Really makes me wonder what the world would be like now if Watergate hadn’t happened: https://atomicinsights.com/why-did-richard-nixon-so-strongly...

If Nixon hadn't sent his people to Vietnam in the late 60's and promise the Vietcong a better deal if they walked away from negotiations, He wouldn't have been able to run on 'winning the war' and we would have been out of Vietnam FIVE YEARS EARILER. Nixon was a fuck up, and is still screwing the world today. Piece of shit.

Well, at least the Viet Cong got their better deal, right?

Well they won the war, if that’s what you mean. But I imagine they would’ve liked to not be bombed for years and suffer enormous casualties and environmental damage

No need to go back that far, the irak war after 9/11 was a resource hog by itself. 600 trillions if I recall ?

The world would be a better place if Nixon never existed, how is it possible for one person to do so much damage

Or imagine if Chernobyl didn't happen.

Nixon canceled the Mars program where the vast majority of cutting edge nuclear research was happening - tech like the nuclear lightbulb (search my comments for details) that could have matured and saved us by now. He was no friend to nuclear, just the entrenched nuclear industry.

This is magical thinking. No, nuclear light bulbs would have made absolutely no sense for use on Earth.

Yes, they would have. Still do.

In fact, they built several experimental setups and were just short of testing fissile material before the program was canceled.

If anyone would like a starting point for research instead of lobotomized rhetoric like "this is magical thinking", request this paper: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19750027209

Yes, let's vaporize nuclear fuel. What could possibly go wrong with this stunning large brain engineering. It is surely no more burdensome on materials than solid fuel sealed away in metal tubes. /s

Yes that's how civilization was built. By pushing material science further and further. Do you think pressurized steam turbines just magically appeared?

Read the papers, they explain it all and characterize the tests.

Civilization advances by trying huge numbers of things, most of which are horrible and bad. The rare winning technologies survive.

Implying that nuclear lightbulbs for terrestrial generation would have been in this elite group of winning technologies is just ludicrous.

Vaporizing nuclear fuel is how we enrich it. Uranium => Uranium Hexaflouride sublimed at 57C => Gaseous centrifuge to separate the isotope. We've been doing it since the Manhattan Project, since before nuclear power plants were even a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Centrifuge_te...

Comparing uranium hexafluoride vapor at 57 C to incandescent vaporized uranium + fission products at 22,000 C. The materials problems with the latter are just a bit more severe!

Waste storage.

If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.

So instead we just pump energy waste / byproducts in the air?

Your terms are agreeable.

Waste is stored on site until it’s quite a bit less radioactive, this can and has been done for decades. The fear of shipping this cooled down waste and burying it in a mountain is entirely unfounded and the only reason it hasn’t happened is people spreading unnecessary fear.

There are a lot of problem related to nuclear, including its cost, the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid.

> the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid.

Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east and Russia for fossil fuels.

That's called false dichotomy.

Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the scary propaganda line that there's mountains of highly radioactive waste pouring out of nuclear power plants that is just waiting to irradiate our neighborhoods because we don't have anywhere to put it.

> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year!

And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle:

> Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.

Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

I agree that nuclear waste is an overblown problem, but that link entirely ignores the structural components that become radioactive. There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.

Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.

Not an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated materials, in addition to being harmful to biological entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay and then return it to the raw material stream.

The halflife of irradiated equipment isn't that long (it's what you call low level waste), you just bury it and wait till it becomes less radioactive.

You can't just announce the problem is "easy to solve".

The other article on the front page is about the decommissioning of Sellafield, predicted to take over a century.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375

elting it down doesn't make it less radioactive. It's still a significant health hazard to work with, making new construction with the remolded materials prohibitively expensive.

That's only a problem for a few decades though.

I don't think that actually meaningfully helps all that much. Storing it for 2 years, 30 years, or 500 years, are nearly the same problem from a political perspective. "Where to keep it" is really the question "where to put it", and then you leave it there because moving it is dealing with the problem "where to put it" all over again.

Today already gives an answer -- just keep it where it is.

It grows extraordinarily slowly, so neither the problem not the solution changes on human timescales

Oh, I got your answers.

> "Where to keep it"

On site. That's what we're doing and that's what works really well. Honestly, it is only the high level stuff that will outlive the powerplant. I know this might not be the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that we probably won't do any significant huge waste repositories (like Yucca Mountain. Though we do have smaller ones) until the waste reaches a significant volume and it actually becomes a problem. Human nature and the inability to do long term planning or something. The good news is that even if we increased our nuclear output, globally, by say 10x or something, we'd still have many decades to resolve that problem because so little waste is actually produced that it can be stored on site relatively easily. Maybe we put things off because in the future we're usually more knowledgeable and have better technology so things are cheaper. Maybe we're just dumb. Either way, it doesn't seem like a huge worry.

