Bullshit!
I’ve seen plenty of conservatives say they’d rather have a loud data center than quiet solar farm near their home.
I don’t understand.
Possibly because the main data center companies are US held, while solar progress is much more international. Conservatives don’t see the world as “emissions vs technical progress”, but rather as “us vs foreign aliens”.
But both are American owned and operated but manufactured overseas…
it’s crazy how close to post scarcity utopia we can get but you get these chuckle fuck red hats that are just hell bent on letting billionaires revert us back to feudalism
Well the solar farm uses tons of water and power, causing shortages and high prices, creates a giant eyesore of a building that will be worse than a dead mall when the bubble pops, and generates a crapload of noise and pollution. …… oh wait, that’s not solar
I have read the inverter and related cooling equipment of the solar system can be noisy if poorly implemented or maintained, though I doubt it would rival the downsides of a data center.
Even if both made the same amount of noise and/or occupied the same amount of space, a Solar Farm is better because it produces energy. A Data Center consumes energy (not to mention the energy is also being spent unethically.)
Easiest to say when you’re not living near either
I know, those solar panels are just soooo loud
nuclear power is expensive to maintain, plus needs all those expertise. and building the power plant takes like a decade+, and then you have to deal regulatory issues.
solar, you can pratically put that anywhere on the cheap.
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Nuclear is the best for investors. They invest a fixed amount of money and the government pays dividends. Minimum kWh promised. Minimum price promised. There is no wonder why everyone wants nuclear.
headline is clickbait. here’s the only thing it relies on:
According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.
Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.
so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear
How do you read “solar is more efficient than Nuclear” from that title? And what would that even mean? The title is clearly about the amount of solar power generation, not efficiency.
you know how usually you look at statistics and assume they’re per capita? that was my mistake, though replace per capita here with per unit
so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear
We’ve known the ROI on Solar/Wind has been better than Nuclear for decades.
Nuclear usage is flat because it isn’t profitable to build or operate. The efficiency of Renewables is economic efficiency. Cheap scaling, low overhead, high profit margin
Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized (by nearly everybody but the US and Russia) to heck. This is like saying trains aren’t profitable because of how much the US subsidizes roads. Even then, nuclear ROI is still better in the long term, it just comes slower.
It is literally impossible to operate a fission plant without government subsidies. Private insurers won’t touch the things, as the potential damage they can do in a worst case scenario is something only the budgets of nation states can absorb. Nuclear plants always rely on national insurance schemes to make them viable.
Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized
Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It’s entire existence is predicated on public R&D. Virtually all of its generators are public projects. It’s a notorious money loser to operate. We still don’t have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands and in Superfund sites, too.
That’s not the reason it lags the alternatives, though. If public spending got us cheap energy with zero trade offs, everyone would be France by now.
Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels. It outperforms in defiance of subsidies, often growing market share in states that are actively hostile to its expansion.
Even in the face of enormous cuts to public spending and bailouts to coal, under Trump 1 & 2, renewables increased their market share.
That’s because renewables aren’t just efficient, they’re profitable. Enormously profitable. The private sector loves high margins on their capex spend, and renewables consistently deliver.
Even France is replacing nuclear with other sources in the long term.
The main advantage nuclear has is size. It can produce more power per hectare of land than either solar or wind can, and this will be even more the case if the small scale reactors that Canada has been researching ever become a thing - basically a power plant in a shipping container, meant to service remote communities.
People have been trying to do small scale fission for decades. They always slam headfirst into the square cubed law and the fact that fission plants were built giant for a damn good reason. Fission is so cost inefficient that the only remote hope you can have of making it profitable is if you build giant reactors and hope for big economies of scale. The hope of building small reactors on assembly lines has proven to be a pipe dream. Many have tried it, and it has failed again and again.
@Omgpwnies @technology Power density and the ability to generate large amounts of power quickly. There is less need for new methods of power storage (e.g., batteries).
Which is definitely helpful for utility that’s constrained by space. For instance, with the nuclear powered freight shipping that Jiangnan Shipyard is looking to pioneer.
But for urban grid power or industrial production at the continental scale, space isn’t an issue. One reason why states like Texas and California are running away with renewable power even in the face of hostile political headwinds. Real estate is far cheaper than the energy is produces.
