5356

Citation? Not trying to be snide, but I haven’t read anything to the effect that they are intrinsically incapable of shouldering the load if enough were built and put into operation.

5357

Cause solar power doesn’t fucking work in the dark, dude. Wind power doesn’t work when the wind isn’t blowing. Hydroelectric didn’t work unless you have ready access to suitable waterways.

They just aren’t there yet dude.

You could theoretically just install WAY more capacity, as well as huge battery systems. But then it’s going to cost way more.

And you know what that means?

It means that people are going to keep burning fossil fuels.

Just like they’ve been doing for the last number of decades while we largely stopped the expansion of our nuclear industry in the US.

Hell, here in PA they’re shutting down nuclear plants, largely because they’re really old, and are being economically undercut by… What? Solar? Wind? No, that capacity is going to come from natural gas.

That’s just the way it is. Every day you don’t build nuclear plants, is one more day you are going provide that power generation with fossil fuels. Instead of a few tons of nuclear waste, you will have hundreds of thousands of tons of waste from fossil fuel plants.

I’m not telling you this because i would rather burn dead dinosaurs. I’m just telling you it’s what is going to happen.

5358

But what if a fairy with a magic wand riding a unicorn happened?
WHAT IF?

5359

Relax, dude. There are things called batteries, you know. And I’m not going to debate you, as I am not an engineer, which is why I asked for a citation.

That’s just the way it is.

Oh, well. When you put it that way!

5360

Yeah man, I covered that in the next paragraph.

To use batteries, that means that you need to have enough battery storage to cover the base load in hours when you don’t have the power source.

But what’s more, it means that you need to have enough capacity to not only generate your base load when the sun’s up (or the wind’s blowing, or whatever), but you need enough capacity so that you can generate all of that base load, PLUS enough to charge the batteries for the base load when you don’t have the energy source. So you basically need twice the power generation capacity. Plus the battery storage.

And while this is theoretically possible, it’s nowhere close to economical.

Which means that the result is going to be… fossil fuels.

While people might say they care about abstract crap like climate change… they don’t care so much that they’ll suffer the economic hardships that result from massive increases in the cost of energy. When that stuff happens, abstract stuff like climate change goes out the window. People don’t give a crap about it. Again, I’m not saying how it should be. I’m just saying how it is.

Nuclear power has the capacity to replace base load power generation for a fairly nominal increase, if any, over the cost of existing fossil fuel sources.

And we’ve done it before. France built an entire nuclear power industry in a decade that gave them something like 90% of their power coming form a carbon neutral source. It can be done. It doesn’t require any new research and development.

That’s the difference between renewables and nuclear.

Renewables say “We might be be able to solve the problem in few decades”.

Nuclear says, “We solved this problem in the 1960’s.”

5361

The amount of doublethink around this issue is pretty disgusting.

The real problem with nuclear isn’t the safety issue, it’s that if you build enough nuclear plants to completely cover base load, most renewables become non economic, and indeed pointless, unlike in the scenario that renewables are forcing out coal and then gas generation

Because the political champions of the climate change fight are so invested in renewables, it becomes emotionally difficult for them to accept nuclear, because renewables would turn out to be a bit of a distraction. You’ve also got a massive government subsidised industry lobbying against nuclear, which doesn’t help.

Add in the safety concerns about nuclear, and its original military uses, which have made opposition to nuclear power a shibboleth for much of the left, and there’s just massive political opposition.

5362

SL1, windscale, kyshtym and Chernobyl were all government run. 3 mile and Fukushima were private sector. Not really seeing the evidence for your claim.

5363

Thanks for mentioning the French nuclear industry, reading about it has been fascinating. Ok, now for the snark :D

Stable genius quotes:
“Wind power doesn’t work when the wind isn’t blowing.” - T
"When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric.” - T

Here in Texas we’re at ~25% generation from Wind (and approximately doubling capacity by 2030), and one of the reasons that works is that we’ve invested in connecting the grids of different parts of the state. As you know, Texas is larger than any other object, so even if the wind is not blowing in one part of Texas it is probably blowing in another part of Texas, which allows for a more constant average flow (well, and also because the wind flow at 200 meters is much more constant than at ground level). So you can get a lot of stability without using massive batteries by spreading your investment over different geographical areas and energy sources and then connecting the results.


For the French nuclear sector, reading about it highlighted two of the main issues that nuclear power faces today. One is ignorance (plenty to write about with that), but the other is cost & construction overruns. E.g. the French are constructing new reactors to replace their aging fleet. The new flagship reactor is at Flamanville, a place where they already have 2 reactors built ~40 years ago. The new reactor though has gone way off schedule and way over budget. Assuming no additional problems, it will begin generation 13 years after the start of the project, and 3x over the initial cost estimate (3.3B vs a final 11B cost). Other new reactors have had similar timelines and cost over runs, with 10 year long construction times even in the success stories. And the failure stories have been particularly brutal, e.g. the V.C. Summer plant in South Carolina, which had a 10 year construction time and a 10 Billion dollar price tag and… had to be completely abandoned and written off. I feel like if you are a state level planner and you look at something like that you just blanche. It’s not just some absurd lefty prejudice that is holding back nuclear power, it is that in pure economic terms new plants are absolutely terrifying. Until that is somehow addressed you simply won’t have much investment into additional nuclear plants.

