Ah yes famous conservative ideals such as community owned and locally managed power grids to not be beholden to fossil fuel mega-corporations. Advocating for technologies to immediately get us to net zero carbon emissions Such as Federal Grants and funding for development and mass deployment of SMRs to local communities to provide free near zero carbon power.
In any case me personally I’d rather just put a bunch of big fucking satellites in the sky that use solar power to shoot a huge microwave beam down at the earth and then use that to generate power. Fuck energy storage of solar, just shoot it around the earth with a big set of microwave lasers and mirrors.
I’ll take “useless arguing over a conflict of interests that realistically doesn’t exist because none of the people arguing can actually do anything to solve the problem” for 500, Jennings.
jesus christ these category titles are getting really bad
This used to be true, and there was enormous investment in nuclear power.
But the truth is that renewables have come a LONG way these past few decades. In many places, renewables is the cheapest energy to invest in, cheaper than even Fossil fuels in many cases. And much much cheaper than nuclear.
Why build a nuclear plant when you can build diversified renewable energy sources for the same price or less?
As a very small added bonus, renewables can’t be turned into bombs. Yet.
Its not cheaper if you only count the generation side you are ignoring Storage and Capacity factor those in and its not cheaper anymore.
Renewables are great while in combination with peaker plants as the renewables produce a good amount of the base load when the sun shines wind blows etc, That energy generation is dirt cheap no arguments there. The Issue is those Peaker Plants are OIL COAL and GAS fired in most cases. The ideal solution IMHO would be to phase out the peakers and replace them with grid scale power storage augmented with nuclear base stations to manage load and reduce the need for new construction of grid scale power storage. The issue with your suggestion is these grid scale batteries are projected to cost billions of dollars per project and if we forgo nuclear base stations to provide base load we would need a massive amount of these grid scale power storage stations in addition to also then having to generating roughly 90% more power than we do now from renewables alone to replace fossil fuels and to make up for inefficiencies in a storage dependent grid due to the fact that there would be constant losses of energy every time its transferred from generation to storage to use potential. Its simpler and more efficient make power on demand so I think we should take the current infrastructure and modify it. A turbine cares not what turns it. We can rip out coal fired oil fired and gas fired infrastructure and replace it with a modern generation of Small Modular Reactors ( it is proven technology ask the US NAVY en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_naval_reactors ) With Peaker plants being transitioned to base stations this would make it so that the excess energy stored during the day can be tapped but we would not have to depend on it. Instead we can dynamically as needed (as the day ends in solar heavy locations or on calm days in wind heavy locations) start up the nuclear base stations to keep the grid energized using the batteries as a buffer on both ends as the Nuclear plants can not be cycled as quickly as fossil plants but can provide steady power on demand.
I like nuclear and all, but I don’t think nuclear can fill the same spot as peaker plants. Nuclear usually fills the base load needs on the grid. I don’t believe there’s nuclear with ramp rates capable of competing with a peaking gas turbine.
Energy storage does fill this gap usually. My ideal grid would be a semi-flexible nuclear baseload (+ some ancillary services), renewable “mid-load,” and energy storage peaking (+frequency response, etc.).
that is what im describing. im saying turn old peakers into base stations. use batteries as the new peak power stations. batteries can then be charged with renewables, the batteries can also take up excess power from base stations as they cant immediately downshift production.
Did you even read your own article? It’s an opinion piece by one man. He’s using back of the napkin calculations just like I am, and while his math is mostly correct, and while I love his margins for error for increased solar required to take up the slack for unplanned issues with renewable power generation, he never discusses how much money it would cost to buy up all of that land to implement that massive amount of solar. He conveniently skips over eminent domaining of over 27,000 acres of land required to make such a large solar farm to replace the two already almost completed reactors not even counting to replace the two older already in place reactors… from that same location. Oh then we still have to also pay to decommission them…
The cost of decommissioning reactors is unavoidable and factored into the lifetime cost of power delivery. They don’t last forever despite the fairy tales people believe about nuclear power.
Talking about land use, what about the storage of nuclear waste? Are you going to have it in your backyard?