For the places that have enough land and environmental conditions suitable for wind/solar, that is true. In remote communities, just getting the materials for a wind farm there is incredibly difficult if there’s no warm water port for a ship to deliver the blades for instance. A nuclear reactor in a shipping container can be driven by transport on the logging roads or even air-lifted in. It’s not a universal solution, it’s something specific to fit a community’s unique needs.
For the places that have enough land and environmental conditions suitable for wind/solar, that is true.
Again, who doesn’t have this access?
In remote communities, just getting the materials for a wind farm there is incredibly difficult
Remote communities don’t have the kind of energy demand that nuclear power fulfills. Nevermind how it’s always going to be more expensive to build a nuclear generator than a big fan connected to a dynamo.
It’s not a universal solution
It doesn’t need to be, when the bulk of what we’re trying to replace is coal and natural gas.
Again, who doesn’t have this access?
There are communities in northern Ontario that are only accessibly by airplane ~6 months of the year, and those 6 months also have very low amounts of sunlight. They’re not quite north enough to be completely dark all day, but they only get a few hours of useable light per day in the winter.
This means that a) solar is less effective in the winter, and b) if there is damage to a wind turbine blade in the winter, they may not be able to get a replacement until spring.
Remote communities don’t have the kind of energy demand that nuclear power fulfills
Each reactor cell produces about 1MW, which is about enough to power a small town of about 1,000 people. They can also be air-lifted meaning if it needs to be replaced during the winter, that is still possible.
SMRs will be neat if they actually work, but there is no demostration that they can be remotely economically feasible. Even considering carbon emissions, it would be cheaper and more effective to improve the carbon footprint of the main power grid by a tiny fraction of a percent and then just give those small northern communities modern fossil fuel plants, maybe supplemented with renewables over time.
For large northern communities, grid connections are going to be the eventual solution either way.
if there is damage to a wind turbine blade in the winter, they may not be able to get a replacement until spring.
And if there’s damage to a nuclear facility?
I agree with this; I think the “universal” argument and subsequent infighting is propped up by the oil lobby to slow us down. I just think it’s important to highlight how efficient nuclear is. We should be using both good tools to solve this and part of that is knowing how good both are so they’re not unnecessarily ignored.
It’s obvious the title refers to usage rather than efficiency. You can hardly define a similar efficiency for each one to compare them.
I mean, the literal meaning of efficiency would be the capacity factor (how much energy is actually extracted out of the inputs over how much energy the input contains) which is very measurable. I’ll concede that that is unfair, but even then there’s the extremely accepted measurement of land use per unit of energy:
(Solar is represented as CSP, concentrated, and PV, photovoltaic)
Edit: energy over land use→land use per unit of energy
< 10 vs > 1000 confirms what I said.
Yes, so nuclear uses 100 times less land for the same energy. The unit is hectares per TWh.
The United States could meet its entire electricity demand just by putting solar panels on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol.
The land argument is beyond grasping at straws. The last refuge of the incompetent.
lol, using a land version of “efficiency” to make solar look bad. 🤣
what does this even mean
they’re more economically efficient than nuclear, which means they give you more bang for the buck
We could have had this 30 years ago. There have been improvements in the tech and manufacturing, but the main reason for the price drop has been the scale of sales.
Wind Turbine technology has improved very marginally over the last 30 years
What’s really changed is capacity of production (and scale - these turbines are truly collosal) combined with the rapidly rising retail cost of electricity.
Marginally? Wind turbines are close to 15MW each now. 10 years ago it was more like 5-10MW. 30 years ago it was 3MW for an offshore turbine.
You don’t think that’s significant progress? 5x the power. You don’t think that requires improvements in technology?
We included solar panels and a battery when we built our new house in Tokyo, and even though it’s in a quite shadowy area, I’m surprised how much power we get out of them (even on cloudy days). Switching to an EV now too. It’s an absolute no-brainer.
Lucky you. I tried to get solar installed but around here it’s still ridiculously expensive. Unfortunately it’s also one of the scammiest industries. I went through a good dozen installers without finding one that didn’t make me feel ripped off, and that’s even before spending money.
