But have we solved solar + heat pumps in the winter problem? Hydrogen sounds logical but its not the hot thing right now.
Hydrogen is just portable energy storage. Different problem than generation.
And yes, heat pumps run down to -20C or so now.
- Yes.
- Hydrogen as a fuel is stupid and impractical, it’s dead because the thermodynamics suck and there’s no real benefit (even energy density isn’t far off the better batteries nowadays). Hydrogen is the new carbon capture, I.e. dead-end technology that people pull out to get headlines and fake some green credentials.
- If you want to store heat, you can just store it in a bunch of rocks wrapped in insulation. It needs to scale up a bit, because the cube-square law makes it cheaper and longer lasting the bigger it is, but at a 20 metre wide cylinder with 1 metre thick insulation, you can use summer solar to cover the entire winter’s heating needs for a city district with 1950s technology and no moving parts besides the fans in the air ducts (and a normal district heating system).
Unless you live inside the Arctic circle heat pumps will work in the winter. I think they’ve been proven to work down to -20c
Even if you did live somewhere where heat pumps were not viable for some or the entirety of the year you could still use solar and just heat with electricity. So that mostly a solved problem. The bigger issue is that they are a pain to install into existing properties especially if they don’t have ducted heating.
Where did you get that last bit? Mini splits are so easy to put in on old homes. They run the lines externally and make a hole into the wall. I have it in my 1920s home.
It’s a problem if you use radiated heating which is what most homes in Europe use. It’s not impossible to solve you just hook the heat pump into a heat exchanger and transfer the heat into a hot water tank. It’s just a hot water tanks tend to take up a lot of space and it’s an extra component to you need added.
In a stroke of pure irony I’ve recently seen a study showing that really old central heating (water based) works quite well with heatpumps.
Here everyone still says that you need floor heating or modern radiators or it won’t work. (Here air2air pumps won’t get grants because it is easy to use them for cooling…) But it looks like badly insulated pipes in the walls and huge ass cast iron radiators work great.I have a heat pump and it looses efficiency around 45*, and once u get below zero it just cant keep up. I use my heat pump on the shoulder seasons, but have to rely on my oil furnace for the majority of the winter. If I had the loot I’d get a cold weather heat pump setup as they work much better, but I just spent a boat load of money getting my chimney redone and having a wood stove installed in the hope u can stave off my oil bill with wood … (Chimney NEEDED done anyways, wasn’t a big deal to add wood stove at the same time)
Yes. You basically just shove part of the piping down past the frost line and congrats you now have year round heating via heatpump. The ground is basically a static temperature not all that far down and it solves the entire issue for really cheap during initial construction. Putting it in after the fact is quite involved though
They should do this in London to bleed all the heat out of the subway system and surrounding rock.
And this isn’t even a crazy new idea. I remember houses being built with geothermal climate control back in the '90s.
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.
You mean a Dyson Sphere right?
Dyson swarms would be more feasible. Heat rejection on a sphere would give an engineer a complete meltdown.
149.6 million km
how many American hotdogs is that?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Decaying nuclei is from supernova, but the rocks that formed the solar system and Earth? I’m not sure they can pinpoint an origin. I think atoms of a rock have different origins and at some point, they combined to form the rock, so that’s also an origin. To be verified.
Probably
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.
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.
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.
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.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Not when we buy all our panels from China.
You only buy them once though.
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.
Yeah, damn governments holding all the uranium for themselves. It’s just not fair.
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.
So far, they are not a thing though.
Sure they are, they’re just relegated to government use atm.
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.
Approaching this problem like it has one perfect solution is pure ignorance.
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.
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 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.
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%.
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.
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.
nuclear power is a fascist tech
Calm down, Francis.
Guess which single country is making all the PV panels?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear, both fission and fusion (which will never happen anyway) are relics of an era of cheap fossil fuels and relative world order.
Solar electricity is viable at scale but also indicates a change in our species’ living arrangements on this planet.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. If it’s not just about the power and the cost, there are actually a lot of other factors that we have glossed over.
Solar is cooperative and local while nuclear necessitates centralization. In a nuclear future, large nuclear generating corporations are the sellers and we are the buyers. In a solar future, we pool and exchange our power depending on current production ability and current electric need… comrade.
