Well, you see, the “Anti Magic Rock” Lobby has immense amount of power because of the money of the still lucrative “burning stuff and pollute everything” business.
Nuclear isn’t in competition with fossil fuels, it’s in competition with renewables. Renewables are better than nuclear by pretty much every conceivable metric. So fuck nuclear power, it’s a waste of money and time.
Fact: that is a fake statement.
Nuclear is not renewables competition.
Nuclear provides a base line energy production.
Both renewables and fossils produce a variable production line.
So within a rational production scheme the choice is nuclear+renewables or fossils+renewables. As renewables by themselves cannot work. Because there is months over the year when it’s not sunny, not rainy and not windy enough, what do we do for those months? We close humanity during those months because some political dogma says so?
Since we are talking hypotheticals, an ideal scenario would be a nearly completely renewables approach where each household is its own self contained energy production center equippef with solar arrays, wind turbines, thermoelectric generators. Various means of production. And have either propane or diesel generator as a backup. You know your average overall watt-hour usage for the household and try to have enough battery capacity to satisfy it for a week or two of bad weather.
Most household electrical wiring is redone for DC transmission and all consumer appliances possible are run straight on DC for optimal efficency. Energy efficent heat pumps for cooling and heating. energy efficent cooking appliances like induction heaters. Electric cars that act as backup battery banks would be awesome.
Industrial zones would be much harder as you need huge solar panel or wind turbine arrays to get the megawatt and gigawatts needed to run a factory. Most factories are decades old running on the most energy ineffient assembly lines you can think of. A energy mandate that calculated and taxed total energy efficency compared to national average for factory size and the would be a start.
Humanity simply does not “stop” because we go through an energy crisis. We did fine enough before the industrial revoltion and renewables + energy efficent consumer devices have improved a bunch. The economy would tank and what renewable energy made would be a premium commodity and the system would adapt to use it best as possible. But things would go on.
Are you sure renewables don’t require more extracted resources and more land usage per quantity of energy produced?
I feel like people are interpreting your comment with an American context. As a fellow European I agree, NGOs like Greenpeace are also to blame, and I don’t think those are financed by fossil fuel lobbies.
Burning down your house doesn’t poison people thousands of years later, so it’s not a perfect analogy.
Plus we have magic mirrors and magic fans that do the same thing as the magic rocks just way cheaper.
We’ve upgraded from burning our houses down to burning our atmosphere down which will absolutely poison humans for centuries to come. And since we now burn larger fires with black rocks, those release far more magic rock dust that poisons people than the magic rock water heaters do. Not to mention that fire has both killed more of us cave dwellers than magic rocks ever have (including the flying weaponry runes made from them) and have caused more ecological disasters, so fire is much worse.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
And the magic fans? The design is very human. They’d be a gift from the gods if only the spirit of the wind were always with us.
Summary: Magic rock still good, black rocks and black water make bad fire and hairless monkey make sick more.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
Sure, because mining uranium is total helaty and no problem at all.
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-015-0019-3
One must be very careful when digging for magic hot rocks or else you expose the evil spirit vapors. Our ancestors knew that where there is magic, some evil lurks. As they did then, we do now when we accept a better evil in return for the magic we believe may do more good than before.
We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
Yet we decided to release way more poison and even way more radiation by mining and burning fossil fuels. We just poison larger areas than any nuclear disasters. And with fossil fuels people actually get cancer, and with toxic byproducts, mutations and birth defects.
We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
We’ve had solar and wind electricity generation for centuries?
Eccentricity generators were invented before mass oil or coal use (1830s by Faraday).
We’ve had windmills, hydro, and even animal/human powered devices that could result in turning cranks for the generator to produce electricity - all for centuries at even that point. I would have to look up about when we first used solar to boil water, but I’m guessing there about.
. Don’t feed the troll 💩
Storage is a solvable problem. Whereas we don’t have the resources to power the world with nuclear plants.
Storage is a solvable problem
I’m not convinced it is. Storage technologies exist for sure, but the general public seems to grossly underestimate the scale of storage required to match grid demand and renewables only production.
The second half if most important. It doesn’t produce enough electricity. Renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper and are taking up the mantle to take over majority of power production in some nations. But it is harder to monetize and can be democratized and made pretty easily. It’s like weed. It can be taken away from bigger producers and therefore there is significant push back/lobbying against it.
Don’t feed the troll! We’re making progress fast. ☀️
Nuclear: As long as you don’t care about the magic rocks once the magic has decayed to a level where they’re not boiling water anymore
90% of magic rocks that no longer boil wsater is magic rocks that can boil water.
Funny how nuclear power plants are taboo, but building thousands of nuclear warheads all over the globe is no issue.
Funny how building nuclear power plants that can only (if you have dipshits running them) kill a nearby city is taboo, but climate change that will kill everyone is acceptable to the moralists.
Funny how solar, wind, and batteries are way cheaper and faster to build yet people are still talking about nuclear.
Stopping nuclear from being built is the problem.
We would have had a lot more clean energy than we do by now if we let the nuclear power plants that “would take too long to build!” be built back then, because they’d be up and running by now.