Anyway, government incentives expired and the prices to consumers are still so high that there really isn’t a payback period. While I understand that the market should be able to stand on its own, we should have had a few more years to get off to a good start and build economies of scale or something.
Anyhow I was looking at $30k+ to cover half my electricity usage. Even worse, none of them wanted to actually sell me anything. Even when I made it an initial condition, they all wanted to dazzle me with word salad and sell me a lease or PPA agreement (totally not a lease, bro.)
Only dark clouds reduce solar panel outputs. Panels don’t care if the light is hitting directly from the sun or diffused by cloud, as long as sum of incoming radiation over surface is high, you get your energy
You mean we can make FREE ENERGY in our BACKYARD for almost NO Money? This is TERRIBLE!
-LITERALLY Conservatives!
Won’t somebody please think of the investors!?
What a nice coincidence, just recently edited this. I usually don’t get to use my custom made memes twice.
Don’t y’all know everything is made from oil and this is why we should keep burning the stuff to never see it again?
-Also LITERALLY Conservatives
I heard Hunter’s laptop ran on solar energy!!
Nah. Hunter runs on fossil fuel. Remember he was being paid a fortune by a Ukrainian Gas company.
Turns out we already have fusion power, it’s just been placed safely 149.6 million km away. The solution to energy independence comes up every morning.
Serious questions for people not looking to play political whack-a-mole and slapping people around online.
I haven’t taken the time to research - but is the “solar overtaking nuclear” because of the dramatic increase in solar farms? Or primarily from the increase of tech? I imagine an mix of both, but the quantity increase seems to be significant.
Are nuclear plants as efficient as they can be? Or are most of plants decades old with problems from aging?
Can the rise of solar be more person to person investment? Or is it’s increase mostly from huge cap ex from people wanting to own and charge for the energy? Nuke is obviously a huge expense begining to end.
The price per watt is rapidly shrinking all while the batteries keep getting cheaper and better. Progress keeps being made. Sodium batteries are coming and promise inferior storage capacity, but excellent reusability at a much better price point than regular lithium batteries. So they might not be put in phones, but for static installation such as houses, they are very promising.
I believe the price per watt almost everywhere on earth is better with solar than with coal/oil/gaz, even in the USA where they are actively working against solar. Another advantage solar has, is how easy anyone can have it installed. So it fits almost anywhere without complications. I couldn’t tell you if the rise is mostly individuals or companies looking to resell the energy though. But for sure, solar is replacing all of those.
As for nuclear, they require HUGE commitments, a lot of consideration on where to put those plants and where to store the wastes. Nobody wants to live anywhere near wastes and everybody is at least lowkey fearful of a nuclear powerplant. It’s not surprising with what happened in the past. Even if all incidents were mostly due to someone cheaping out on something. Even that incident in japan due to a tsunami. (Btw check out the show Chernobyl if you haven’t, it’s really good).
Another disadvantage of nuclear is they are far too dangerous for gouvernments to just “let you build it out” as an energy company. That’s not much of a problem for solar plants.
Modern nuclear remains very much cheaper on the long term and is totally safe, but it’s hard for governments to keep long term commitments when political will is so easily changed. So nuclear plants are rarely built and yeah, mostly aging out.
When we figure out fussion though… Oh boy, nuclear is going to be THE source of electricty. No wastes. Just clean energy. But that’s not soon.
Nuclear fusion has the same problem as fission. In theory the energy is enormous speaking of a nuclear bomb or the power of the sun. But in order to make it a stable/sage energy source and the inefficiency of turning heat into energy, the net amount of energy gained is so small they had to scale the plants up so much for it to gain enough energy for it to be economically sensible. The initial plants were way smaller.
What we really need is better was to convert other forms of power into electricity, store it efficiently and reduce power consumption. Normal pressure, normal temperature Supra conducting would be a game changer for example. That could reduce the worlds power consumption by 60%
The Dept of Energy was stripped of a lot of nuclear oversight staff and regulations by Trump and Doge, to fast track microreactors for data centers.
Fuck us and all the life forms living here I guess.
Nuclear has lots of regulations so there had been little to no research in scaling it up compared to the vast sums of private RnD that panels and batteries have seen.
