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.
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 trains!
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
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.
Your response is exactly Space Nuttery. Dream-like nerd fantasies.
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.
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.
Like on the north pole maybe, but otherwise it’s just a massive loss of economy of scale.
Uhh any major metropolitan area without US large area infrastructure? Also, underwater.
Cheaper to drag a cable there.
I… don’t think you are thinking this through.
So far, they are not a thing though.
Sure they are, they’re just relegated to government use atm.
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.
All energy comes from the sun except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum which might as well be the sun because it wouldn’t rotate without something to orbit around.
Technically nuclear came from a different star. The sun won’t create those kinds of heavier elements until it burns through its hydrogen and helium fuel to start fusing its way up to lead, and I don’t think it’s massive enough to actually reach the kind of supernova collapse required to smash lesser elements together into heavier elements than that in any significant amount. So technically, fission is the only the form of energy that isn’t based on solar. It’s just the still-cooling-embers leftover from someone else’s dying star, a whole bunch of billions of years ago. I guess you could say the sun’s gravity at least attracted it all into this general vicinity though, at least until the Earth’s own gravity started pulling its own weight.
All accessible energy originates from the low entropy state during the big bang.
Well, it’s like I told my old friend Einstein, everything’s relative!
well actually there’s renewable energy on the cosmological scale (look up E. Harris - Mining Energy In An Expanding Universe), at least theoretically. nobody’s ever practically utilized it (afaik).
except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum
emm that is not the source of geothermal energy…
TIL - according to one source 80% of the geothermal energy comes from radiation and the remaining 20% is from the sun.
btw geothermal does not come from the earth’s rotation. it mostly comes from nuclear decay of heavy isotopes in the earth’s interior and the enormous heat capacity of the earth’s interior, which means it’s still warm from the friction heat from when the planet first formed. in other words it’s there since the Earth formed, independent of the sun.
also there’s another (practically accessible) form of energy that comes neither from geothermal nor from the sun: you can pull energy out of the tidal movement that comes from the moon’s changing gravity field as it orbits around our planet. i think that one’s not really being used though because the only way to really utilize it is to build dams across havens and important shipping routes and that interferes with trade, which is considered the more economically valuable activity from the two.
Tidal energy is being used in many countries. You don’t have to block the canals. You can build structures in coastlines, or just put underground generators that run automatically without any dams because the water moves without the dams as well
Didn’t the molten core also originate in some way from the sun?
Yes but no. The sun didn’t form the Earth. The Earth and the sun both formed from a primordial star. You don’t hear much talk about the star that actually birthed us, because theres very little we can say for certain about it. We can’t even say for certain if Sol (the sun) is a second or third generation star because we only have vague notions about if the star that produced all the elements that aren’t hydrogen in the solar system was long lived or went nova in under a billion years.
The molten core is hot because a whole lot of rocks crashed into each other. Also, nuclear decay.
Well… those are remnants of a supernova aren’t they? So the velocities to have meaningful impacts came from a sun?
Definitely not what I was thinking or trying to say though, and not our sun, but kinda still all the energy comes from at least, a sun.
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Probably
geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum
umm… that is not the source of geothermal energy…
Yes it is, and the earth is gradually slowing down because of it.
149.6 million km
how many American hotdogs is that?
At least three.
km
American
You can’t mix units like that
I’d want to say “about a week”, but I learned not to overestimate people, so probably 5 days top
I know you are joking, but we have several commercial fusion plants that are in the construction phase.
Now you know why Big Oil is pushing so hard for massive profits. Between renewables and fusion the energy landscape is going to change dramatically.
…and it’s still 20 years away.
That is the propaganda big oil pushes. You are correct.
I’m curious, I wonder why something like a large magnifying glass, hasn’t been used to heat up something like a special metal/material or even oil or something, which can somehow be turned into storable energy for the grid 🤷♂️
Other than solar panels? Consumers have to pay for their implementation, with power sold to the grid at such a low rate these days, that for single occupier dwellings, they’re not worth it financially.
Do you mean something like the Mojave Solar Project, which has produced 5.1 million MegaWatt hours since 2015?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Solar_Project
Or do you mean something like a smaller scale, e.g. home use? Look up Parabolic Solar Collector.
Or are you thinking of an Heliostat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat Something like the Solar Two, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat#/media/File:Solar_two.jpg
Yes, something exactly like that, thank you for the link, I wonder why this idea hasn’t been replicated more around the world.
I’ll take a read today, maybe I’ll find out why this is so.
I’m wondering, too. I haven’t looked into the topic for some time, e.g. back when Solar 2 was being set up. At the time I had calculated that an efficient heliostat could scale down to the amount of power that four homes would use. And that was when I started thinking of forming a solar power coalition with my 3 closest neighbors. Of course we’d need a place to put the heliostat. So we’d need to raize the home on a fifth property. And of course we’d need gardens, sized for sustainable agriculture. Going from Jeavon’s How To Grow More Food, my property would have enough space for me, but I would need more for my partner. Assuming 2 of similarly sized properties for each of the above would be 8, plus one for the heliostat equals 9 properties, which is pretty much the whole block. Of course the HOA was going to have issues with that, so we had to take them over their properties as well. That was ages ago, and so now we’re realizing the need for additional power to run a moderate sized Data Center, and there IS that ridge to the North, which would be good placement for some discretely placed Wind Turbines… lol
You mean a Dyson Sphere right?
