| ▲ | pil0u 3 days ago |
| Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply. |
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| ▲ | LinXitoW 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures. And price and time to market are of course giant points as well. |
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| ▲ | pfdietz 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Even with that, renewables are cheaper. One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric. |
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| ▲ | johanyc 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of). In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization. | | |
| ▲ | Paradigma11 3 days ago | parent [-] | | And we do have detailed weather data for the last 70 years in Europe. So it should be easy for proponents of renewables plus batteries like you to show that their proposed solutions would have worked all those years. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 3 days ago | parent [-] | | One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/ | | |
| ▲ | tstrimple 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Nuclear proponents seem incapable of avoiding the exact same debunked arguments over and over again year after year. Did you know that the sun doesn’t always shine? Checkmate solar power! Bet you never thought of that. I am very clever. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | They use the bad arguments because they don't have any good arguments. It's a tell. |
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| ▲ | nilslindemann 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you. Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee? | | |
| ▲ | chickenbig 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee? Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout? | | |
| ▲ | nilslindemann 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Oil and gas and other fossils are finite resources, and we need to replace them anyway sooner or later with pure electrical solutions, better sooner, as we know. And then what I said applies. And, as the only "infinite" resources we have, are the sunlight and the gravity of the moon, it is obvious that we should base global electricity generation on them. | | |
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| ▲ | mperham 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You should check out these things called batteries. | | |
| ▲ | realusername 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose. | | |
| ▲ | thijson 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Using batteries for long term storage is one of the classic bullshit moves of anti-renewable arguments. There are much cheaper options at scale. | | |
| ▲ | realusername 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Cheaper solutions which no-one bothered to implement until now. The proof is in the pudding. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | If fossil fuels are available and cheap, unburdened by the cost of their negative externalities, of course they will be chosen instead of a more expensive CO2-free alternative. That's what killed the nuclear renaissance in the US ~15 years ago. What this means is there's low hanging fruit to solve these problems in other ways, once fossil fuels are no longer allowed to pollute without cost. There are already good ideas for solving the long term storage problem, with many of the component technologies already existing for other purposes. |
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| ▲ | bluefirebrand 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who the actually cares about cheaper I want better and more reliable Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper? | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Renewables and storage would be cheaper at the same level of reliability. | | |
| ▲ | bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You are delusional if you think renewables and storage will be the same reliability as base load plants like nuclear, gas, coal | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Renewables and storage wouldn't drop gigawatts off the grid in an instant. They'd be massively redundant and distributed. That's how you get reliability. | | |
| ▲ | bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent [-] | | No way any current place is building that kind of oversupply and redundancy | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | "No one is doing it therefore it is impossible" is a remarkable argument, especially from someone trying to argue nuclear can replace fossil fuels. |
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