I think it’s just the economics of it, as it almost always is.
Solar panels have been dropping logarithmically in price for 50 years. Battery improvements don’t hurt either.
I am a fan of nuclear energy, but its cost has not done anything like that. It would be a good thing for us to develop cheaper fission and build more reactors. I know there are companies trying to bring it back, at least.
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
Nuclear produces waste, which is mentioned often but it is usually responded by pointing out that it could be recycled and the worse to be buried.
Here is what people miss:
Are all our nuclear waste handled correctly today? If not then why should we imply that they will be in the future.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
And imo that’s a very valid argument on why we should use solar as much as we can.
And if Republicans weren’t such greedy assholes we’d have been here decades ago
Technically solar power is nuclear power ☝️🤓
All power is solar power if you go deep enough. Or to be more accurate, stellar power.
Big Bang Power
Tidal and geothermal are not.
Pretty sure if the sun stopped generating heat the oceans would freeze but I’m no astrophysicist.
You’re not deep enough yet, tides and earths core only exist because stars exploded billions of years ago and some particles eventually formed earth
This raises an interesting question in my mind, does tidal power make the earth get closer to the moon? Because if you got all the energy out of it, then the water wouldn’t move, so I guess it’s the same as gravitational potential in that sense, but I guess it’s removing it, so less gravitational potential means either less mass (not the case) or less distance.
The opposite happens. Tidal energy is what causes the moon to drift farther away from the earth, as the moon loses angular velocity.
actually, the moon gains angular momentum from the tidal movement that it causes, and that’s what makes it move further away. the reason is that it takes Earth about 1 day to rotate once around its axis, but it takes the moon 28 days to rotate once around Earth’s axis. so Earth has a higher angular velocity, and the tidal movement tries to reduce that difference to make the two tidally locked eventually. ironically, this process transfers angular momentum to the moon (to speed it up), which makes it move further away and thus the angular velocity actually decreases. yeah, orbital mechanics is weird.
(btw this is not a joke. it’s really that way, difficult to comprehend i know).
But does harvesting it make it go faster or slower away?
If you mean harvesting tidal energy, the effect on the moon would be minimal. The loss of angular momentum the moon experiences is due to the mass of the earth’s waters. I could not imagine anything humans could build that could extract enough tidal energy that it would disrupt the moon without utterly destroying the environment at the same time (by way of nullifying tides somehow). In fact, to harness tidal energy, one way would be to use underwater turbines. They would have an immediate effect to the local environment but a negligible amount to the moon itself.
I know its minimal, I’m not saying it’s a concern, I’m just saying if we are harvesting it, doesn’t that mean it’s pulling us closer to it? It’s not magically free energy (in the physics sense), so what else could it be other than converting the potential gravitational energy between the earth and moon into something else?
Geothermal comes from friction inside the core, residual heat from planet formation, and radioactive decay. Since all elements heavier than hydrogen were fused inside stars, and heavier actinides like uranium are formed in second gen stars, and the inertia of dust that coalesces into planetary bodies including the earth and the moon originated from dying stars going supernovae, geothermal and tidal energy are products of stellar explosions, either inertial, kinetic, or radioactive. Tides are driven by the moon, whose energy is kinetic, stored from past supernovae
Planet wouldn’t exist if stars didn’t explode billions of years ago, checkmate.
Most usable energy on Earth comes from fusion of hydrogen into helium in the Sun, creating radiation that hits the Earth. That’s solar energy, of course, either thermal or photovoltaics, but also the wind caused by uneven warming, the evaporation and condensation of water that flows downhill for hydro power, the chemical bonds formed by photosynthesis making renewable biofuels or older fossil fuels.
Some portion of energy on Earth is gravitational potential energy and the kinetic energy of stuff moving around settling into a lower energy state: the moon dragging the oceans around, the heat of the Earth’s core spinning and tectonic plates moving from the momentum of all the dust that got pulled into what is now a planet. Geothermal and tidal energy mostly come from these planet scale phenomena.
Some portion of energy is the release of energy stored in nuclei formed from some past supernova, of less stable isotopes of atoms heavier than iron. Some portion of geothermal is traceable to this kind of nuclear decay, and obviously we can isolate and enrich those nuclear elements into fission fuel for nuclear power, as well.