First a Dyson Ring; have you read any of the Ringworld series by David Niven? And for the time being solar panels, solar architecture, cardboard solar fucking ovens, solar deathray from a satellite dish, etc, etc, etc…
Technically solar power is nuclear power ☝️🤓
All power is solar power if you go deep enough. Or to be more accurate, stellar power.
Tidal and geothermal are not.
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
All stars came from the Big Bang.
So it’s all Big Bang powered.
Checkmate.
You’re right, we are all just passengers on this bang bus
Planet wouldn’t exist if stars didn’t explode billions of years ago, checkmate.
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.
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?
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).
Stellar? Mmmm never thought about this word much. Constellation? Stars? Stellar?
I have some holes to go down
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?
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Big Bang Power
Fusion as well
Goated power generation method because no form of water needed.
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.
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.
Or if you’re Germany, use renewables to decommission your nuclear reactors while continuing to burn Russian natural gas and Polish coal 🙄
Because nuclear is just an expensive and time consuming distraction at this point. Itis usually brought up mostly to delay the energy transition
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 seawards, and not towards Tokyo, else they’d have to evacuate a 30 million inhabitant metropolis. That’s not an achievement of well controlled technology.
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.
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.
Unclear waste disposal is “solved” by saying “just leave it”. Thats not an answer
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.
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.
Do you not have any of your own backyard you could also dig up?
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.
no problem.
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If I could have a small modular reactor in my neighborhood, I would be all over that.
You mean we can make FREE ENERGY in our BACKYARD for almost NO Money? This is TERRIBLE!
-LITERALLY Conservatives!
I heard Hunter’s laptop ran on solar energy!!
Turns out the sun has a few competitive advantages over nuclear: free fuel, no radioactive waste, and it doesn’t need a decade of permits before it starts shining. The real bottleneck now is grids and storage. Imagine losing the energy race to a giant fusion reactor 93 million miles away. 😎
It has its issues, but yeah currently it is the cheapest source of power, it got so cheep that individuals can build their personal power plant for their home.
And we still have idiots fighting it. Even if you don’t care about environment (you are “drill baby drill” kind of person) it still makes sense economically.
The weirdest thing about it are fascists who support oil and gas imports from Russia and complain about woke left-green sleep paralysis demons but at the same time they have solar cells on their roofs and will tell you how much money they‘re saving them and how liberating it is. Call them renewables however and you can expect a rant about woke conspiracies and chemtrails or something.
The real bottleneck now is grids and storage.
And turns out nuclear has a few competitive advantages over solar. They are both great and serve different purposes.
Nuclear’s big selling point is that the sun goes down. Batteries have apparently missed that memo: they keep getting cheaper, better, and more efficient. Storage won’t solve every grid problem overnight, but pretending today’s limitations are permanent is a strange way to plan tomorrow’s energy system.
another big selling point of nuclear is it’s easy to drop in at old coal plants that already have grid connections ready to go.
pretending today’s limitations are permanent is a strange way to plan tomorrow’s energy system.
how long are you willing to wait for perfect energy storage?
obviously battery tech will improve, but the point is we cannot afford to assume that problem will be solved 100%, meanwhile experiencing more and more irreversible damage to our environment. We need to put our eggs into all clean energy baskets to get off CO2 as soon as possible. Not whenever battery tech happens to be ready to handle everything.
Nobody’s asking us to bet on miracle batteries: Wind and solar paired with storage are already cheaper than building new nuclear. Reusing a coal plant’s grid connection doesn’t magically make a reactor cheap or quick to build. If speed and CO2 matter, follow the numbers, not the nostalgia.
“Cheaper” is not the most important metric.
Maybe cheaper in money terms, not others, first of all space.
But how much would cost to build a solar farm with the same output of a nuclear plant, both on days and night ?There are a bunch of studies about that, the point of all those articles like this one coming out recently is that solar has become so cheap it even beats nuclear when you factor in the still very high cost of storing the power
“it’s easy to drop at a place that has grid connections”
Funny, because solar or literally any other plant will also benefit from having existing connections, and all of them are easier and cheaper to build than nuclear.
Nuclear is dead but for niche applications.
In your world, is “tomorrow’s energy system” exclusively solar/hydro?
No, in my world tomorrow’s grid uses whatever delivers reliable electricity at the lowest total cost: solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, storage, and yes, nuclear if it can compete. This isn’t a religion with approved energy sources. It’s an engineering problem with a price tag, and nobody gets bonus points for glowing in the dark.
Exactly, this is an engineering problem. You’re talking it like it’s an accounting one. Reliability, emergency use, redundancy, generating potential and universal scalability are the most important factors. Cost is a completely separate issue governed by separate factors, many of which are 100% artificial.