Compare that to Wind power, where you can install a new turbine with 4 dozen good old boys and some large trailer trucks. Rather than 10 years and 10 Billion dollars, you’re looking at 2 months and 2 million dollars for a small wind farm. It’s far less investment, far more immediate, and far less risk in all sorts of ways.

Ok and anecdote time just because I loved this experience. I’m driving to see Avengers: EndState, and on the highway I pass a convoy with 2 of these titanic trailers carrying turbine blades out to a new construction. That’s weird I think, usually the convoy has 3 trailers since, you know, 3 blades for the turbine. I continue on my way to the theater, pull off the highway, drive past an Applebee’s and some stores, and after a few blocks on steadily narrower streets I’m almost at the theater. And then I see the 3rd trailer, stopped at the T intersection between the main roads and the Mall’s road system, and absolutely unable to either make the turn or back out into traffic. And about a dozen workers are standing around the trailer and scratching their heads. And besides the hilarity of the incongruity of this massive industrial equipment stuck in the mall feeder road, it also just raises these questions about how things could go so wrong that despite the leading cars in the convoy the trailer pulled off the highway in the middle of the city and managed to drive for blocks along mixed use streets before finally getting lodged in this small T-intersection. Anyway, what I’m saying is that South doesn’t exactly have the best educational system, and I’m not sure that we are quite ready for massive nuclear deployments. Presumably these people stuck in the road scratching their heads were the same people that would be building and operating any new nuclear plants, and I don’t think that they are up for it. Giant spinny things, sure, we can handle that. Third gen nuclear reactors though, that might be a bit too much for us.

5364

You’re right! And that applies to nuclear too, if you actually make all the political and economic sacrifices necessary to set it up and maintain it safely.

5365

Yeah there are some massive organisational failures in nuclear reactor construction. In particular the focus on extremely large reactors seems misguided - the economies of scale melt away in the face of complexity-induced diseconomies. It’s certainly not an easy solution.

5366

Can you point to the literature which says this is so? I had a 10.5 kWh solar farm on my roof which provided all the power I needed on an annualized basis in Phoenix, AZ. I achieved that through net metering with the grid of course, but there’s no reason at all I couldn’t have put a couple of model 2 Powerwalls in my house and stored the excess solar energy instead. So it is already much more than theoretically possible, and economics are largely a function of scale at this point.

In any event, it isn’t a question of solar or wind or etc. It’s an integrated solution. The wind is always blowing somewhere. The sun is always shining somewhere.

Yes, precisely.

5367

I am under the impression that battery production isn’t exactly environmental friendly. Hence it maybe better to drive your old car longer then buy a electric car right away.

5368

See, I think this is just wrong. The political champions of climate change aren’t invested in renewables, they’re invested in solutions that can/will be implemented, and it’s an environment where everyone understands that nuclear can’t/won’t be implemented. Change the environment and you’ll change some minds. I get that it is a chicken and egg problem — you have to change minds to create the environment to change minds — put the point is that you’re not talking about the same minds. It is the general public that has by and large rejected nuclear.

5369

Yes, I hear that too, but I don’t really believe that making an electric car is more environmentally bad than making a fossil fuel car. The comparison I always hear is between keeping your current car and making a new electric one to replace it, which strikes me as an absurd comparison because your current car is going to be replaced in any case.

5370

Why on earth not? Much of it is the same, and the one of main bits that isn’t is an enormous battery, which is extremely environmentally unfriendly, and considerably more so than an empty gas tank.

5371

I’m open to the idea, but I’ve only seen the comparisons made as I framed it above. And I don’t think the absence of a gas tank and presence of batteries constitutes the entirety of the difference between the two…

5372

Obviously not, but even if an electric motor is a bit more environmentally friendly to make than a combustion engine (maybe?), it seems unlikely to outweigh a shit-ton of lithium and cobalt.

5373

…maybe, but when compared to the fossil fuel impact of lifetime operation?

As I said, I’m open to the idea, but I’ve never seen a straight-up useful life comparison. Can you point to one?

5374

Fueled by a fear that is completely irrational if you look at how harmful nuclear energy has been vs coal energy. And that’s not even counting the harm yet to come due to CO2 increases.

Nuclear isn’t a silver bullet that will solve the climate problem, but neither are renewables. A combination of both is needed.

5375

But this isn’t a lifetime comparison. It’s an environmental impact of construction comparison. I don’t doubt it’s better over a lifetime of operation (all the more so the higher the proportion of clean power in the country of operation).