Hard to categorize the second and third categories into solar power, though. Yeah, it comes from astronomical phenomena tracing back to how our solar system and planets were formed, from the materials they’re made out of, and found their way into their current shapes and orbits, but is that solar power?
Which is ultimately caused or released by gravity.
Stellar? Mmmm never thought about this word much. Constellation? Stars? Stellar?
I have some holes to go down
Fusion as well
Goated power generation method because no form of water needed.
Nuclear plants - with high start-up costs, national security risks and high output - will always require concentrating large amounts of power in few hands.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Greater inequality results in a worse society in just about every imaginable way. And nuclear will always encourage that more than solar.
Yeah, damn governments holding all the uranium for themselves. It’s just not fair.
My son would argue that governments should have invested heavily in thorium reactor technology instead.
That is remains a cool potential technology, but why spend billions of dollars trying to develop a worse technology when solar already exists and for much cheaper? It’s just being sidetracked while letting investors enrich themselves on government research money
Plus it harkens back to the old adage about base power. No, we don’t need base power when we have large scale grid storage. Thats just coal propaganda
That is remains a cool potential technology, but why spend billions of dollars trying to develop a worse technology when solar already exists and for much cheaper?
This was the exact same argument made against solar. We should research and improve energy technologies. I doubt Thorium is the solution, but we’ve discovered a lot of our technology by researching something else and then discovering an interesting function or byproduct unrelated to the original goals.
Plus space exploration will need to be nuclear.
LOL
Why bring Space Nuttery into this?
Nuttery?
Every dollar spent at NASA has returned so much more. They develop things for space travel that have uses far beyond space. We wouldn’t even have satellites and GPS if we didn’t venture into space.
Space has a lot for us to explore and a ton of resources we can use. Why strip mine the Earth when we could just take it from the asteroid belt?
You really need to disconnect space exploration from the likes of Musk or Bezos. We’ve been advancing humanity through space exploration before those two assholes were born
NASA has nothing to do with nuclear research. The world would benefit from nuclear research more than sending another group for a lap around the moon.
Nuclear power is a very important technology for space vehicles, probes and bases. There’s proven potential for greatly improved propulsion systems as well.
You can’t just hear the word space and declare it “nuttery”, that’s just ignoring whole industries and areas of active research and engineering.
Space Nuttery is thinking it’s somehow important or relevant for humanity going forward.
A power source for a floating camera to go take pictures of dead rocks and frozen chemicals is a niche interest. No one has a RTG powered city.
“You can’t just hear the word space and declare it “nuttery”,”
You can’t just hear “Space Nuttery” and talk about space. Space is a mostly empty sucking vacuum hostile to all life and a radiation-blasted hell.
Space Nuttery is living in a fantasy world where we’ll just somehow go space mining and colonizing Mars with water from Saturn’s rings like it’s just a question of a longer trip to Home Depot.
It’s an intellectual dead end.
Your response is exactly Space Nuttery. Dream-like nerd fantasies.
I seriously doubt there’s any useful overlap between nuclear for space and for terrestrial power generation. Even if there were, we’ve spent close to a century proving that nuclear is expensive and time consuming to run and thorium’s theoretical advantages re mostly only in comparison to existing nuclear technology. Research is always good, but that really looks like a dead end, especially in comparison to something that is cheap and ubiquitous, and entirely ready, just needs scale out. Even that is already happening
especially in comparison to something that is cheap and ubiquitous
In some countries nuclear is cheap and ubiquitous. The key is simple standardization.
In France for instance, nuclear accounts for about 70% of their power. They operate 57 nuclear reactors, all of which are one of 4 reactor designs. By having standardized designs these reactors are cheaper to maintain, parts and equipment are more available. The engineers that run the facilities are more familiar with every aspect of the plant, operating procedures are better understood. It’s easier to find qualified engineers and technicians. Accidents are uncommon (I believe they’ve never had any kind of major accident).
The price French households pay for power is comparable to what we pay in the US and they generate significantly less CO2 per capita. They also have less reliance on oil states.
We could have that too if we were motivated to make it happen.