You’re stringing worlds together at this point.
Cost is the single largest factor in the deployment of new power plants, and solar is just impossible to match right now.
You could spend literally decades and billions building a nuclear plant, or start deploying solar right this minute and immediately reap the rewards of that investment.
It’s a no-brainer.
Cost is the single largest factor in the deployment of new power plants, and solar is just impossible to match right now.
I would say that even availability is an important factor, maybe more important then the mere price.
But it doesn’t need to be one or the other. The more diverse the grid the better. I’ll also say again, cost on both sides is mostly artificial anyway.
Dude, the cost is the final decision point after all those concerns are handled…
nobody gets bonus points for glowing in the dark.
where the fuck did anybody say that?
“Glowing in the dark” refers to nuclear power sources. Hope this helps.
yes i know that, genius. the point is that is not an argument people are using for nuclear. it’s a blatant straw man from someone clearly not engaging in a goood faith discussion.
A lot of people support nuclear for largely cultural reasons.
What cultural reasons would anybody support it for?
Nuclear is simply incompatible with renewables, if the price tag is of any concern to you. Nuclear reactors take long and cost a lot to build, still aren’t cheap to operate if you include the infrastructure cost of getting, handling and storing the fuel, can’t respond to changing demand quickly and are centralized.
Nuclear power plants need subsidies over their whole life, mainly to handle the risk inherent with nuclear fuel and the finincial risk of having to handle spent fuel for centuries to come. Nuclear power plants need to run at full power, which costs money every time renewables are pushing the energy price into the negatives. Nuclear power plants need a centralized power grid.
Renewables work in exactly the opposite way. They are cheap to build and maintain, they are variable and decentralized. So to use renewables effectively, you need to build a decentralized grid and ideally on-premise energy storage.
Renewable energy simply wins in terms of cost, risk-management and scalability. So the energy grid of the future will be purpose-built to accomodate renewable energy. Trying to force nuclear energy generation into that mix only makes sense, if you have a clear, non-monetary reason to do so, like enriching uranium for bombs. For strictly commercial use, nuclear power is dead.
Nuclear is simply incompatible with renewables, if the price tag is of any concern to you. Nuclear reactors take long and cost a lot to build, still aren’t cheap to operate if you include the infrastructure cost of getting, handling and storing the fuel, can’t respond to chaning demand quickly and are centralized.
The fact is that the price tag is not the only factor.
It is true that a 1000 MW nuclear plant cost about 10 times the equivalent solar field (about 6-9 billions for the nuclear plant Vs about 800 millions for panels) but at this point you use about 15 square Km to just match the output of the nuclear plant, with no storage, and only in the best case scenario.In a real case scenario the price tag of building a solar field that could replace a nuclear plant is probably not that different anymore.
To produce the same amount of power in every condition you could not install the exact amout of panels, you need way more (double ? triple ?) with the associated costs and space requirements.
And then you need batteries to be able to offer energy also at night and to store energy for the days when the sun is not enough to produce the energy required.I would say that to match a nucler plant a solar field would cost about half of it for the same power generation but with the additional problem that you need way more space, which itself is a cost.
Nuclear power plants need subsidies over their whole life, mainly to handle the risk inherent with nuclear fuel and the finincial risk of having to handle spent fuel for centuries to come.
We have nuclear power plants that uses less problematic fuel which is easier to handle and less risky.
Nuclear power plants need to run at full power, which costs money every time renewables are pushing the energy price into the negatives.
True, but when the renewables are not producing enough ?
Nuclear power plants need a centralized power grid.
Like a solar farm.
Renewables work in exactly the opposite way. They are cheap to build and maintain, they are variable and decentralized. So to use renewables effectively, you need to build a decentralized grid and ideall, on-premise energy storage.
No, they work in the exactly same way. What is different is that renewables can be made decentralized. Solar panels on the roof produce only for the house, not for the power grid (even if you can connect them to the grid to fill in the surplus).
I think you are comparing a nuclear plant with the small panels you install on your roof but you cannot make such comparison.
So the energy grid of the future will be purpose-built to accomodate renewable energy.
As far as I remember, what was told me when I worked in the field was that power grids does not care about the source, only the power: a power grid do not care if the 10 Gw power it transfer comes from a nuclear plant, a solar farm or from a squirrel on a wheel.
And the grid is already ready, we are already able (ok at least here) to send to the grid the surplus generated by the solars panels on the roof. And adding the batteries will not require anything done on the grid itself (at least this is what my collegues said).
Trying to force nuclear energy generation into that mix only makes sense, if you have a clear, non-monetary reason to do so, like enriching uranium for bombs. For strictly commercial use, nuclear power is dead.
What about being sure that a 5 days of bad weather cannot stop a society ?
You are mixing up many different things.
First, you don’t have to install the solar capacity in one huge blob. Solar farms also don’t have to be the only use of the land. You can still farm crops that like shade, you can hold cattle, build the energy storage right beneath the solar farm, a car park or what have you. There is also a lot of currently “wasted space”, such as roof tops or existing car parks. There are also swimming solar pannels that have the added benefit of keeping lake temparatures in check in the summer. You also have wind turbines that can contribute their fair share to the energy mix. So no, you don’t need to build huge over-capacity and you don’t need to bulldoze huge swaths of land to install solar. And the price to build solar and battery storage is still going down.