A lot of countries are doing just fine using only renewables to replace energy generation from fossil fuels. Nuclear is really expensive while renewables are the cheapest. There’s just no reason to use nuclear.
Albania, Iceland, and Paraguay obtain essentially all of their electricity from renewable sources (Albania and Paraguay 100% from hydroelectricity, Iceland 72% hydro and 28% geothermal). You may notice Solar is not mentioned.
I didn’t say countries that already successfully did it, I meant countries that are in the process of doing so. Germany, for example, has no nuclear energy and is getting 60-70% of its energy from renewables. There are countries that are already further along but building renewables takes time. Building a nuclear power plant also takes years but you get nothing from it until it’s finished.
Germany can do that because they opened new coal plants, plus they can buy cheap (mostly nuclear) electricity from France when their renewables are performing suboptimally and they need to meet high demand
No, that’s just false. Germany has been steadily reducing the amount of coal they use in favor of renewables and could easily sustain itself with the energy it produces but sometimes it’s cheaper to buy from other countries. Most of the time that’s wind energy from the nordic countries but sometimes it’s nuclear from France. France is paying billions of Euros to subsidize nuclear tho. Germany also only imported 2% of its energy in 2023 and 25% of that (so 0,5% from the total), was from French nuclear energy.
Germany, for example, has no nuclear energy and is getting 60-70% of its energy from renewables.
Gas and Coal are 40% of the Power generation inside German borders but that is not the sum of German consumption. When nuclear was cut more gas was used. This also completely ignores the electricity generated elsewhere in the EU that Germany is Importing.
Im sick and tired of the right wing imports “argument” from people that clearly have no idea how the European electricity market works. Germany has the capacity to easily produce all of its electricity but its way wiser to not do that and import from other countries since that can be cheaper than ramping up power plants. In the past Germany used to keep running coal plants even for export but CO2 emission certificates keep getting more expensive while other European countries have been expanding their renewable power plants resulting in cheaper electricity which results in Germany exporting less and importing some of that cheap electricity now because 1. exporting electricity produced via coal is less profitable now and 2. importing a certain amount is getting cheaper than powering up a reactor yourself. 2023 most of those imports (~50%) were from renewables btw. 24% of imports were from nuclear which is 3.6% of the whole electricity production and even that keeps decreasing.
It’s rather the opposite. Big oil pushes nuclear because nuclear directly competes with renewables, and because nuclear is a centralised power generation solution that they can fully own, in contrast with stuff like rooftop solar or onshore wind. Shell has a share in General Atomics, BP is eyeing investments into nuclear energy.
Nuclear fusion might truly be an answer, but there is nothing that nuclear does that renewables can also do, but cheaper and faster.
Literal fucking oil shill. Tell me. Where did I ever say to not keep building solar? Where did I ever say that we should let oil Giants maintain their monopolies. I agree that we do need to continue to expand renewable options at a local and state level, not a corporate fossil fuel level. Open your goddamn eyes and read the five graphs I’ve pasted so far in this common thread. Please make me understand how if technology we’ve been investing in more heavily than anything else for 20 years and that only now takes up 16% of our total energy needs is going to magically cover the other fucking 84%. Of the base load.
Money spent building nuclear is money not spent on renewables. I didn’t say you said to stop building solar, but deciding to build nuclear does mean building less solar, simple allocation of resources.
Solar energy particularly has been becoming increasingly efficient and cheap. In fact, it’s ahead of even the most optimistic expectations price-wise.
There’s been plenty of studies showing that nuclear is not theoretically required to achieve 100% fossil-fuel free energy generation. And we’ve known this since 2009: frontiergroup.org/…/do-we-really-need-nuclear-pow….
Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and energy storage solutions are perfectly capable of providing the full energy demand whenever we require it. The only issue is building sufficient amounts of it.
In fact, nuclear is particularly bad at providing base power. The reason is that renewables are so cheap (and becoming cheaper), that one of the main issues has turned into having too much power on the grid. Nuclear unfortunately doesn’t turn off and on very quickly. Many old reactors take a couple hours to do so, and even if it’s technically possible it’s financially impossible because the reactor would be running at too large a loss. When dealing with fluctuating power (mostly caused by the day/night cycle of solar, other effects mostly even out if the grid is large enough), you need a backup system that can also easily turn on and off. Energy storage and hydrogen can do this, nuclear can’t.