More letting perfect be the enemy of good.
If only people weren’t fearmongering about nuclear 50 years ago we’d have clean energy today.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best is now”
Solar and wind are cheaper yes. Batteries, no. If batteries were that cheap and easy to place we’d have solved energy a long time ago. Currently batteries don’t hold a candle to live production, the closest you can get is hydro storage, which not everyone has, and can’t realistically be built everywhere.
Look at the stats. The second largest battery storage in the US (and the world) is located near the Moss Landing Power Plant. It provides a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned (Which would make it the largest). That sounds like a lot, but it’s located next to San Jose and San Fransisco, so lets pick just one of those counties to compare. The average energy usage in the county of San Clara, which contains San Jose (You might need to VPN from the US to see the source) is 17101 GWh per year, which is about 46.8 GWh per day, or 46800 MWh. So you’d need 8 more of those at 6000 MWh to even be able to store a day’s worth of electricity from that county alone, which has a population of about 2 million people. And that’s not even talking about all the realities that come with electricity like peak loads.
For reference, the largest hydro plant has a storage capacity of 40 GWh, 6.6x more (at 6000 MWh above).
Relative to how much space wind and solar use, nuclear is the clear winner. If a country doesn’t have massive amounts of empty area nuclear is unmissable. People also really hate seeing solar and wind farm. That’s not something I personally mind too much, but even in the best of countries people oppose renewables simply because it ruins their surroundings to them. Creating the infrastructure for such distributed energy networks to sustain large solar and wind farms is also quite hard and requires personnel that the entire world has shortages of, while a nuclear reactor is centralized and much easier to set up since it’s similar to current power plants. But a company that can build a nuclear plant isn’t going to be able to build a solar farm, or a wind farm, and in a similar way if every company that can make solar farms or wind farms is busy, their price will go up too. By balancing the load between nuclear, solar, and wind, we ensure the transition can happen as fast and affordable as possible.
There’s also the fact that it always works and can be scaled up or down on demand, and as such is the least polluting source (on the same level as renewables) that can reliably replace coal, natural gas, biomass, and any other always available source. You don’t want to fall back on those when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. If batteries were available to store that energy it’d be a different story. But unless you have large natural batteries like hydro plants with storage basins that you can pump water up to with excess electricity, it’s not sustainable. I’d wish it was, but it’s not. As it stands now, the world needs both renewables and nuclear to go fully neutral. Until something even better like nuclear fusion becomes viable.
Funny how being polite didn’t convince you so now you’re trying to sell that being mean is going to stop you. You were always useless.
It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.
It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.
Its bad in the sense that is a crazy expensive way to generate electricity. Its not theoretical. Ask the customers of the most recent nuclear reactors to go online in the USA in Georgia. source
"The report shows average Georgia Power rates are up between $34 and $35 since before the plant’s Unit 3 went online. " (there were bonds and fees on customer electric bills to pay for the nuclear plant construction before it was even delivering power.
…and…
“The month following Unit 4 achieving commercial operation, average retail rates were adjusted by approximately 5%. With the Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery (NCCR) tariff removed from bills, a typical resident customer using 1,000 kWh per month saw an estimated monthly increase of $8.95 per month. This follows the previous rate impact in 2023 following Unit 3 COD of $5.42 (3.2%).”
So another $5.42/month for the first reactor built on top of the $35/month, then another $8.95/month on top of all that for a rough total of $49.37/month more just to buy electricity that is generated from nuclear.
Maybe the power company is greedy? Nope, they’re even eating more costs and not passing them on to customers:
“Georgia Power says they’re losing about $2.6 billion in total projected costs to shield customers from the responsibility of paying it. Unit 4 added about $8.95 to the average customer’s bill, John Kraft, a spokesman for the company said.”
So that $49.37/month premium for electricity from nuclear power would be even higher if the power company passed on all the costs. Nuclear power for electricty is just too inefficient just on the cost basis, this is completely ignoring the problems with waste management.
The next biggest problem with nuclear power is where the fuel comes from:
“Russia also dominates nuclear fuel supply chains. Its state-owned Rosatom controls 36 percent of the global uranium enrichment market and supplies nuclear fuel to 78 reactors in 15 countries. In 2020, Russia owned 40 percent of the total uranium conversion infrastructure worldwide. Russia is also the third-largest supplier of the imported uranium that fuels U.S. power plants, accounting for 16 percent of total imported uranium. The Russian state could weaponize its dominance in the nuclear energy supply chain to advance its geostrategic interests. During the 2014 Russia-Ukraine crisis, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened to embargo nuclear fuel supplies to Ukraine.” source
So relying on nuclear power for electricity means handing the keys of our power supply over to outside countries that are openly hostile to us.
Yes, of course. Because oil has never depended on outside countries that are openly hostile. No sire, thank goodness we rely on a power source that no war has ever been fought for, ever in history.
/s
Because oil has never depended on outside countries that are openly hostile.
That argument is so weak to me. No one is advocating “oil is the future! We need to build more oil consuming power plants!”. If people were, sure you’d have a great counter. Since that’s not reality though, its a Strawman response at best. Its Whataboutism at its worse.
