Uranium ore distribution is also quite uneven. Fossil fuel distribution is also quite uneven.

Good thing you can pick it up and move it to other places.

Good thing electricity is cheap to transmit.

It's not though; that's one of the reasons all of the grids aren't interconnected yet.

"Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by truck/train/ship is immense.

Transmission costs only capital. Opex for transmission is practically free.

And capital isn't free. With physical goods, there is already a number of existing roads, train tracks, and ports.

Capital costs is why Hawaii has traditionally imported oil versus having an undersea power connection to the continental US.

Hawaii has abundant sun and wind, and deep ocean hard by for cheap storage.

When costs are all capex, the more you use, the less it costs. (And, as with nukes, the less you use, the more it costs.)

Transmitting power over long distances has its own problems and infrastructure costs. It isn't trivial.

Building pipelines for oil and gas isn't trivial either but we managed to do it.

I don't see what that has to do with nuclear plants or solar farms. My original point was that complaining that uranium isn't evenly distributed is a red herring because you don't build power plants on top of the mines. Whereas you do have to build solar farms where the sunny days are plentiful.

And you can deliver that renewable power wherever it is needed, for a one-time up-front cost, free thereafter.

No you can't. Transmission lines have upkeep.

You have to clear brush periodically, and repair them when they break.

Most places where people live have enough sun and/or wind to meet demand.

Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak. Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.

> Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak.

But they do. Normally. A fraction of the fuel transmitted through the pipe will be lost, seals, punctures, breaks, medium changes, over-pressure release through venting and so on.

> Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.

Not all that significant in short range transmission, and until we figured out HVDC a major factor in long range transmission but the number of HVDC links that are coming online is increasing rapidly making this much less of a problem. The gear used for this is very impressive stuff, it is a different level of semiconductor engineering than what you normally have kicking around the yard but it works and is deployed at scale already with very good results.

They do in fact leak a bit.

Power losses are measured in single digit percents per 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny places.

When opex is free, and capex is falling exponentially, you just put in a little more power upstream.

> Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak.

????

> Currently, the most complete bottom-up inventory of natural gas system emissions is the 2012 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). (2) It estimates an overall system-wide methane loss rate of 6.2 Tg/yr of methane, or 1.3% of methane transported (Supporting Information (SI), Section 16) and that the transmission and storage sector (T&S) is the largest emitting segment of the natural gas industry, (2) accounting for about one-third of methane emissions.

> For T&S stations that are required to report to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), this study estimates total emissions to be 260% [215% to 330%] of the reportable emissions for these stations, primarily due to the inclusion of emission sources that are not reported under the GHGRP rules, updated emission factors, and super-emitter emissions.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01669

Gas will literally bleed right through the seals at a certain rate, especially with the compressor motors, which is no different to the electrical losses from stepping voltage up/down.

And this is actually a huge problem with natural gas specifically because methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas... around 30x as potent as CO2 over 100 years. Losing a couple percent of your methane is a big deal. That is actually what is driving the push for electric-driven heat pumps for home use... it's better to lose a little bit of electricity than to have thousands of miles of poorly-maintained residential gas distribution that even in the best case are leaking highly potent methane through seals.

Not only they leak, but, unlike electricity, leaked gas is terrible for the environment.

How does one transmit electricity across an ocean?

Undersea cables. There are plenty between Norway and Germany for example.

In case anyone is curious, I found this interesting background reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable

That said, there is only one submarine power cable connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg

Comment was about undersea transmission, but I recently learned about DC transmission in the US West. Interesting advantages and trade-offs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

This is the future and it will eventually create a global connected grid. DC allows the coupling of 60 Hz and 50 Hz grids without a problem too.

Lots and lots are under construction. UK just committed to a 10 GW cable from Africa, that will be expanded later.

Thorium is an abundant alternative to uranium, and the technology to use it has existed since the 1960s.

I'm a layman so I'm trusting the smarty sounding guy on Reddit and his elaborate arguments, but it seems like Thorium reactors, while delivering on the promise of not being able to physically explode, involve materials so nightmarish to work with that it's been impossible to create one that's safe to operate by nuclear worksers

https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_satiric...

Thorium reactors never worked very well unfortunately.

What? They worked reliably and efficiently, and cost very little.

Maybe I'm misinformed. Which Thorium reactors worked reliably and cheaply?

You're not misinformed. Commercial thorium doesn't exist and prototypes have issues with proliferation risks and the lifecycle of the materials used to build the primary containment. It is promising and there are several groups working on these problems but it's a hard sell given that recent gen uranium reactors aren't gated by fuel costs and have established supply chains.

Indian Point tried thorium. They abandoned it, for reasons.

...and yet you'll find that there are very few people living in places with insufficient sun, insufficient wind and no geothermal/tidal sources.

Heavy industry is going to tend to move away from places with inadequate renewable energy. Why should they stay where energy is more expensive?