Then there’s the energy security argument. 40% of uranium imports come from Russia. Kazakhstan is an alternative, but even that is largely controlled by Rosatom.
Literal fucking oil shill.
Please stay civil. I’m happy to debate you but you can keep the insults to yourself. I’m very much against the oil industry. I’m not even necessarily against nuclear as a technology (I think it’s safe and don’t think the waste will be too big of an issue, also fusion is really cool science), but I have to conclude that it doesn’t make financial sense to go for nuclear, there’s practical problems integrating it with a renewable grid and we just have better alternatives.
I’m calling you an oil shill because nobody is pushing nuclear. Nuclear is being decommissioned nuclear power is not on the rise for the last 20 years. There has been a net loss of nuclear power and the only country’s building reactors currently are China, India and Russia. So your entire rhetoric is flawed.
Nobody is pushing nuclear? Strange, I wonder why in my country numerous parties have been pushing for nuclear then (mostly right-wing pro-corporation parties with fossil fuel donors).
There’s plenty of parties pushing nuclear. The fact that it’s hard to actually build doesn’t mean that there’s no lobbying effort being made. And even then, a lobbying effort now will only really result in a net nuclear gain in 10-20 years time when the reactors actually finish.
And for the record, “big oil” , does invest in nuclear. Chevron, Duke Energy, Eni, Shell and BP all investments in some nuclear research or nuclear company. The reason they don’t really invest much more is simple: it’s barely profitable, if at all. And renewables threaten the financial picture even more.
Aside from Chernobyl, Fukushima, Kyshtym, Windscale, and the fact the half life of uranium 239 is 24 thousand years, and we've got no legitimate long lasting way of storing, or disposing of nuclear waste, sure, i see no problems at all.
The sun produces more power every day that can power the entire global need 1 million times over. It's right fucking there, all we gotta do it catch it better.
Air pollution from coal and oil is estimated to kill 5 million people every year. That’s more than every nuclear disaster combined, and not to mention the signifcant safety advances that have been made since those disasters.
All nuclear waste ever produced can fit in one football field. It’s stored in containers so thick you can go up and hug them safely, and so strong you can ram them with a train without doing significant damage. And if need be, we have the means to bury it deep underground.
Renewables are fine, but they don’t deliver consistently, so they need backup power. Nuclear provides that at much lower environmental cost than, say, giant lithium batteries.
Do me a favor and look at the big chartand see how much of our energy needs are currently met by oil, coal and natural gas and see that 16% of our energy needs are met by a combination of all renewables. While I agree that we do need to continue investing more in renewables. There is only so much sunshine in a day and it isn’t sunny everyday and it isn’t sunny everywhere. We do not have the transmission technology to pipe electricity across continents feasibly. There’s certainly enough Sunshine at the equator. Good luck getting it beyond 30° north or south. The other issue is storage pumped. Hydro isn’t an option in most places because there isn’t enough water or natural reservoirs available to fill. So please elaborate on your battery storage solution for your solar mega farms and how you’re going to distribute that energy feasibly worldwide.
I’m not saying Germany can’t produce solar energy. Currently 5% of all the energy Germany uses is solar. I’m saying Germany can’t run on nothing but solar energy which is why we need something dependable to take up the base load. That is not fossil fuel based. https://yiffit.net/pictrs/image/576f015e-da12-4e4c-9c35-4d424e1bf39b.png
If you Google “is a nuclear baseload required” you’ll find plenty of articles clearly demonstrating why this isn’t true. Renewables + storage solutions can provide the base load just fine. The biggest issues have been worked out already, it just needs to be built (which is expensive, but so would nuclear be).