Where are the nuclear plants that use “safer fuels”?
Renewables are cheaper to build and run, meaning that renewable energy is always cheaper than nuclear power. You’d need to artificially limit the amount of renewables companies are allowed to build or subidize nuclear, otherwise renewables will price nuclear out of the market.
No, solar farms don’t need centralized grids nearly as much as nuclear power does. What is much more important for renewables is monitoring the local grids, so they don’t get overwhelmed by people providing power to the grid with their solar pannels.
And people already absolutely do provide power to the grid with their own solar pannels, you denying that just shows that you haven’t mich thought about/experienced local “grass roots” energy production. In Germany, the capacity of the local grids is one of two big hurdles renewable energy production is facing right now. Commercial and private energy producers are complaining that the utility companies are forcibly cutting their power plants from the energy grid to stabilize it.
And like I said in other comments already, hydrogen/natural gas power plants are a much better fit to handle extended lulls in wind and solar.
First, you don’t have to install the solar capacity in one huge blob.
We are comparing a nuclear power plant with renewables, it make sense comparing them this way.
Solar farms also don’t have to be the only use of the land. You can still farm crops that like shade, you can hold cattle, build the energy storage right beneath the solar farm, a car park or what have you. There is also a lot of currently “wasted space”, such as roof tops or existing car parks.
Partially true. but still, we are comparing solar with a nuclear plant not with a distributed system.
Obviously you can make some use of the land under the panels but you still need the same surface if not more.There are also swimming solar pannels that have the added benefit of keeping lake temparatures in check in the summer. You also have wind turbines that can contribute their fair share to the energy mix. So no, you don’t need to build huge over-capacity
You still need over-capacity unless you are planning to use some other sources during the night. If your needs is 1000 MW/h during the day and 300 MW/h during the night, during the day you need to generate the power you need and all the energy you will need for the night. It is the reason why if I put solar panels on my roof the system come with batteries.
and you don’t need to bulldoze huge swaths of land to install solar.
Yes if you want to make a comparison with a power plant, no if you talk about distributed installations (roofs and so on) but at this point you are comparing apples with oranges.
And the price to build solar and battery storage is still going down.
True, but this is the same as saying “some technology will solve the problem in the future”. What is the cost now to build a plant based on renewables source that can be a drop-in replacement for a 1000 MW nuclear power plant ?
Where are the nuclear plants that use “safer fuels”?
Thorium for one.
Renewables are cheaper to build and run, meaning that renewable energy is always cheaper than nuclear power. You’d need to artificially limit the amount of renewables companies are allowed to build or subidize nuclear, otherwise renewables will price nuclear out of the market.
As I said, cost is not the only factor. Renewables are cheaper, but less than you think when comparing the output, but they have other limitations: solar is good only by day and the generation highly depends on how much sun is out, now panels can produce even if not in optimal exposure but of course they produce less; wind turbines have a range of wind they can be used else they broke for example.
You can combine them, it is the most intelligent thing to do honestly, but if you want to use only renewables you need to generate more power than you need and then store the surplus to be used when it rain or there is not (or too much) wind.
No, solar farms don’t need centralized grids nearly as much as nuclear power does. What is much more important for renewables is monitoring the local grids, so they don’t get overwhelmed by people providing power to the grid with their solar pannels.
Still, you are comparing a single nuclear plant with a distributed system.
To the grid a nuclear power plant and a solar farm are no different: both introduce 1000 MW/h in the system.
In both cases you have a single point of entry to the grid and what is behind this point is irrelevant: you can also have an army of hamsters on wheels.What are you saying is the obvious thing: if we had n-thousand entry point we need to monitor the grid but even this is not dependent on how you produce the power. If you connect to the grid n-thousand 1 kW/h gas generators you have the same problems.
And people already absolutely do provide power to the grid with their own solar pannels, you denying that just shows that you haven’t mich thought about/experienced local “grass roots” energy production.
In Italy we’ve been doing this for ages, at the time we were even paid to provide the surplus to the grid. It is nothing new to me.
And like I said in other comments already, hydrogen/natural gas power plants are a much better fit to handle extended lulls in wind and solar.
Maybe natural gas, not hydrogen at the time
I’m not going to entertain the completely ridiculous and idiotic scenario, in which an energy provider is forced to install all solar capacity in one location. Solar’s biggest strength is its distribited nature and you want to take that away to make your comparison work?
There will be diversity in the future grid, but that diversity will be in the forms of energy storage used. I think the grid of the future is almost entirely solar but with different energy storage systems optimized for different time scales. For storage on the order of seconds, you use fly wheels to replace the spinning mass once provided by gas turbines. For daily swings, vast warehouses full of old electric car batteries work well. For longer term storage, you can use chemical energy storage or flow batteries. Think making vast tanks of ammonia or methane. You use excess electricity in the summer, store it as chemical energy in vast tank farms, and then burn it or run it through a fuel cell in the winter.
