News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets. Parent comment

Re:White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help mee... by EricE on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @01:01PM (#27052524)
Except if you are pitching it as a solution for the base load problem - where is anyone doing solar+hydrogen at scale? Where is anyone committing to doing it at scale - let alone in the near future? How do we know it will remain economical at scale? All kinds of fun things can happen between theory/demonstration and implementation in the real world.

We do nuclear at scale today. The vast majority of blockers from doing more nuclear at scale today are political; not technical.

That’s the other facet of this that always seems to get overlooked.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help mee... by suster on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @02:09PM (#27053503)
Do you have an example of a specific scaling problem which applies to solar+hydrogen and probably can't easily be surmounted?

Or is your argument just "We're not doing it yet, therefore it can never be done"?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help mee... by kolinko on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @04:28AM (#27115637)
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

You don’t need one huge plant to manage the baseload when we’re talking about renewables.

You can just as well have the same wattage distributed across multiple places in the country, removing a single point of failure and lowering transmission costs (although requiring a redesign of the energy grid).

[ Parent | on HN ]