Yeah, OP keeps using the lack of current investment in renewables as an argument that it can’t be done at scale. It’s a really weird lack of logic whether they’re aware of it and arguing in bad faith or just fundamentally confused…
My argument is that it has taken us 30 years to reach 16% of global power generated by renewables. And every year we seem to add about two more percentage to that. Any and all progress we make towards divesting away from fossil fuels is great, however we don’t have the fucking time scale to keep that slow rate going rate going. We need to drastically cut oil yesterday and the only thing you can use to replace that much oil in a short time span is nuclear. Never once anywhere have I said that I want less renewables. I want more. I also want a safely generated nuclear base load to replace the oil that is 84% of our sum total energy needs. There is zero reason that we can’t invest in both for a more equitable future.
My argument is that it has taken us 30 years to reach 16% of global power generated by renewables. And every year we seem to add about two more percentage to that.
Mainly because of the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies bribing politicians, not any deficiency inherent to renewables as you keep implying.
we don’t have the fucking time scale to keep that slow rate going rate going
True, but the solution is to increase the investment in renewable energy generation at a faster rate, not giving up and pivoting to the slower, less effective and more dirty transition to nuclear.
Meanwhile, a major solar array or wind turbine park can be built in a matter of months and doesn’t have those problems OR the waste disposal issues you keep downplaying.
We need to drastically cut oil yesterday
Again, absolutely true.
the only thing you can use to replace that much oil in a short time span is nuclear
Absolutely 100% categorically false.
Never once anywhere have I said that I want less renewables
Except for repeatedly suggesting that nuclear is a much better option, which it isn’t.
There is zero reason that we can’t invest in both for a more equitable future.
Except for the fact that a combination of the myriad types of renewables is a faster, cheaper, and cleaner way to get off fossil fuels.
Nuclear is the coal of low to no carbon energy generation: it’s an obsolete method that is still used in spite of much better modern technology being available, chiefly because of rich lobbyists bribing politicians and gaslighting regular people.
OP calling you a “dipshit” and others “fucking shills” is clear evidence OP knows he/she is losing the argument and gets emotional about it.
What’s funny is that nuclear apologists sweep other renewables like geothermal under the rug and only proclaim that wind and solar depend on the elements. Wind and solar do but others like geothermal don’t. Hydropower is also less dependent on flukes of nature.
Also France needs to lower their nuclear energy output in summer because the cooling water from rivers gets too hot.
That depends entirely on what design you go with. Ideally we would be looking at municipal level power generation with modern proven light water Small modular reactor designs reliant on passive safety features we can pump them out of factories at a rate of approximately two per day if we can look at the average aerospace industry rate of construction for jumbojets for a comparable engineering project in size and scope to most SM reactors.
There are also many options to convert existing fossil-fired plants to be nuclear powered at the end of the day a turbine spinning is a turbine spinning. It doesn’t care whether you boiled the water with radiation or coal or oil or gas
A nuclear scientist once explained this to me and a few of my friends in such a great way and I can only do injustice to that explaination, but I will try anyway.
What the nuclear disasters are, are tail risks. What he meant by that, is the more severe a disaster is the less chance it has happening, which you can imagine like the tail of a rat: the further away it is from body the thinner it is. Now the thing about nuclear disasters is that the tail is very long and gets very thin towards the end. That makes it so most incidents reported are incredibly unintresting (thankfully), most of them being non-vital valves gettint stuck and such. But when those really small (and with advancement always shrinking) chances cause a disaster you may have to evacuate a town. Then he told us about the Eschede train disaster. What happened was basically that a wheel of a train cracked and through incredible unluck killed half of the passangers. And looking at the history of trains, while this particular kind of mishap is very rare and we even have systems in place to prevent it from happening, other kinds of catastrophic failures have happened multiple times throughout history, sometimes even killing bystanders, much like a nuclear reactor could. This didn’t stop people from boarding trains though, since the odds were always in their favor and the usefullness of the train was incredible at the time. At the end of the day we have to evaluate whether the benefits are worth the risk. And once again this scientist told us that while he may be a bit biased in this regard he does think those disasters are less and less likely to happen by the day and with the amount of energy generated they are quite worth it.
For one, even with disasters factored in, nuclear kills only 0.04 people per TWh of energy produced. Coal kills 160. That is four orders if magnitude more.