Because the radiation from those structural components is not harmful in the doses people would experience from them. The fear of radiation is wildly exaggerated and is based on the LNT model which every single scientific test of has proved invalid. The threshold appears to be about 25 mSv / day.

The worst American nuclear disaster, TMI, exposed some people to a radiation dose equivalent to a single trans-Atlantic flight. What do you think the radiation dose from structural equipment is? One of the worst examples from structural irradiation was when recycled rebar was used to build 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan, the highest annual dose received from that was 910 mSv, or 2.5 mSv / day, significantly less than the threshold dose of 25 mSv / day. The occupants of those apartments had fewer cancers than the average population.

Check out the authors article on this: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...

Now do church hill, and the cancer rates around the other mines on the Navajo nation.

A terrible mining accident/dam failure, not a storage issue of radioactive structural material. Now go ahead and compare deaths from mining accidents and dam failures from other sources of energy to those associated with nuclear fuel. What do you think the result would be when a nuclear reactor requires hundreds of thousands of times less fuel than any conventional reactor does or hundreds of thousands tons less of concrete and steel and rare elements than renewable generation does?

Mining accidents kill some ~10,000 people every year. Mining coal is a large portion of that. The worst damn failure killed 170,000 people.

If you don't like deaths from mining accidents then an energy source with millions of times the energy density is far superior. If you don't like deaths from dam failures then maybe putting a dam on every river isn't the greatest idea either.

What is the energy density in MJ/kg of uranium ore from rossing?

> There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.

That's actually the VAST majority of what needs to be contained. But these don't need to be contained for thousands or even hundreds of years. We're talking a few years (<=5). This waste also does not require shielding nor cooling and is mostly a precautionary factor ensuring that there is no cross contamination. Low level waste accounts for ~90-95% of waste, intermediate is ~5%-7% (shielding but no cooling. Short lived ILW -- <30 yrs -- is often stored on site and disposed normally. Long lived ILW is just thrown in with HLW in geological depositories for convenience) and high level/trans-uranic waste (<1%-3%) is what needs to be stored in a geological depository (several of which exist btw).

Just want to make sure you have the facts before you start forming big opinions. Things like concrete and steel are typically stored on site and later disposed of normally. It's not really the concern of nuclear waste.

Keep falling for the narrative of the nuclear power industry.

Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.

Man, the source I listed is literally from a guy with a Ph.D on the topic. Where exactly am I "falling for the narrative of the nuclear industry?" An industry which, by the way, hardly exists in the US anymore.

> Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.

Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?

You can tell that the biggest damage from nuclear power plant waste is emotional, by the fact that no one gives a shit about disposal of radioactive coal power plant ash.

Even though that shit is dumped next to where people live on the regular, with increases to cancer rates as you would expect.

What's the nuclear recycling failure? Isnt the US running nuclear plants off of decommissioned Soviet weapons?

> And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle

This is scifi. MOX has the fuel reused once to provide a small boost in efficiency after being reprocessed in an incredibly polluting weapons facility that needs an excuse to stay open and then the Pu240 still needs dealing with. And the "leftover uranium" is U238 not U235. There is no closed or "mostly closed" fuel cycle, it's just a shell game.

And your 40 grams doesn't include the 400 grams of non-radioactive heavy metal enrichment tailings, the 4kg of low level waste and the 40kg of milling or leaching slurry that would come out of any new mine or half of the existing mines.

Then multiply that all by 5 for full decarbonization rather than just electricity.

I would love a nuclear plant in my neighborhood, especially if I could buy power from it without going through PG&E. I have trouble imagining waste storage being cost effective here.

Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense. Small nuclear could go near where power is used. Waste should be somewhere with inexpensive land and in a convenient location for putting the waste there.

If there were container-sized reactors that produced a few tens of MW, they could go all over the place. Fancy neighborhoods could pay a premium to put them in fake houses. But the waste would probably be much more economical to handle by moving the entire container to a service facility, refueling at the facility, and handling the waste at or near the facility. This would be in an industrial area, just like other large warehouses or factories.

> Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense.

Like Bodega Head where you can actually visit the never-finished reactor pit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant

To be fair, if it was going to be a Fukushima-style boiling water reactor that can fail dangerously if it loses power, sticking it that close to a major fault line in an isolated area may not be the best idea.

I honestly don't believe that :)

At Fukushima, the reactor SCRAMed successfully and it was the seawater that took out the generators powering the decay-heat cooling system. If California experienced a wave that could crest Bodega Head's yuge natural seawall then we have bigger problems lol https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93...