We are started to build the first commercial fusion plants now. You may want to update your rhetoric.
You may want to update your physics, engineering, and reality.
You can remain ignorant, it is up to you. Cheers!
I look forward to seeing them produce energy in a short 20 years from now.
You should read up on the topic, I know I was surprised, the breakthroughs have recently happened. Now it is just permitting and building. Obviously there will still be issues, but there is little question to the reality now.
I’ve read of smaller reactors that should speed up prototyping, but nothing about actual net positive energy production. That’s still far away.
This happened a long time ago. Prototyping is over. I was very skeptical as well up until they figured out a practical reactor design and are in the process of building and permitting several commercial plants around the world.
No, there won’t. You sound like you’ve never heard of a scam. Here’s one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaren
Just, no.
Living in denial as they are building commercial plants. Looks like Big Oil propaganda got you.
You do realize that you can support multiple things? You don’t have to be antinuclear to be pro-solar.
You need to choose a thing to build there is not unlimited budget.
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:
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Hungary - Aug 2026 Hungary plans to shut down only nuclear power plant amid drought
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Romania - Aug 2026 Nuclear power plants are being shut down as Europe’s drought becomes an energy crisis
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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!
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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.
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.
fire it into space futurama style
Would you trust a SpaceX rocket with radioactive waste?
We also have limited potential stores of uranium. When Chinese reactors all get on line, maybe 40 years left.
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
A hailstorm wiped out 350mW of solar in Texas in 2024. But, they learned that the angle of panels was critical to avoid damage and now they have a hail storm mode that increases the angle to protect the panels.
Not sure if panels can survive hurricanes, certainly not tornados.
350mW
Maybe they should keep some AA batteries around just in case another hailstorm hits.
AAA might be more portable though Texas might loose them in a strong gust of wind
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. 😎
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ideall, 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
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.
“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.
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 ?
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.
Dude, the cost is the final decision point after all those concerns are handled…
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.
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.
nobody gets bonus points for glowing in the dark.
where the fuck did anybody say that?
A lot of people support nuclear for largely cultural reasons.
What cultural reasons would anybody support it for?
“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.
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.
*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
also nuclear needs billions in upfront costs, plus hiring all those scientists and technicians isnt cheap.
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 priductivity, 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)
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.
Now we just need a cheap sustainable storage medium for all that solar power and were 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.
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.
Which is stupid and insanely expensive, since methane itself is an insanely potent greenhouse gas and methane has plenty of fugitive emissions.but, back up a second: isn’t the main reason for banking so much methane in the winter… heating? Because we can easily 10x the efficiency and 100x the cost - efficiency, by skipping the hydrogen - methane crap and storing heat directly.
See, you can store heat trivially in insulated thermal mass. “Thermal mass” is basically just mass, I.e. dirt-cheap materials such as rocks or dirt. You can skip a whole raft of fluid-handling stuff (methane and hydrogen being fluids, and fluids requiring pipes, pumps, leakage handling, inspections etc) by just using electricity from summer solar to resistively heat a 20m-diameter cylinder full of rocks wrapped in 1m of insulation, and when you need heat in winter you can just run air through the vents to extract that heat. It’s based on 1950s technology (probably older tbh) and most of the materials are literally dirt-cheap. Hook it up to district heating and you have an effectively infinite battery to handle your winter heating needs, based on informed summer renewables costs. Sand, insulation, a big cylinder (probably the most expensive part), resistive heating, an air vent. None of it is expensive (except the land, but those 300sqm can be located underground if it helps) and it’ll last for a century because there’s nothing that can even break.
It’s basically just a bunch of sand wrapped in an electric blanket (and an actual blanket). It’s dead simple.
Compare all that to a hydrogen electrolyser on a river, with a chemical plant to transform the hydrogen into methane (with carbon from where, exactly?) then a pipe or tanker or truck to transfer the methane to a big methane storage cavern, which is then piped to an individual furnace to burn. That’s a Rube Goldberg machine.
Sounds great. Let’s do that. We’ll need electricity in winter too, though.
Is that more or less efficient than filling a giant thermos with coffee?
Depends on the size of the Thermos. The volume scales by the cube while surface-area (I.e. insulation) scales by square, which means it’s exponentially more efficient the larger it is.