Although, for seasonal variation, the most practical solution might be just to spam solar panels. It just depends on the price ratio of solar panel cost to storage cost. You could have a grid that just had so much solar deployed that it is able to cover energy demand even on cloudy winter days. You just flat out build that many panels. Maybe then in the summertime you’re capable of producing 10x your normal power needs.
Seems wasteful, but this would just encourage a lot of very energy-intensive industries to become more seasonal. We have a farming season, why not an steal smelting season? Why not an AI model training season? Maybe for datacenters, the big runs are done during the summer when power is dirt cheap. Then the companies spend the winter planning next year’s runs, etc. Or the extra power could be used to make synthetic fuels from CO2 pulled from the air. Maybe we never figure out how to make batteries good enough to power a trans-oceanic jumbo jet. But maybe we don’t have to. You offer dirt cheap energy on a seasonal basis, and people will find uses for it eventually.
To be fair the construction time on a star is actually a really long compared to nuclear.
And what happens when the sun goes out?
Riddle me that, solar elitists.
It always reignites in the morning.
Take Germany that has solar and wind combined production capacity between 4 and 5 time its needs in electricity. Yet, It can not cover its needs. If you cannot produce electricity to cover your needs, you are far from being able to store an excess of your production. The last solar farm Germany was building south of Berlin had an estimated efficiency of 10%… The capacity of the power grid isn’t a light issue, and it is far from being resolved.
So before thinking about having a full working renewable power grid, you have to rely on a working mass production system. Germany choose coal and gas, which makes their emission of CO2 for producing electricity high during most of the year
Now take France. It has a solid capacity of electricity based on nuclear. It is among the least CO2 emitter in the world to produce electricity. Now, if their energetic politics was a future oriented one, France would ramp up its renewable capacity while maintaining its nuclear capacity (so building new reactors to replace old ones) to not loose on stability.
Nuclear isn’t the energy of the past, nor a nostalgic one. It is probably the most efficient mass production system for electricity we have to transitionning to renewable while not messing up the CO2 emissions.
Not all countries have ideal solar exposition, nor constant wind… Not to mention that hydroelectricity requires land specifics advantages and geothermal energy isn’t an everywhere solution, as drilling can cause problems.
There is no miracle solution, only partially satisfying ones.
Most of the country that have a 100% or near 100% renewable power grid rely on hydroelectricity. Which is not achievable by all.It’s not a race between technologies, it is a race to find the most efficient way to produce low CO2 electricity… while maintaining the confort of people and factory productivity, because, you know… Shareholders are the most important thing in the world… Apparently…
Searching for Germany, I see many articles on grid storage - basically at its infancy but exploding in popularity. I also see huge expectations on pumped hydro storage
Seems like you’re arguing that we should stop building out these proven, low cost solutions in favor of dumping tons more money into a problematic technology that will take decades and billions of dollarseach
The hydro storage has the same problem than the battery storage. You have to build a reliable eletricity production that cover your needs before being able to store your excess.
How much power can you store with hydro storage ? Do you have enough land/mountain to create the artifical lakes at different elevation ? Can you store enough energy to compensate the reduced production of solar power during winter ? For now, storage is either for short periode ,(days, maybe weeks, with batteries) or limited capacity (hydro pumping). If you are interested on storage technology you should look on the CO2 storage that Italy built lately.
It is complicated to rely on yet to develop technologies to power an entire country. Some can, they should, other can’t, and have to rely on non renewable energy.
I’ve written than Nuclear is probably the best way to produced decarbonated electricity while waiting for good solutions for the renewable energy. I’ve never said that we should stop developping renewable. While the world spend money on an energy and water consuming technoloy like IA, it would be way more intelligent to focuse all that money on developping renewable… Yet to produce solar panel, wind turbin, concrete, we still need fossile fuel or nuclear. So giving up on it would only make things more complicated.
Time is the missing value here.
- that disregards the massive time commitment needed to build out nuclear. When each plant takes over a decade to build and there is no ready supply chain, they can’t be mass produced, scaling out would take many many years
- while also ignoring that even the fast solar buildout takes time. Even with ready supply chain, mass production, mature technology, we need to expect scaling out to take 20+ years. We may not have all the answers for storage yet but it’s all known technology and we have 20+ years to figure it out. It’s ok to lag behind solar a bit
The problem in germany is that we been ruled by Conservatives who failed to expand the grid so the cheap energy (in the north) gets where it’s needed (in the south).
Expanding the grid and the storage is still cheaper than investing in nuclear.
And despite all the fossil driven propaganda the german power grid still operates very reliable. (Execpt when terrorists cut a single line, because again we’ve been ruled by Conservatives and they don’t seem to know what redundancy means)
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Do you mean that renewable are mostly concentrated in the north of Germany and fossil fueled power plant are mostly used in the south ?
While very impressive, solar power is not the the ultimate power source.
For us in the nordic regions we don’t get enough sun during the winter just as we need it.
