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
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.
I know right. How can I become a super hero from exposure if I can’t get some uranium.
This is why SMRs are a thing, and may still take off.
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.
149.6 million km
how many American hotdogs is that?
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
Technically solar power is nuclear power ☝️🤓
All power is solar power if you go deep enough. Or to be more accurate, stellar power.
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?
Big Bang Power
Fusion as well
Goated power generation method because no form of water needed.
You mean we can make FREE ENERGY in our BACKYARD for almost NO Money? This is TERRIBLE!
-LITERALLY Conservatives!
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.
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.
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
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.
Thats not even the biggest problem with nuclear power as the waste angle, at scale, will hit us decades in the future. The more urgent problem hitting us now on even on existing deployed nuclear plants is cooling water.
The byproduct of nuclear power generation is lots AND LOTS of waste heat. You have to get rid of this every second to continue to produce electricity. This is why nuclear power plants are typically built next to a large body of water. However, with reduced water supplies in reseviors theres less water to use for cooling nuclear plants. A double whammy is with climate change increasing temperatures, the water that remains is already hotter than it was, meaning it can carry away even less heat.
If a plant can’t get rid of its heat it needs to curtail (reduce) electricity production. This isn’t just theoretical. Its happening now in 2026 to existing power plants:
-
Hungary - Aug 2026 Hungary plans to shut down only nuclear power plant amid drought
-
Romania - Aug 2026 Nuclear power plants are being shut down as Europe’s drought becomes an energy crisis
-
France & Switzerland - Aug 2026 Droughts cause nuclear power plants in Europe to reduce output
At the time when Europe was experiencing its worst heatwave is recorded history, many European reactors had to be turned down or off. 2026 isn’t the first time this has happened either, you can go back in the last 5 years or so and see many reports of nuclear plant curtailment because of lack of cooling capacity (cool water).
When we know global temperature are rising, it looks like this will just get worse. How can we say nuclear is the future when the conditions for it working well are already declining?
Fuck, that’s a terrifying thought. Bring on the panic attacks! Yay!
-
Being pro-nuclear was a very valid position up until a few years ago. Now solar has gotten so cheap that there is practically no reason to do it except to protect yourself against US imperialism.
You do realize that you can support multiple things? You don’t have to be antinuclear to be pro-solar.
This is true. I am mostly pro-solar and mostly anti-nuclear, but if we decided to build a huge multi-national plant to combat/reverse global warming and it needed obscene amounts of energy to operate, I think that might be a perfect task for nuclear. The same doesn’t hold true for AI data centers though. I hope those guys have to generate their power by daisy chaining potato batteries.
You need to choose a thing to build there is not unlimited budget.
Solar still has some huge problems when it comes to seasonality and day/night cycle. You either need massive battery build out or some other form of energy to handle base loads and/or offset when solar isn’t producing enough.
Not saying solar isn’t part of the future, but we literally can’t just rely on solar.
Battery tech is getting super good though, and the materials are recyclable. If solar becomes cheap enough we could even store it in creative (but less efficient) batteries like lake batteries or weight batteries and the like.
I had heard of lake batteries over the years, but never a weight battery. Thank you for teaching me something new today!
You know what else I haven’t heard of in a while? Thermal solar, where they use a parabolic mirror array to concentrate the sun onto a small tube full of water pushing a steam turbine. Even the plain steam could be used for heating and more. Steam can absolutely be concentrated under pressure (more of a capacitor than a battery since the temp won’t hold, but it does provide stability). The steampunk future from comic books is at our finger tips only we will generate the steam using the sun rather than big factories of iron and steel.
You haven’t heard of a weight battery because the weights need to weigh something close to a lake to be useful.
Companies come up every so often selling the idea and then people realise that the energy stored in the tower, mine, or whatever is about the same as a couple of EV batteries unless you have something the size of a lake.
You have to over build and you have to diversify. As many different types of generation as you can.
Nuclear probably has a role. However it doesn’t fit well in a dynamic generation scenario. It doesn’t like just sitting there waiting to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. It wants to be a full power all the time just due to economics.
If we could get tidal working, that would be superb. Regular, predictable and almost universal.
Solar panels have become more than ten times cheaper than they were a decade ago. They are easily able to gather half the energy of what they did a decade ago in the summer now in the winter.
So even in the winter solar is twice as price efficient.
Yes there is downtime but solar is a fast and cheap way to replace most electricity cost. Then the rest can be fixed with nuclear in 20 years. We need clean cheap energy now and we can mostly get it.
I’m not talking about price, I’m talking about generation.
I have solar panels, they are great. However, I get too much energy in the summer, not nearly enough in the winter, and no power at night. Since I’m on a grid that doesn’t matter too much for me, but highlights some of the issues.
Even if I installed a battery, I’d end up with extra power in the summer and not enough in the winter. Which just highlights the discrepancy in production. Batteries obviously help solve this, but some mixture of wind/nuclear/other is needed.
This isn’t a problem at City scales and beyond. You just can’t buy a bunch of nazi batteries so there isn’t a corp greasing politicians to build it.
Nuclear reactors could still be useful in things like the mass production of hydrogen through steam electrolysis or even using fancy stuff like thermochemical reactions.
I know China is planning on building the world’s first nuclear reactor integrated into an industrial area for the production of very hot steam.
The trends on wind and solar have been clear for at least a decade if not more. The time for nuclear was last century when it had no serious competition.
You can still like it if you are looking far enough in the future to realize it’s the only viable energy source for space travel past like… Mars. Further than that and solar panels just won’t generate enough.
To the disposal argument i like to ask; are we handling our waste from burning fossil fuels well?