Water (or coffee) might be more energy-dense (thanks to its phase-change to steam) which would make the coffee theoretically more efficient (although you’d ruin the coffee when you boil it) but handling fluids like boiled water is expensive (even just the pressure - water expands 1600x when boiling, that’s why steam engines work) where 500°C sand just isn’t. So the cost massively favours sand/rocks.
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.
That’s outdated information, solar + batteries already reached parity in cost with nuclear and continue to get cheaper
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Hydrogen works, as do pump-storage plants.
No, it does does not. If it did, we’d have it everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, same arguments as with solar, too expensive, not feasible, yadda yadda. Always the same.
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)Solar was rapidly getting cheaper, hydrogen isn’t. Sooner or later, batteries will be more energy-dense than hydrogen - I don’t think you understand just how dogshit hydrogen truly is.
Hydrogen is, IIRC, ~30% efficient roundtrip (multiply the efficiency of the electrolyser (70%?) with the efficiency of the fuel cell (50%?)), where batteries are 90%. And batteries are waaay cheaper per cycle. That’s why BEVs are selling like hotcakes whereas surplus hydrogen cars from failed hydrogen car initiatives can’t be sold (that’s not entirely true - they’re being bought up and converted into BEVs).
So batteries are cheaper, their power source is cheaper (because they’re ~3x the efficiency of hydrogen - and BTW that basically won’t change due to thermodynamics, hydrogen is just fundamentally rather inefficient), and you need a ridiculously absurdly expensive pressurized pumping system just to refill your hydrogen tank (which BTW has huge problems of its own because when you pump hydrogen into an empty tank it expands, and when hydrogen or helium expands it heats up, which then needs cooling which takes a bunch of power and engineering work), what’s the advantage of hydrogen?
Well theoretically hydrogen is more energy-dense. Except there are two types of “energy density” (the term is often used loosely/wrong) - there’s power per weight (specific energy), and there’s power per volume (energy density). And hydrogen is literally the least dense substance in the universe, that’s why we filled airships with it, and it’s why we need pressurised tanks in hydrogen cars. Pressurizing the tanks helps, but not by much. It still sucks unless you’re using it as rocket fuel (which cares a lot about weight, not so much for volume)
So, hydrogen needs pressurized tanks. Pressurised tanks weigh a lot, and they weigh more the smaller the tank! (the weight overhead follows the cube-square law). And car fuel tanks are much smaller than rockets.
What’s worse is that unlike fuel tanks, hydrogen tanks need to be cylindrical (or theoretically spherical) to efficiently contain the pressure. Which means they’re a pain in the ass to fit onto a car, because they can’t be flat. They’re in practice way worse than batteries, volumetrically, because batteries can be low and flat on the bottom of the car, in the middle between the axles for a nice clean centre of gravity. You can sort of flatten the hydrogen tank by having two cylinders side by side, but that’s inefficient and adds a ton of weight, which undercuts the point of using hydrogen in the first place.
Hydrogen refills quickly… But so do batteries nowadays. And of course if you really care them you can just make batteries swappable (check out Janus trucks, they have swappable batteries that take less than 5 minutes to swap with a forklift, and they’re actually commercially used in the real world on public roads, unlike hydrogen trucks).
By the way, you know how BEVs can literally be charged with a $20 power cord plugged into a standard wall outlet? Guess how much a hydrogen refuelling station costs (keep in mind the entire thing has to be pressurised). Are you ready?
$3million.
LOL
(Even a DC fast-charger is sub-$100k (might be closer to $10k I forget)
All that to pay more than petrol costs (even post-Hormuz, hydrogen is still 10x more expensive IIRC). But still, if you ignore the practical range limitations, you still have more range than a BEV though right?
Yes, you do. I forget the numbers but it’s not that much better (like 20% or 30% maybe?) and absolutely not worth almost literally everything else being worse than batteries.
But I forgot the worst part of hydrogen: it can’t be produced by unfirmed solar panels. It’s not a flexible chemical process, so realistically you need batteries to firm the solar panels while they electrolyze. Chuck that onto the giant “technical breakthroughs required to make hydrogen fuel a thing” pile, I suppose.