We still need nuclear power unless we make ourselves dependent on other nations for power generation and transfer.
Just look at how Russia tried to hold Europe’s supply of gas hostage after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I don’t want us to ever be so completely dependant on another nation/entity again.
“Oh, but we can use batteries!”
Sure, but batteries degrade over time, meaning we will need a continous way to replace them, and since most manufacturers of batteries are located in China (same goes for solar panels) we will just become dependent on China for our energy needs, so we have replaced Russia’s gas monopoly with China’s solar and battery monopoly.
Untill we have the ability to build and deploy solar panels and batteries at scale inside the EU we should be careful about giving up our current traditional powerplants.
Modern batteries degrade much slower than earlier generations did. Especially if you remove the size- and weight requirements of mobile batteries, we already have battery technologies that push a century in usable time.
Cool, I didn’t know that.
batteries degrade over time, meaning we will need a continous way to replace them, and since most manufacturers of batteries are located in China
Batteries are largely recyclable and worth recycling, at least the ones of the scale used for grid-scale power storage.
And manufacturing can be done outside of china; it’s just a bit more expensive.
Do you realize how heavily Europe still depends on fossil fuels today? And that some of its nuclear reactors still use fuel supplied by Russia? If your big argument is avoiding dependence on hostile suppliers, swapping Russian gas for Russian nuclear fuel is a pretty spectacular blind spot.
Do you realize how heavily Europe still depends on fossil fuels today? And that some of its nuclear reactors still use fuel supplied by Russia?
Yes.
If your big argument is avoiding dependence on hostile suppliers, swapping Russian gas for Russian nuclear fuel is a pretty spectacular blind spot.
When did I mention using Russian nuclear fuel?
Sweden has actually a fair bit of uranium, we could mine it, have France process it and run our nuclear plants on our own fuel.
You may import turbines or panels, but no foreign government can turn off your wind or sunshine. Equipment supply chains can be diversified: imported fuel remains a recurring dependency. That’s a pretty important difference.
I just mentioned that we have the fuel and the enrichment facilities in the EU…
Having enrichment facilities doesn’t mean controlling the entire nuclear fuel cycle:
France still imports Russian enriched uranium and relies on Russia to convert and enrich recycled uranium. Longstanding contracts and missing European processing capacity explain why. Energy independence is clearly more complicated than owning uranium deposits.
A reactor needs an industrial fuel supply chain, while wind and solar need no fuel imports once installed. Nobody can embargo the breeze. If energy independence is the goal, why treat fuel free generation as an afterthought?
I feel like we have strayed too far away from my main point, solar doesn’t work when it is dark outside.
It is dark for long streaches of time in the Nordics.
When it is dark, we use more energy to heat and light our homes.
Batteries can’t supply enough power during that time.
Importing power is expensive.
So domestic power generation it is, and since nuclear power is one of the most environmentally friendly power sources we have and will work in the dark, it makes sense to use it to complement renewables.
*long term storage, cause batteries are good for ~24 hrs
also nuclear needs billions in upfront costs, plus hiring all those scientists and technicians isnt cheap.
That’s why they’re sending mirror satellites to blot out the sun unless you subscribe to Sun+. Can’t have free electricity for the masses
Edit: this would have sounded like the most batshit crazy conspiracy theory a decade ago; look where we are now
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.
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
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).
In UK in 2010, 10 new nuclear plants were announced. Since then 5 older plants have been shut leaving us with 5 active. 1 of the 10 new ones started construction and it’s massively over budget and delayed.
In the same time we’ve added about 20GW of solar.
New nuclear plants take like 10 years to build, and need to plan out a 50+ year useful life in order to be worth the up-front construction costs.
I wonder what the state of energy production in 2075 will be, where a nuclear power plant designed in 2025 and completed in 2035 will still have 10 years in order to break even on cost, competing with whatever the state of the art is on generation in 2075. Fusion? Widespread solar+wind+geothermal+batteries? Something we haven’t even dreamed of?
That’s why I’m skeptical of nuclear fission these days. It locks us in too long.
I’m all in on solar for most places.
Sure it uses a bit more land, but it makes no noise, no pollution, there’s zero risk of an accident, no targets for terrorism and your grid isn’t completely shut down if it is somehow turned offline.
You don’t depend on others for your own resilience. No need for oil, gas or uranium.
Unless you live in the high northern latitudes, there is almost no reason to not be building a durable and resilient battery-renewable grid
btw the reason why denmark and germany are building so many wind turbines is mostly because they’re so far north.
Solar should be in every parking lot and the median of every highway as the baseline, already space we’ve developed and can (more) easily add to.
Nuclear is slow. Solar is fast.
Modular reactors are fast. Ontario will have three online in 2 years.
Solar is still faster
You can have a solar panel up and running in like an hour.
Solar is fast and getting better continuously. The new battery technologies like Sodium Ion are eliminating the downsides to it. We just need a big battery shack on every block with safe sodium battery storage and solar panels on all the house roofs.
Nuclear has been slow, for a variety of reasons, but that is about to change.
SMR
Solar is fast now. We need fast now.