And yet even in this ideal case where France built out a full country of standardized nuclear power half a century ago …… a quick online search shows me they still have double the cost/KWH compared to solar
And trains!
I think thorium reactors are more complicated though. You have to achieve very high pressure or they don’t work. They just hasn’t really been an impetus to develop the technology.
Thorium has been imminent for the last 40 years, like fusion.
I know right. How can I become a super hero from exposure if I can’t get some uranium.
Just use urinium.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Not when we buy all our panels from China.
You buy the panels, and they last for 25+ years though.
In those 25+ years, there’s time to develop your own domestic supply chain.
You only buy them once though.
This is why SMRs are a thing, and may still take off.
Too expensive
Depends on the location. In some places space is the commodity.
Averaging nuclear over the entire world really doesn’t give it a fair shake, since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones. Where I am, the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is more than five times what’s supplied by solar and wind combined, and we’re doing just fine (and building out more nuclear in addition to more renewables).
Solar is great but so is nuclear. They have different use cases, we need both.
Nukes are very expensive to build, but easily the cheapest energy is that you have a nuclear power plant up already and you keep it running. Germany royally fucked that one up.
Nuclear is not there when you need it. It’s prohibitively expensive to build, it takes decades to finish. If we wait for nuclear power to replace coal, we’ll be at 4°C.
Better stop complaining about that fantastical technology and use the tools that are there. They’re quite good already, we can do it.
What about using both instead of being idiots who fight about which is better? They clearly have their use cases. We can use all kind of renewables to decommission coals and meanwhile build nuclear reactors.
Or if you’re Germany, use renewables to decommission your nuclear reactors while continuing to burn Russian natural gas and Polish coal 🙄
Because it can be accomplished without nuclear, meaning nuclear is a huge expense and a lot of toxic waste for no advantage?
Nuclear waste can mostly be reused and what remaiin can just be sealed off, also, they are experimentig with thorium rn which is a LOT more safe; you also ignore that solar energy uses a lot of terrain
And also the mining and manufacturing and disposal/recycling for the panels. They don’t just pop into existence at the supply warehouse. Any full analysis should include the environmental entire manufacturing chain, regardless of whether it’s solar, wind, or nuclear.
Should also included the conseguences of installing them: will it disrupt any habitat? Will the color of the materials/object affect the temperature of the zone? Etc etc
they are experimentig with thorium rn
For the last 50 years.
a LOT more safe
There’s a reason why Texas bought 8 CANDU reactors.
Because nuclear is just an expensive and time consuming distraction at this point. Itis usually brought up mostly to delay the energy transition
I live in Finland, in a few months it’ll be -20C outside and about 0-10 hours of sun per month, depending on cloud coverage. Solar is not really an option for half the time here. Wind is bit better, but unfortunately doesn’t quite work at the coldest times.
It’s possible that nobody should live in Finland…
You guys may be fine with 4°C and already have nuclear power. Weird country.
You’ve got some valid points in your criticism of nuclear. They are also points that could be addressed - we built lots of nuclear power plants within budget and timelines, once. Like solar, and like everything, nuclear benefits from scale.
Similarly, there are valid points of criticism that solar gushing ignores: Power is needed 24/7, solar doesn’t deliver power 24/7 and batteries (pumped hydro, chemical, heat etc) are nowhere near large enough to see the whole of society powered through the winter. If we built renewables like we built traditional power plants we would say “I’d like 1 GW, 95% availability, steerable down to 0.6 GW”. Solar right now goes “weeell, not really my problem what you want - I can give you power sometimes and sometimes not”.
So like coal power socialises the cost of pollution, renewables socialises the cost of consistency.
We could instead say “storage is the solar field operators’ concern” and then you’d be able to see what solar really costs”.
And hear me right; I’m ALL in on renewables. I’m also ALL in on nuclear. We need everything that can deliver power with low carbon output. If nuclear goes away, you’ll have to start a tonne of gas peaker plants when there’s not enough wind and not enough sun to power everything.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
batteries haven’t been built in the past because they weren’t needed, but they’re being built today (look up sodium-ion batteries) and they’re cheap and effective.
The underlying issue with energy is always storage. That has always been the appeal of fossil fuels and now nuclear.
Shelf stable energy ready to be unlocked in a rock or liquid that nature provides right out of the ground.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.