We’ll still need green hydrogen as a chemical input, it just doesn’t make sense as a fuel.
Seriously, why adopt the world’s most explosively flammable gas that’s also a chemical Houdini when you could just… Not handle fluid transfers in the first place and just transfer electricity normally, with a wire?
Why would anyone consider mass-adopting a 30%-efficient battery?
Hydrogen electrolysis currently requires an iridium catalyst for practical long-term durable efficient electrolysis, and might always require one. Iridium is stupidly expensive and a major reason why hydrogen can’t currently scale. Chuck it onto the “technical breakthroughs required” pile, I suppose.
I do think hydrogen-based energy has a future, funnily enough - I have high hopes for the TABQ “proton batteries” (AKA hydrogen-ion, which is like lithium-ion but a positive hydrogen ion is literally just a proton. It should be theoretically more efficient - hydrogen is lighter than lithium, after all). It’s a cool tech, if very new, and I hope it succeeds. It’s just a normal battery, one made from an organic molecule (TABQ) with no need for rare materials.
I used to be on the hydrogen hype train myself, but it took me an embarassingly long while to realise that hydrogen was motivated by hype and wrong thinking more than any technical merit. Especially said thinking by chemical and car companies. Hydrogen is a fuel, like hydrocarbons, and if you can’t imagine a world without fuel - a world where you don’t take your car to the fuel station and fill it up - then hydrogen is the only alternative. BEVs charge slower because they don’t need to charge quickly at home - in other words, they’re different and we have to think of them differently. Hydrogen is in basically every way the type of round-peg square-hole thinking that’s preventing adaptation to climate change; it’s this absolute turd that people are nonetheless actually considering adopting.
Seriously, why would you want to reinvent fuels? To paraphrase Technology Connections, the problem with fuel is that you have to literally light it on fire and replace it every time you use it. CATL’s latest Sodium-ion batteries claim a cycle-life of 15000 cycles, whereas hydrogen fuel has a cycle life of 1. Battery cycle life is only getting better, hydrogen will always be single-use, just like diesel.
We have commercially-viable battery-electric planes (namely the Heart X1, a 30-seat regional airliner - not just a wimpy Cessna replacement, although we have an electric Cessna knockoff too) before we have commercially viable hydrogen planes. Because batteries let airlines save money on fuel. If there’s one place where hydrogen’s better energy-weight ratio should dominate, it’s aerospace, but hydrogen has nothing.
I guess what I’m saying is: if you were wrong and hydrogen is indeed a pipedream, what would look different to our current situation?
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
You mean we can make FREE ENERGY in our BACKYARD for almost NO Money? This is TERRIBLE!
-LITERALLY Conservatives!
George Harrison knew…“Here comes the Sun and I say it’s all right”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
fantastical technology
Ah, the “fantastical technology” of the 1950s.
It’s only prohibitively expensive the way that we’re currently doing it in the US, there are better ways.
Not in France, Great Britain or Germany either. Or Poland or Spain. To my knowledge not in Japan either.
Probably you are talking about some countey with lax regulations. Which is curious , because proponents of nuclear power always say Chernobyl could not have happened in a country with good regulations (so Japan probably is not included in that list either)
Fukushima survived an earthquake and then a tsunami before partly going prompt critical. The meltdown was incredibly controlled compared to Chernobyl.
That…is remarkable brain acrobatics to paint Fukushima somehow in a good light. Tell that shit to yourself. The lucky thing that happened to them was the wind blowing seaside, and not towards Tokyo, else they’d have to evacuate a 30 million inhabitant metropolis. That’s not an achievement of well controlled technology.
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.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.
My point is globally. Globally we need nuclear.
the planet has a finite amount of uranium. It’s rare.
New nuclear power plants and current reprocessing can absolutely make this a non-problem. There’s plenty of radioactive material.
I hear your argument, it’s old. But I also listen to news, and the storage problem seems to not be a technological problem anymore. Battery storages for the evenings/nights are almost trivial today, it’s a matter of just allowing investors to build.
For winters, the solution could be green methane in existing storages, and for that we’ll also need gas plants. Green methane is sorta inefficient to produce, I get that, but we’re still in a phase where we need much more solar and wind to get across spring and fall. Simultaneously we need to shut the existing production off in summer. Let’s not do that, and produce inefficient methane instead.
