With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
Damn. I shouldn’t have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? I’m referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.
It’s not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldn’t make any sense.
And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isn’t a close call. With a 5 fold increase in being economical, we have plenty of money to spare to afford some batteries and hydroelectric dams.
I was looking at the building cost. Looking more into the Wikipedia article, it seems to account for availability. But the numbers are very speculative still, there is a crazy variation both for the specific data points and for the studies. Another big factor is the interest rate for investment which can double the cost of nuclear energy depending on the assumption.
Another thing that bother me is the speculative nature of these things. No photovoltaic power plant ever went through its whole lifespan. No significant energy production was made with variable renewable. Whereas nuclear was used for 70 years now. Yet the speculation makes it like nuclear will be expensive and unreliable and renewable will be cheap and reliable when the actual history is the exact opposite. Technology advances obviously, but still. I don’t consider renewable to be a tried and tested technology that scales while nuclear is.
Idk. Solar cells have been around for a while, too. Wind turbines are kind of simple devices. I bet an engineer can predict their maintenance cost and lifespan fairly accurate. Hydroelectric power plants have been around for more than 100 years. Electric cars have been invented before the combustion engine took off. Nuclear power has been around for some time. But you can’t use that as an argument and simultaneously argue about using thorium which large scale deployments are still hypothetical.
And I don’t think those numbers are 500% off. You can double some cost and were only at 200%. And they’re not complete speculation. They took the actual numbers of the previous year. And the years before that. These numbers are the ‘actual history’.
Pardon? Norway? New Zealand? Switzerland? Iceland? Sweden? Countless others I probably forgot because I’m bad at geography? The USA and China, Philippines, Indonesia all have major ‘variable renewable’. Thousands and thousands of megawatts of energy are generated this way as of today. Then there is biomass if you’re geologically not that favored by nature, but I barely know anything about that. And who says we can’t use the sun and wind? Of course we can also use those.
What proportion of those countries’ energy is renewable? Because that’s the big problem: when renewable are less than 50% of your energy, you can balance the load with the rest ; when it’s 80%, it’s a whole different story. No country has the most of its energy from renewables, and thus we don’t know if it can even work over time, it’s not proven. The scale matters. Producing a prototype is not the same as the whole industrial thing. That’s exactly what’s happening with nuclear btw: after 30 years of abandon, the construction is hard and more expensive and time-consuming than expected because we need to relearn how to do it. But prototype is not industrialisation. And that’s a problem renewable will run into: industrialisation. Where do you all the silicium you need for the batteries and solar panels? How do you deal with balancing the load? And there will be unexpected problems. Nuclear already dealt with these problems. Will renewable actually be able to expand everywhere? Because there isn’t wind and sun everywhere. I severely doubt Switzerland can power itself this way for example.
And then, isthere any solar or wind farm of more than 30 years? I’m pretty sure there isn’t because their lifespan is less than that and the last models that are so efficient are less than 10 years old anyway.
The experience also shows that all countries that went for renewables ended up using more fossile energy btw. Spain and Germany most notably. How do you answer this problem? This is not theory, this is what happened when countries decided to use renewable energy.
I’m sorry. Let’s end the argument here. We won’t agree. Some of your points are valid, most of them are plainly wrong or don’t contribute.
Yes, this page shows there are currently 4 countries above your arbitrary 80% demonstrating exactly that.
Yes. See above.
We’ve already established countries like Germany with close to 50% renewable aren’t a prototype. I’ve given countless other examples.
then don’t do it.
You’re sure nuclear is without issues nowadays?
That’s why we shouldn’t only do 100% of those. I’ve explained several alternatives and you can store and transport energy across the continent.
We don’t focus on batteries and solar. We need a diverse mix. In fact we don’t need batteries at all, we need energy storage. But this doesn’t have to be batteries. Same applies to solar. I’m living a bit far north and it gets rainy here sometimes. Maybe just take another kind of energy.
Btw. where do you get your uranium 235? Is that a different argument?
Well, how do you do it? Nuclear also is generating a relatively constant amount of energy. Day and night, 24/7. Nuclear also doesn’t balance the load. Same argument applies here.
Nobody says it has to be 100% this or that by tomorrow. It needs to be a diverse strategy. It needs to factor in individual geographical facts. If we’re only at 70% renewable tomorrow it’s better than 20%. It is a process. We don’t have to skip everything and jump to 100% immediately. Let those natural gas plants run a bit and balance out things, as they do today. Just put in the effort. Once there are cheaper alternatives, use them and don’t cling to old technology just for the sake of it.
Let’s scrap solar for the sake of this discussion. Let’s say material science is completely wrong and they vastly over-exaggerated lifespan of solar panels. Solar is a small fraction of the equation. Tell me what in a wind turbine we don’t understand. Windmills have been around for centuries. As have been generators. I’m not looking that up but I bet we had wind farms in the 70s. Water power has been used to generate electricity for more than a century. It works at scale for some time now. Geothermal works with steam and turbines. They’re also in your nuclear plant. Can you explain all this away?
As is everything that made some progress. My computer is faster and better in most aspects than the one I had a decade ago.
Politics. Germany was supposed to invest into renewables and phase out the old stuff. In a sane way. Then we switched off all the nuclear plants at once (after Fukushima). Obviously this requires buying energy from neighboring countries and ramping up other technology. We subside companies wreacking havoc throughout the Niederrhein for brown coal which isn’t even economical in the first place. Instead of investing that money into our future. We also killed off our domestic solar industry years ago. The war in Ukraine happened. That took us by surprise and we were dependant on Russian natural gas. I’m not an expert on Spain.
You’re right with your distinction between theory and the real world. What we should do isn’t always what we do (or did). When someone does something stupid, it doesn’t automatically make it right or wrong. But you’re supposed to learn from their mistakes. And factor in everything if you want to talk about what makes sense for the future.
The wikipedia article on renewable energy also has some facts about history and state of the art in green energy, so you can have a look at the world-wide numbers and decide if your perspective is that this is sci-fi or actually out there. I don’t say this is easy or possible without changes to the energy grid, society or whatever. And I don’t argue we need to do 100% solar. Or get rid of all of the batteries in the world. Or do everything with lithium batteries. Or the problems getting from 0-20% are the same as going from 80-100%. That’s not my argument. My argument is, if it’s the cheapest option in the long run. And the way to not further temper with climate. Why not use this? Why not invest in this unless there is a proper argument against it? We’ve already begun, made some mistakes and are getting smarter by the day. Nuclear has so many challenges that are difficult to solve. And looking at the numbers, it’s unlikely it will improve so much in its current form that it’ll become better than renewable anyways. I’d be happy to reconsider things once sombody gets a nuclear fusion reactor viable for real-world use.