Solar and wind don’t render entire regions uninhabitable when something goes wrong.
Solar and wind alone can’t run a grid unless there is a significant amount of battery storage.
Okay? That doesn’t have anything to do with the issue.
Its possible to build reactors that don’t fail spectacularly. Just look at penslyvania with the three mile island nuclear plant or hell you could even look at fukushima. People still live around those locations.
edit: Build out more solar too because that is a great way to generate power but don’t snub other things just because they aren’t “perfect” from your perspective.
since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones
Most jurisdictions aren’t allowed to build nuclear, for nonproliferation reasons. That’s because nuclear technology can be used for nefarious purposes, and requires a highly functioning security apparatus in order to enforce safety requirements. So as a society we’ve tried to keep it out of the hands of those that the great powers have decided can’t be trusted with the tech.
Which then raises the uncomfortable question of whether we should trust ourselves, the current great powers, with this technology? If we plan out a 50-year useful life for a power plant, do we trust that the governments and companies operating that plant (and its supply chains and its waste management) will still be doing things safely in 50 years?
These days, I’m less sure.
Big star object provide energy for everyone for most of day, it s possible now to make it available for entire day with battery tech, affordable with less waste and risk than old fossils energy. Sounds good and should applied to all of place asap.
I have been do disenfranchised with this world.
I had a private education and strong interest into alternative fuels and power. I was so happy to learn about hydrogen fuelcell cars, solar, and wind energy.
I really thought we were all collectively passionate about saving the planet, back when I was 14 and learning about this stuff in grade 7.
Now, 25 years later and its a joke. Billionaires are going to burn up the world.
Same, friend.
You could see it in things like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted about how awesome the future was going to be.
It only takes a few of these guys to throw all of humanity in the shitter too. I mean, there’s the people that put them into power and all that, but it is the key people were people seem to love a charlatan.
The majority of human history was solar powered. It took fossil fuels to allow us to reach 8 billion with our current level of resource use.
Please describe how sunshine alone will sustain this unchanged.
Please describe how sunshine alone will sustain this unchanged.
Because you’re ignoring the hugely inefficient baseline of how much sunlight we have historically been able to harvest.
From this page, sunlight-to-biomass efficiency of wild plants is less than 1%. For crops specifically bred over thousands of years to grow as much useful biomass as quickly as possible in each season, the number ticks up to 2%. But even that number also fails to account for the periods in which fields lay fallow between seasons, or for crop rotation.
Then, once you have that biomass, converting it into a useful form of fuel for burning, or food for biomechanical energy, has huge efficiency losses along the way.
Meanwhile, solar panels achieve approximately 25% solar efficiency.
That’s how we can collect far more energy from the sun today than at any point in the past. Biology is inefficient compared to photovoltaics.
We didn’t have means to convert it into electricity for the majority of human history or machines to run with that electricity that made it possible to produce enough to support all those people. We’re able to do a lot of shit with just electricity now that used to require engines running fossil fuels
Best to think of fossil fuels as a shot in the arm of the development of human civilization. On that timescale, It was always going to be temporary, whether due to climate change or simply the limits of availible fuel. We were always going to need to use it to bootstrap onto something else within a couple hundred years of the invention of the steam engine. The math is reasonable and yes, total solar power isnt a problem (storage and distribution is, but total availability isnt hard).
Who said we need to sustain it? Personally, I think we should reduce our energy use. Fewer private vehicles and more public transit, for example.
Approaching this problem like it has one perfect solution is pure ignorance.
It doesn’t need one perfect solution, just needs the best solution to become dominant. Obviously solar is not perfect or even best in every situation, but you don’t need 100%.
In the end, the cheapest reliable kilowatt hour wins. Not the technology with the loudest fan club, the best nostalgia, or the most impressive lobbying budget. Energy markets don’t award participation trophies for expensive electricity.
The issue is that with solar “cheapest” and “reliable” depends on how sunny your geography is. It’s not cheapest and reliable everywhere.
Not really addressing what I said at all. But hey, the words sound good if you’re ignorant on the subject.
I don’t feel like this article is doing that?
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.
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.
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.
Now we just need a cheap sustainable storage medium for all that solar power and we’re golden. Anyone?
Batteries would like a word. They’re already storing solar power, getting cheaper, and improving at a pace nuclear construction schedules can only dream of. For longer gaps, pumped hydro and thermal storage can pitch in. Turns out the answer isn’t one magical box, but a bunch of technologies that actually exist.
From what I know, for large scale solar farms, batteries arent there yet. The maintainance and replacement costs cut into the money saved by using solar by quite a lot.
From what I know there are many many many such projects in the permit phase in Germany, all of them run on capitalist interest without state funding. The only thing between now and them getting build is our government which seems to prefer a 180° turn into the fossil age.
One thing is to build them, another thing is if once built they deliver
Not enough to reduce the benefits to zero and that’s all we need. As improvements come in you can upgrade the batteries over time and get better and better margins. But the system is already good enough for deployment.
It’s not as easy as just replacing the batteries though, each battery needs its own infrastructure and from what I extrapolate it’s not very easy to just swap out.