But for this transformation we’re constantly held up by the “what about nuclear” argument straight from the fossil lobby playbook. Sorry to say that, but if you are pro sustainability you should be careful whose arguments you repeat. Just like the individual CO2 footprint, there are a number of popular stories propagated by the fossil lobby with the purpose to sow doubt, and therefore stagnation.
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.
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
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.
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 experimenti g with thorium rn which is a LOT more safe; you also ignore that solar energy uses a lot of terrain
And also the mining and manufacturing and disposal/recycling for the panels. They don’t just pop into existence at the supply warehouse. Any full analysis should include the environmental entire manufacturing chain, regardless of whether it’s solar, wind, or nuclear.
Should also included the conseguences of installing them: will it disrupt any habitat? Will the color of the materials/object affect the temperature of the zone? Etc etc
they are experimentig with thorium rn
For the last 50 years.
a LOT more safe
There’s a reason why Texas bought 8 CANDU reactors.
Because nuclear is just an expensive and time consuming distraction at this point. Itis usually brought up mostly to delay the energy transition
I live in Finland, in a few months it’ll be -20C outside and about 0-10 hours of sun per month, depending on cloud coverage. Solar is not really an option for half the time here. Wind is bit better, but unfortunately doesn’t quite work at the coldest times.
It’s possible that nobody should live in Finland…
Sure, we’ll put it down your street and bury all the waste in your backyard if you don’t mind.
If I could have a small modular reactor in my neighborhood, I would be all over that.
no problem.
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.
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.
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.
Unclear waste disposal is “solved” by saying “just leave it”. Thats not an answer
Batteries can be recycled into… new batteries. The panels are mostly glass and metals.
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
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.
Solar is great for where it’s sunny. Not as great where it’s not.
True, but:
- Most of the world is actually quite sunny
- High-voltage electrical grid can carry power for thousands of kilometers if needed. Granted, there is some loss of power and maintenance overhead, but at the current rate, economics can still go in favor of this option.
Yeah I hope for Europe they just do some big farms in Spain and Morroco and make a really good grid for the rest of Europe.
Not true. Modern solar tech no longer needs direct sunlight and will still generate a good amount of power in overcast conditions.
That does mean you need more panels for the same output, yup. Good news is panels have become so cheap that it’s not remotely a deal breaker.
Shit has been bleak out there but the advances in solar tech are incredible and legit one of the most positive and exciting things going on right now.
I agree in general but as someone who lives in a place that’s grey much of the year and have evaluated solar for my location, the ROI is not amazing, and it’s pretty useless during winter. Even at current prices.
Ha! I have done the same evaluation for my location (also grey much of the year) and came to the opposite conclusion. I do have reservations about winter, but they’re more about the duration of the day. Thankfully that’s also when we get a lot of wind.
You gonna do home wind turbines?
I mean, you gonna do home nuclear?
They do have home wind turbines but they don’t look that practical.
Your place is not the world. In general PV is working fine.
It’s even better than you think. Organic and semi-organic solar panels are improving fast, so even disposing of the toxic metals involved in their manufacturing is likely to become a problem of the past.
Wake me up when it beats fossils:
2021?
Not quite the same format, but 2025. And not so much transition as addition. On top of still increasing coal and gas.
A lot of that coal is temporary in China before they get their reactors on line. They have 43 under construction.
Nuclear is like fighter jets, a relic of the profligate cheap energy 20th century.
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).
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.
Nuclear is slow. Solar is fast.
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
Modular reactors are fast. Ontario will have three online in 2 years.
You can have a solar panel up and running in like an hour.
Solar is still faster
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.
btw the reason why denmark and germany are building so many wind turbines is mostly because they’re so far north.
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.
Sorry if this is an uninformed question, but can’t we just pump infinity liters of water uphill?
Sure if you have the infrastructure and topography to do so. But this adds to the cost.
The problem is everyone always compares solar alone to nuclear in this comparison it looks really good. However when you include the cost of storage, it doesn’t look as good.
The analyses I’ve seen suggest that we will need to build at least some nuclear to achieve the fastest and cheapest decarbonization.
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.
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.