Is run away climate change “doing it well”?
Would you rather your waste be buried in the ground or pumped into the atmosphere?
Containing the waste and burying it in the ground is the default for nuclear, meanwhile doing the same for CO2 is very challenging and it may never be viable.
But we are comparing solar to nuclear.
Being better than fossil fuels is a pretty low bar.
And yes better nuclear than oil but the whole thing about nuclear is that it has a very delayed start time, so the argument of needing it ASAP supports solar if anything.
IMHO another big issue with nuclear is concentration of power. nuclear is quite stable, but not always and when it fails you suddenly loose a huge bunch of production that becomes hard to replace. (and Im not even getting into safety here)
France had to deal with a lot of issues just this year, with around 20% of their nuclear plants unoperative, which increased prices dramatically.
Solar is mostly distributed by design (and need) and failures are smaller
fire it into space futurama style
The fact is that humans are just not well equipt to deal with problems beyond human scales.
We’re not good at accurately assessing risks beyond human time scales and we’re not good correctly prioritizing action when the benefit is beyond human time scales.
Big Oil predicted global warming pretty spot on, they just fought it and hid the findings instead.
To some extent I think we’ve gotten pretty good at long term predictions on things like this, but no one wants to hear it.
Global warming is a great example of how terrible we are at dialing in the correct priority for issues beyond human scales.
When some humans worked out it was coming, nothing happened - the opposite of nothing. As more humans became aware, more effort was put into styming efforts than actually doing anything.
Even now, as the effects are near-universally understood, present, and killing people - still we fail to act on the threat with anything like an appropriate level of seriousness.
I don’t think that’s fair unless by “we” you mean the oil companies and their bought politicians.
Agreed. Are we seriously forecasting 5000 years of stable, deep, under-mountain storage. For all those years, waste storage is a prime target for contaminating locales.
The other quality argument I’ve heard from Lemmy, is that the security requirements for nuclear plants are essential and costly, due to plants being a similar target for creating contamination.
Essentially, nuclear power is a fascist tech, due to the centralised, militaristic, security apparatus required for the life of the plant and waste.
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. 😎
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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)
Do you mean that renewable are mostly concentrated in the north of Germany and fossil fueled power plant are mostly used in the south ?
deleted by creator
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
*long term storage, cause batteries are good for ~24 hrs
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.
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
It’s cognitive dissonance of reality not aligning with the propaganda that indoctrinated them. They will never like it because words like clean, renewable and green are evil incarnate but they cannot give a proper logical explanation.
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.)
Did any of them mention why?
We are for the jobs the comet will bring.
Easiest to say when you’re not living near either
I know, those solar panels are just soooo loud
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
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.
Solar and wind don’t render entire regions uninhabitable when something goes wrong.
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.
I think the main advantage is how much easier and cheaper solar is than nuclear. Also apparently nuclear will have diminishing returns as the earth warms up, due to cooling issues.
Also with things like balcony solar, you can easily get a distributed power network.
That being said, nuclear is also great. Especially the newer powerplants behind produce very little waste material.
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.
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?
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.
That’s almost entirely been due to size increases.
The average new build rotor in the US is 133 meters, 5x the size of 90s era standard blades
You don’t think that’s significant progress? 5x the power.
Biggest Blades = More Energy
Yeah. Just bolt bigger blades on it. Simples.
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.
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
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.)
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%.
I don’t feel like this article is doing that?
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.
Not really addressing what I said at all. But hey, the words sound good if you’re ignorant on the subject.
Then, by all means elaborate on your perspective.
I personally view this issue as a fight between energy technology and energy resources.
If the main energy system is based on a technology that utilises the environment, such as solar, wind, hydro, tidal and others, of course energy output fluctuates due to conditions, but you can mass manufacture and slowly iterate on them overtime, just like how solar pricing has dropped almost exponentially.
If the main energy system is based on utilising a resource, such as natural gas, coal, uranium, thorium and others, of course you’ll get a ton of energy output and systems within can keep it perfectly stable, but the downside is that emissions, accidents, centralisation and the ethics of mining these resources are a pretty substantial issue.
Ideally, we should have an energy grid mostly consisting of passive technology based energy systems, with suitable resource based energy systems coming in second, since we can have the benefits of decentralisation allowing building based and community micro grids to continue functioning, while also having the redundancy of resource energy systems to account for any defects caused by environmental issues, such as volcanic ash blocking the sun in certain areas, but realistically the need for resource energy systems would be low, as the whole environment can’t be nullified by conditions. If there isn’t sun, there would likely still be wind, tidal and hydro, and vice versa for all.
It’d be interesting to see your take.
I don’t believe a decentralized grid is a good thing in most situations. In fact I think that’s extremely dangerous. So, we likely won’t find common ground there. I wont waste time trying to convince you otherwise.
The crux of your point seems to be that renewables should be the majority (excluding nuclear) and fuel based systems (including nuclear) should be the minority. If we take nuclear out of the equation I agree with you. I’m not anti renewables, I’ve spent my career working in various forms of generation, including oil, gas, comb cycle and hydro. My stance is that they all have a place, even gas and oil but especially nuclear.
Side note, the ethics of mining could be pointed at heavily for the current state of battery and solar pannel tech as well.
Thank you for putting it this way. I hope it helps others.
The issue is that with solar “cheapest” and “reliable” depends on how sunny your geography is. It’s not cheapest and reliable everywhere.
Unless you’re in Epstein Land of America where coal is now the golden standard for the predator administration
I have solar power at home in the USA. I just set it up by myself without asking permission.
Coal is for cowards, burn whale blubber and trees
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cmon guys, coal still leaves the most dust.