That’s outdated information, solar + batteries already reached parity in cost with nuclear and continue to get cheaper
Could you please point me to a place which talks about this new kind of system? Id like to read up on it.
For long term storage most countries will need more than pumping hydro. But green hydrogen can be produced from wind and solar to use in times of need in claasic power plants adapted for hydrogen. This technology also exists. But it is very inefficient, so should and will he used only as a backup.
Hydrogen is also a huge pain to store. It’s really hard to keep it from leaking.
Difficult? Yes. But it’s a solved engineering problem. There are chemical industries that need hydrogen. It is being transported and stored for decades. There are even small pipelines in operation for a long time by now.
But it can be stored as Methane in exactly those containers that many countries already have at a large scale for their winters.
Batteries for grid storage also don’t need to be compact or lightweight. High voltage infrastructure already has a lot of space where fossil fuel power plants used to be in formerly heavily industrialised places in Europe, we can make batteries the size of villages and not care about land use…
Adding to the other answer, for longer lulls in energy generation, the power can be used to create hydrogen gas that can be burnt in gas plants.
So, why isn’t everybody building hydrogen burning generators?
Right, because hydrogen is not working. It’s expensive to produce but most importantly incredibly hard to store and very dangerous if it catches fire.
I propose we use antimatter energy storage instead. No risk of it catching fire if you use anti-hydrogen!
Anti-hidrogen can still burn in the presence of anti-oxygen, but that’s way safer than being in the presence of regular oxygen
Because hydrogen-ready power plants are not the same as natural gas power plants, as hydrogen gas is not a drop-in replacement for natural gas. And right now, when natural gas is still relatively cheap and renewable energy is not yet absolutely dominating the energy mix, politicians are fearing the cost of building the infrastructure for generating, transporting, storing and burning hydrogen gas.
In the future, hydrogen gas plants promise to be the best fit to pair renewable energy with, but right now the cost of it and the availability of fossil fuels do not force the hand of the people responsible for planning the future of the energy grid.
In the distant future, I see purely renewables backed by hydrogen, and nothing else. But not in our lifetime. Over produce with renewables everywhere, and store the excess by using it to produce hydrogen, then store the hydrogen to power anything when renewables isn’t viable. The development and build out of renewables has started, but it’ll be a long time time will over produce, and the build out and development of hydrogen hasn’t really started yet.
Of cause it has started. Germany has plans of what is to be its hydrogen backbone. Electricity is set to be about 80 % renewables in 2030. So slowly starting to build up the hydrogen infrastructure starts now.
Gravity batteries in abandoned mineshafts. Put a bunch of rocks in an elevator and use them to spin a generator as they fall.
That’s an argument from 2017. Today the Technologies are there, and we can build it on scale. Battery for short term, green gas for the longer term.
It doesn’t really matter what we have if it’s not commercially viable, or we are missing something from the supply chain.
It is commercially viable
Battery tech has been there for at least half a decade. Many of Australia’s houses have solar (so much so that we have too much of it during the day so it’s free), and an ever increasing number have batteries. Many don’t need to use grid power ever. It’s not hard. The problem has been fixed.
As more EVs do V2G connections, that will get even less demand. The grid of the future is becoming a lot more decentralised and based off solar and batteries
Quite a broad statement to make globally.
Who says I was making a global statement? I was talking about Australia as a specific example. Let’s not be reading things that aren’t there now.
However, countries that have access to vast areas of sunlight, like those in naturally desert or savannah biomes could and should use solar as an option - and even those that don’t, should supplement their power production with it too. If every roof had solar worldwide, be that home or warehouse/factory, it’d be a huge reduction in the amount of electricity that needed to be provided by a centralised electricity provider.
Hydrogen works, as do pump-storage plants.
No, it does
doesnot. If it did, we’d have it everywhere.Yeah, yeah, same arguments as with solar, too expensive, not feasible, yadda yadda. Always the same.
No, it’s different with hydrogen. If you want green hydrogen, you’ll waste at least 50% of energy. Then there are storage and flammability etc. We have everything we need for using hydrogen today, but somehow it is not used besides minor experiments.
Yeah, but does energy waste matter if the other option is that you turn wind or solar input off? It should not run during high peak, of course, but if there is more energy in the grid than it uses? Turn it into hydrogen.
And storage, strangely that safety topic never gets raised with nuclear. If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage.
If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage.
They’re facing entirely different problems.
True, if we have huge surplus of renewables, then the cost doesn’t matter that much.
As per storage. Nuclear is far less problematic to handle in many aspects. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to store and if we go at scale, there would be massive amounts of hydrogen stored everywhere. A tiny spark away of a huge bomb.
And storage, strangely that safety topic never gets raised with nuclear. If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage
We can safely store nuclear waste. What do you think happens to all the radioactive waste produced by hospitals ?
For one you need special alloys to store hydrogen, to avoid corrosion.
And solar and wind alno have not the same security problems of hydrogen, I am sure you understand that a tank of hydrogen that for some incident detonate is pretty bad (to use an euphemism)