Oil fares better, but with 36 fatalities per TWh, that’s still a thousand times more deadly than nuclear.
For two, every milligram of emissions from nuclear power is accounted for, as someone in the other thread said. All the waste fits inside a football field, and is stored in ginormous casks which can stand being smashed by a train, and are so thick you can hug them with no consequences to health and safety.
Meanwhile, emissions from coal and oil are vented to atmosphere. Including volatile radioactive trace contaminants. Which means that ironically, on top of the greater fatalities and the carbon emissions, fossil fuels have worse nuclear emissions.
As for storage, for one, that’s hampered because the oblivious and the malicious get to contribute to the discussions. Fact is that there are sites for long term storage, which are in the process of being filled with spent fuel.
For two, much less of that stuff is needed if spent nuclear fuel is recycled. Which Japan and France do.
Finally, an electricity grid needs three things: capacity, stability and flexibility. Both nuclear and renewables offer stability, but only nuclear offers stability, while renewables offer flexibility.
Renewables are great while in combination with peaker plants as the renewables produce a good amount of the base load when the sun shines wind blows etc, That energy generation is dirt cheap no arguments there. The Issue is those Peaker Plants are OIL COAL and GAS fired in most cases. The ideal solution IMHO would be to phase out the peakers and replace them with grid scale power storage augmented with nuclear base stations to manage load and reduce the need for new construction of grid scale power storage. The issue only using renewables is these grid scale batteries are projected to cost billions of dollars per project and if we forgo nuclear base stations to provide base load we would need a massive amount of these grid scale power storage stations in addition to also then having to generating roughly 90% more power than we do now from renewables alone to replace fossil fuels and to make up for inefficiencies in a storage dependent grid due to the fact that there would be constant losses of energy every time its transferred from generation to storage to use potential. Its simpler and more efficient make power on demand so I think we should take the current infrastructure and modify it. A turbine cares not what turns it. We can rip out coal fired oil fired and gas fired infrastructure and replace it with a modern generation of Small Modular Reactors ( it is proven technology ask the US NAVY en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_naval_reactors ) With Peaker plants being transitioned to base stations this would make it so that the excess energy stored during the day can be tapped but we would not have to depend on it. Instead we can dynamically as needed (as the day ends in solar heavy locations or on calm days in wind heavy locations) start up the nuclear base stations to keep the grid energized using the batteries as a buffer on both ends as the Nuclear plants can not be cycled as quickly as fossil plants but can provide steady power on demand.
So while the progress of the last few decades in renewables is great progress, I’m certain you can see why we need to divest from oil and invest in nuclear tech to take up the base load
I’m not knocking solar. It’s a great technology. It’s just not feasible to scale to the point that we would need to scale it to sufficiently power our societies . We only recently developed the technology to make burning methane more feasible. They used to just light it off and burn it at the wells when they would tap it.
It’s a logistical problem basically most people don’t live at the equator and that’s the good spot for solar where it’s three times as effective. We could plaster a quarter of all the land with solar panels and then yeah you have enough. Except you still wouldn’t have a dependable energy inputs because sometimes the weather is shitty for a week. So you would still need the massive transition cables to pipe it in from somewhere else that the sun currently is shining. So basically you are going to need to cover massive amounts of land with solar panels. We would need to invest in massive transfer cables. I honestly think that would be a great idea to implement full coverage of solar panels in our cities and cover all things with them. However, do not think that’s a viable solution to meet our total energy needs. I do think solar is a viable way to help meet those goals. But it needs to be part of a team, not a solo. Lone Wolf . youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o?si=2_TW0JeYeA2htQm1
Fuck it! Here’s a hypothetical a magic genie. Just granted My wish and gave us enough solar to actually power everything we need. Now one six of every country on Earth is covered in solar panels. Here’s the catch though you need to Learn more about how electrical grids work then come back to me once you realized we would have to rebuild an even bigger worldwide connected grid to make solar and a battery powered society actually functional and that we currently have no way to make battery storage equitable and affordable enough to store the amount of energy we would need to store everyday to power our societies through the night.
