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In a major reversal, the world bank is backing mega dams (2024)
- brian-armstrong 1y agoDammed if you do, damned if you don't
- pyuser583 1y agoDam!
- jeffrallen 1y agoNo more dam jokes.
- tomrod 1y agoThis made me chuckle. Well done!
- Ancalagon 1y agoPlease can we just get back to building nuclear
- marcosdumay 1y agoMake nuclear cost-competitive and people will start building it.
- notepad0x90 1y agoI thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
- janice1999 1y ago> Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars). The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.
- marcosdumay 1y agoThe unit economics of dams get more and more competitive when their size increase. So, hell no, nuclear is not competitive with mega-dams. It's not even competitive with small dams.
- notepad0x90 1y agoYou mean the ROI? I'm talking about the cost-to-build.
- colechristensen 1y agoNuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of building plants and if folks get out of the way of location permits and waste storage and people can actually make decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits. The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap between project inception and when investment returns start coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few panels and accessories online and start producing energy within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or expand your production in a very short time achieving break even in a few years.
- zahlman 1y agoIt was cost-competitive before it faced ridiculously unfair regulations due to being so easy to fear-monger about.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago$80B is buying 40MW of hydro. What would that get you for nuclear? 4MW?
- ginko 1y agoIt’s 40GW of hydro
- jasonwatkinspdx 1y agoIf we use Vogtle as a cost benchmark you'd get roughly 5 GW (note you typo'd units to MW).
- erentz 1y agoGiven these projects will be overseas we shouldn’t use the extreme outlier of Vogtle in the US as the benchmark.
- qwe----3 1y agoLooks like at least 30GW https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/china-approves-building-10-new-nuclear-power-units-27-billion-2025-04-28/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
- stinkbeetle 1y agoWithout flooding enormous ecosystems and disrupting river flows, and on average half the CO2 emissions per unit of generation than hydro has, and a staggeringly lower land use per energy footprint (hydro is 100x larger, wind is 10x larger). Nuclear seems like one of the only sane choices from an environmental point of view.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoWind's land-use footprint is almost completely non-exclusive.
- daymanstep 1y agoThere is a finite amount of hydro in the world. They will run out of viable dam locations pretty quickly at this rate.
- Animats 1y agoAll the good sites were used by 1940. The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case. Most later dams are at worse sites.
- tomrod 1y agoIn which continent?
- eunoia 1y agoFor the curious: Cadillac Desert is a great history of American dam building and the Bureau of Reclamation
- igor47 1y agoExcept now thanks to climate change the water levels might drop below the intake in lake Mead. Lake Powell is even worse, Glenn canyon dam was always a mistake, and it might stop producing power next year.
- mcv 1y agoTidal, on the other hand, still has plenty of opportunities.
- V__ 1y agoNuclear just isn't economically viable. Maybe fusion someday.
- qwe----3 1y agoTell that to China
- bobthepanda 1y agoChina has been building them at a relatively lukewarm pace compared to its solar and wind expansion > China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewable-energy-boom-breaks-records/104086640 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
- forrestthewoods 1y ago> isn't economically viable That is not an intrinsic truth. We have chosen to make it economically unviable. Most things get cheaper to build with time. Nuclear is an outlier where it used to be affordable and now it isn’t. That’s insane.
- permo-w 1y agowhy is it different like that?
- zahlman 1y agoMainly because regulators got scared and started adding line items for bogus safety reasons (like expecting to see background radiation levels far below those seen at coal plants due to the fly ash).
- bronson 1y agoCoal plants are dead, partly due to the fly ash. I'm not sure you want to put nuclear in the same boat?
- Kon5ole 1y agoThe solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined. Finland spent 18 years and 11 bn euros to get 1.6 GW of nuclear, the US spent 7bn in subsidies and got some 20 GW of solar in 2022 alone. Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same power that solar can add in weeks. Nuclear basically makes no sense at all in 2025. (For nighttime use dirt-cheap batteries and natural gas now, even cheaper batteries and generated hydrogen gas later).
- geysersam 1y agoBut what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.
- olddustytrail 1y agoFinland's electricity production is already 95% non fossil fuel, so you don't need to worry about them.
- geysersam 1y agoYes but ~37% of that is nuclear. My question was: If they're not supposed to use nuclear what should they use.
- scythe 1y agoThe good thing about northern regions is that they tend to be wet and have low population density. This is pretty good for pumped hydro even if batteries aren't cheap enough at a particular time. But it's not clear when the manufacturing costs of batteries will hit a minimum. So far they continue to decrease.
- Ekaros 1y agoMaximum elevation in Finland is is 1 324 m and that is in extreme north with less water. In general there just isn't elevation differences that are useful enough.
- DarkNova6 1y agoThe nuclear industry was destroyed in the 2000s. You can try to rebuild an industry with 100s of billions of dollars… … or you invest that money into renewables and battery technology.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- Rover222 1y agoWe have cheap fusion. A giant reactor in the sky. Solar should be massively scaled, along with battery capacity and pumped storage. China is crushing in this.
- landl0rd 1y agoHard agree on pumped hydro and other forms of grid-scale storage, but can you understand concerns around batteries? There are environmental ones on the mining/metals side, but producing and disposing of them in a clean manner is often hard. Getting them from anywhere save mostly china is hard (if you want large, dense, affordable, and grid-scale options) and depending on somebody who's nobody's geopolitical friend is probably a bad idea. Ditto for the panels themselves.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago> but can you understand concerns around batteries? No I can't. Just recycle the batteries, and you've solved both concerns in one go. Lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate, the economics for recycling EV & grid storage batteries are even better.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago"Just Recycle the batteries" is a massive understatement of the effort involved. The economics of Recycling ev batteries is autrocious. (They're glued into the frame of the car (differently for each model), needing manual dissasembly to not risk fire) It took 20 years of standardisation and effort to raise lead acid batteries to 99%, and they're as simple as batteries get. Large scale recycle of litium batteries (including the cobalt and nickel) requires changes in how batteries are made to be (either or both) less energy dense and more expensive. Pumped hydro is the best bet for gridscale. And i'm hoping sodium batteries roll out for EVs within the near future.
- gonzo41 1y agoSand batteries provide a very nice scalable solution IMO. https://polarnightenergy.com/sand-battery/ https://polarnightenergy.com/sand-battery/
- unit149 1y ago[dead]
- defrost 1y agoNot mentioned in the article (as it is not being funded by the world bank): China building world's largest hydropower dam in Tibet (reuters.com) * Hydro project located on Yarlung Zangbo in Tibet * Project to dwarf Three Gorges Dam on Yangtze River * Start of construction fuels surge in engineering, related shares in stock market * India, Bangladesh have expressed concern about the dam's impact https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631938 https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-starts-building-worlds-largest-hydropower-dam-tibet-2025-07-21/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoPretty sure that's hydrological warfare.