My point is globally. Globally we need nuclear.
Australia has a perfect proposal -https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/2024/2024-integrated-system-plan-isp.pdf
the planet has a finite amount of uranium. It’s rare.
That doesn’t matter. Uranium isn’t that rare, and we only need a power source that kicks the can down the road long enough to build renewable alternatives. Once we start running out of uranium, its price will increase and it’ll be profitable to replace nuclear plants.
The only reason the same logic doesn’t apply to fossil fuels is that climate change is an externality that will kill us long before we run out of fossil fuels.
If nuclear solves the problem for a century, then in 2126 our solar, wind, batteries, enhanced geothermal, wave etc will be very mature and able to replace nuclear quite easily.
New nuclear power plants and current reprocessing can absolutely make this a non-problem. There’s plenty of radioactive material.
I hear your argument, it’s old. But I also listen to news, and the storage problem seems to not be a technological problem anymore. Battery storages for the evenings/nights are almost trivial today, it’s a matter of just allowing investors to build.
For winters, the solution could be green methane in existing storages, and for that we’ll also need gas plants. Green methane is sorta inefficient to produce, I get that, but we’re still in a phase where we need much more solar and wind to get across spring and fall. Simultaneously we need to shut the existing production off in summer. Let’s not do that, and produce inefficient methane instead.
But for this transformation we’re constantly held up by the “what about nuclear” argument straight from the fossil lobby playbook. Sorry to say that, but if you are pro sustainability you should be careful whose arguments you repeat. Just like the individual CO2 footprint, there are a number of popular stories propagated by the fossil lobby with the purpose to sow doubt, and therefore stagnation.
Storage isn’t a technological problem anymore?!
Let’s take a country like the UK, which is well ahead in the renewable transition compared to most other countries. In the last 3 years we’ve had 619 periods where renewables covered less than than 50% of our mix, the longest lasting 19 days (October-November 2024), where the average cover was 16%. Let’s work out on the basis of just that single dunkelflaute as an instructive example.
To see us through that period Britain would have needed 12 TWh of storage. How much is that? Well, we have 0.04 TWh of total storage, across pumped storage and batteries (pumped storage almost double our grid batteries - and when I say grid batteries that counts for every single battery installation at home too, because they are tracked when they are installed in the G98/G99 application).
So you need to make our storage 300x larger just in Britain. And don’t say “we will just import electricity from other countries”, the dunkelflaute covered almost all of Europe.
How did we get through that one? Gas, gas, gas, burning all across Europe, plus a lot of coal in Eastern Europe.
Could we conceivably install 300x more storage in every country (bear in mind the situation is worse in most other countries, so adopting 300x across Europe is optimistic)?
Yes sure, everything is conceivable. You could dig out every mountain for water storage and strip mine the whole planet for the metals you need for batteries.
But if you add nuclear to the mix, prices fall dramatically, since nuclear adds baseload, meaning your dunkelflautes get much smaller and fewer. It’s a lot more conceivable with nuclear in the mix.
Look, I’m not one of those “nuclear will fix everything” people. Nuclear has downsides, but so does everything else. The key is to mix upside and downsides, not rely on one single thing out of philosophy (whether renewable or nuclear).
If you think “storage is solved” I urge you to speak to someone who works in grid management.
The fossil fuel industry was the one stopping nuclear in the 20th century because they were worried about being replaced. Maybe you should also look at who’s talking points you’re copying
Which battery technology are you referring to?
Lithium-ion has pretty big operational safety concerns (thermal runaway) and as far as I know we haven’t completely figured out the recycling either.
Pumped storage has massive environmental implications and is typically very difficult to get approved by local governments.
Flow batteries are still a very infant technology. There’s very big design differences between manufacturers that have very big tradeoffs. But I do believe these will “win” the storage race, eventually.
Flywheel and gravity storage don’t have the magnitude and duration requirements for grid-level storage solutions.
Lithium grid batteries are a non-issue for safety, in practice. They’re LFP (which is really forgiving heatwise, as lithium batteries go) and adding a ton of passive cooling isn’t a big deal since weight isn’t a problem when it’s stationary. And sodium-ion will only be better in this regard.