You’re still doing it. Your run on paragraphs aren’t worth much, if you want me to take you seriously, please provide links to valid sources to back up your argument.
Solar gets cheaper everyday. Battery storage is not nearly equitable enough at this point in time. Small modular reactors are much more cost effective at the current price point than battery will be for the next 15 to 20 years.
No need to act like a bitch just because I asked you to do the bare minimum and provide sources.
Your first link is about HVDC lines, which already exist and work well, what is your point?
your second link is about battery storage. You’re just posting links without giving any context to how they support whatever argument you’re trying to make here.
Battery storage is not nearly equitable enough at this point in time.
What does this mean?
“findings suggest that the cost per kilowatt (KW) for utility-scale solar is less than $1,000, while the comparable cost per KW for nuclear power is between $6,500 and $12,250. At present estimates, the Vogtle nuclear plant will cost about $10,300 per KW, near the top of Lazard’s range. This means nuclear power is nearly 10 times more expensive to build than utility-scale solar on a cost per KW basis.”
Small modular reactors are much more cost effective at the current price point than battery will be for the next 15 to 20 years.
They literally don’t exist as a means of grid generation. You’re just writing pro-nuclear fanfic and expecting us to treat it as if it has any basis in reality. Are you getting paid to peddle this horseshit?
Hydrogen transport is also a mass of pain in the ass because hydrogen being the noblest of gases and only a single hydrogen molecule likes to seep out of every container we’ve ever made and there’s no way to permanently contain it.
It won’t be. You’d be expecting to eat like 30% losses if you were to generate hydrogen from electrolysis, then that’s combined with 40 to 60% efficiency in fuel cells, then that’s combined with a pretty low energy density, even if it has a relatively high specific energy. You’re also dealing with hydrogen tending to make everything it touches pretty brittle, since it’s reactive, and liking to leak out because it has such a small particle size, in combination with your tanks all having to be like multiple times the size of a propane tank to offset the losses. Either way, the sheer tank size tends to offset the gains in practice, and piping that shit would fucking blow, maybe literally.
Right, but that’s all current conditions, and the field is changing quickly. Legislation, technology, and increased market efficiency will resolve some of those problems.
I doubt many experts in the late 19th century would have predicted our current energy infrastructure, and they werent dealing with an urgent global need to reverse environmental damage.
The cost of inaction is very high, and humanity will be forced off of fossil fuels eventually anyway. Maybe we’ll use batteries for most portable electricity, but hydrogen will have a role.
I mean I kind of doubt that most of those problems are really surmountable in the longer term, unless maybe cryo cooling and storage becomes way cheaper in terms of price, they’re not really things that you can just like, really market innovate your way out of. Not in the same way as batteries, which we might see gain a lot in the next decade or so from solid state. Everyone banks on future technology to solve current problems to court venture capital, but we can already solve most of the problems that we’d need hydrogen for right now. We have trains, we know how to build way more, we don’t really need it for cars, and if you’re not getting your hydrogen from a “free” source like natural gas, there’s not really a reason to produce it in large quantities.
Hydrogen transport is also a mass of pain in the ass because hydrogen being the noblest of gases and only a single hydrogen molecule likes to seep out of every container we’ve ever made and there’s no way to permanently contain it.
This statement you’ve made here is mostly accurate and informative. Hydrogen isn’t a noble gas, its brother Helium is. Hydrogen is highly reactive. However, your points about Hydrogen storage and transport are spot on. You’re not insulting nor condescending in this post. Nearly every other response you’ve made in this whole post is the opposite.
You are clearly capable of civil and informative responses, but because you have so few you’ve lost the audience you want to inform/persuade a long time ago. Are you aware of that?
This is /c/shitpost im not debating civilly as the arguments I get aren’t in good faith 9 times out of 10. I’m not here to be a school teacher. More of a doomsday preacher
I’m surprised that solar isn’t yet big enough to be broken out on its own.
and that’s the problem. It’s not even enough of our power generation to be its own separate entity on the graph, but these people expect it to just magically power the planet in the next 5 years.
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