables in 2040 and 90% renewables in 2045. Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity. If we go all-out on nuclear now, that means significant nuclear power starts coming online in 20-25 years - so 2045-2050. At that point there is no more renewables gap left to bridge. There might be a small niche left for it if there is going to be essentially zero innovation in storage and short-term peaker plants, but who's going to bet billions on that? Nuclear would've been nice if we built massive amounts of it 30 years ago, but we didn't. But starting a large-scale nuclear rollout in 2025? It just doesn't make sense.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  > Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity. I just don't know if that assumption is true. Looking at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor-nuclear-power-ontario-construction-1.7529338 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor... > The timeline is to finish construction of the first reactor by the end of 2029, and connect it to the grid in 2030. Sure, let's add 100% buffer because it's a major project, that's between 8-10 years from now. Not bad. Are we talking about different kinds of reactors maybe?