Recycling is overblown as a problem. Like any industry, recycling needs scale to be economical, and every new tech isn’t recycled at scale until 1) it’s produced at scale, and 2) that generation produced at scale reaches EOL and needs to be recycled.
In practice, recycling lithium batteries is a non-issue because a lithium battery contains an entire battery’s worth of lithium (it’s ~10%+ lithium - and that lithium is a liquid that, when drained out, is >99% lithium!), whereas lithium brine is like 0.1% lithium. It’s not hard to recycle most of the battery, and the other parts will only be learned after we have mountains of free dead batteries to practice on, not before.
I listen to news, some of them dedicated to sustainable energy markets, but I’m not an engineer nor so I pretend to be. That news reported in depths about how many large scale battery power plants want to get permission, being blocked primarily by regulation, not technology.
fantastical technology
Ah, the “fantastical technology” of the 1950s.
It’s only prohibitively expensive the way that we’re currently doing it in the US, there are better ways.
Not in France, Great Britain or Germany either. Or Poland or Spain. To my knowledge not in Japan either.
Probably you are talking about some countey with lax regulations. Which is curious , because proponents of nuclear power always say Chernobyl could not have happened in a country with good regulations (so Japan probably is not included in that list either)
Fukushima survived an earthquake and then a tsunami before partly going prompt critical. The meltdown was incredibly controlled compared to Chernobyl.
That…is remarkable brain acrobatics to paint Fukushima somehow in a good light. Tell that shit to yourself. The lucky thing that happened to them was the wind blowing seaside, and not towards Tokyo, else they’d have to evacuate a 30 million inhabitant metropolis. That’s not an achievement of well controlled technology.
People say nuclear power is cheap, but I love near a failed nuclear plant that was too expensive to ever turn on. Nuclear shills consistently downvote me for this, but like I’m sorry, I’m just not very impressed by how “cheap” this technology is. I understand that it’s cheap once it’s running, but crucially, that doesn’t matter because it’s so dang expensive to get it running in the first place.
I also love that lemmy is apparently big enough to get nuclear shills
Nuclear plants that are already running are very cheap to continue running.
That’s mostly beside the point, though, because, as you explain, they’re very expensive to construct, and that’s before even getting to the ones that never get completed because the cost overruns get the project canceled.
So I’m always in favor of running existing nuclear plants as long as possible, but am pretty skeptical of building any new nuclear plants.
Sure, we’ll put it down your street and bury all the waste in your backyard if you don’t mind.
This is such a cheap shot, nuclear power generation and waste disposal is mostly a solved and highly regulated and enforced problem. I can just as easily ask what is the solution to the waste regarding batteries/panels? I know the industry is saying recycling, may I ask the figures, especially regarding normal folks at home.
Don’t get me wrong, I am pro solar just as much pro nuclear. The future should be a mix of what works best at a given location and constraints. Solar saved my country South Africa, read about how a corrupt government destroyed a world class energy company, built the most cost and time overrun and largest two coal plants in the world, they fucked up. We sat for years in the dark and the private sector built the same capacity, using mostly solar, as the two coal plants within 4 years.
Recurring blackouts, load shedding, are a thing of the past.
It’s highly regulated to evade them just dumping it in your backyard. As for solved… A decade after shutting down the power plants, Germany is still looking for a final storage.
We’ll find it any day now! Promise! /s
Batteries can be recycled into… new batteries. The panels are mostly glass and metals.
I hate that this is the arguement that nuclear bros always make. It is not the same, and you know that. And if you don’t, you are not educated enough to have an opinion on this, broken glass, metal, and batteries do not give people cancer and poisoning for just standing within a few feet of them.
Unclear waste disposal is “solved” by saying “just leave it”. Thats not an answer
We actually have kind of solved that problem in Finland. It’s essentially burying the waste in our backyard, but the backyard is half a kilometer underground.
Great solution. Will you take ours, too? Sincerely, Germany.
I think you guys also have an underground. Have you checked?
Endlessly, and with no results.
If you use breeder reactors there is very little waste. And they extract significantly more energy from uranium than something like a light water reactor.
If I could have a small modular reactor in my neighborhood, I would be all over that.
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no problem.