Do you know how many people died from radiation as a result of the Fukushima accident? Zero. Maybe one depending on how you count.

It was nonetheless a messy and very expensive accident. Avoiding a repeat would be nice.

If zealous deniers of nuclear asked for storage of other power waste to be stored anywhere other than the sky, they'd realize their argument is worthless.

If zealous supporters of coal plants asked for the fumes to go into their neighborhood I still would not be on board. Have you ever seen the effects of coal power? Like really - lived there?

I have and it is not pretty at all. I would take a correctly stored nuclear waste right away.

I had an active nuclear plant in my neighborhood (Indian Point Energy Center) until the NY government made it untenable to continue the relicensing process. I would be perfectly fine with the plant continuing to run and continuing to have onsite storage of the waste. It provided 25% of the power for our county and NYC, employed 1500 people directly, and paid for roughly 1/3 of our children's schools. Shutting it down was a mistake, nuclear is so upfront capital cost intensive that it is a waste to stop a functional plant.

I hereby volunteer my bedroom for nuclear waste storage if it means more nuclear power right now.

I would very happily have one in my neighbourhood, so kindly stop slandering me.

Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid, you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue signalling over a gas grid is killing people, people I know, and I don't like people who support that. No "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free tech forty years ago. If you frustrated that you too are responsible for the destruction I now see everywhere.

If you start calling the other side "zealous", make sure you are not one first.

How much waste do you think will be produced? We’re talking about less than a typical landfill’s worth of waste for the entire world.

I'm willing to take some nuclear waste right here, and I understand if the glowing green barrels aren't available so I can take the green glass.

It takes too long to build, though. Because everyone is sitting around bitching about how it takes too long to build instead of building it.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago."

It takes too long to build primarily because opponents tie things up with lawsuits and challenges. Federal research money is available for competitors but not nuclear. One Utah Senator tried to for something like fifteen years to get money to build a modern thorium reactor sample plant. He never succeeded but there was plenty of money for things like Solyndra.

Thankfully thorium research has become so attractive that it's now attracting private money but we've lost a couple of decades.

I know, right? Why build a solar farm in 6 months or a wind farm in a year when you can spend five times as much and have a nuclear plant ready in 10-15 years?

In 6 months you don't even have the permission for building a wind farm (or a solar farm). Source: https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2022/10/15/solar-farm-...

If you think the NIMBYism for renewables is bad, imagine trying to build a nuclear plant in your backyard. In fact, the majority of problems with nuclear being slow to build boil down to "the NIMBYs wont have it".

This is probably a place where nuclear and renewable advocates could come together and fight back against the NIMBYs who would rather you just built more coal plants next to the poors. Because NIMBYism is just lower-case c conservatism with extra steps.

NIMBY can be solved with enough money and willpower; we don't have that right now.

It can also be reduced or solved by telling people outside "the area" they don't get a say.

What's "the area" for nuclear power though?

The hypothetical radioactive cloud could travel a few hundred miles in the wind...

If your only concern is radiation exposure, coal plants actually emit more radiation than nuclear. And that's deliberate, everyday emissions, not the accidental once-in-a-decade megaevents like Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Please do share the total cumulative activity of all bioacumulative elements present in all non-filtered fly ash ever released and compare it to the Cs137 that Sellafield poured into the ocean as part of normal operation in 1975 or the Kr 85 that La Hague releases on an average year.

I was replying to

>It can also be reduced or solved by telling people outside "the area" they don't get a say.

The area that gets a say, should surely be the area impacted by it.

Further. Whataboutism, comparing it to a rapidly obsoleting technology doesn't seem reasonable.

I suppose it's how you define 'build'.

If I build an IKEA bookcase, do I time the build from when I throw the instructions away, or when my significant other decides to buy it between mouthfuls of meatballs?

Because the solar farm is going to saturate the energy market on sunny days, and fail to produce energy at night and on cloudy days. There's diminishing returns on intermittent energy sources once peak production is saturated. Comparing intermittent sources of electricity to dispatchable sources of energy is comparing apples to oranges.

It's insane to fret about saturating the energy market when 40% of electricity is produced by gas on a sunny day and electric car drivers are gagging for differential pricing tariffs.

Intermittent electricity produced now is worth more than baseload in 14 years later.

40% of electricity may be produced by gas on a given day, but that 40% is being produced mostly at night - which is is not going to be displaced by further investments in solar. "Base load" isn't a reference to generation, it's a reference to demand. Base load refers to the load during the lowest period of energy demand in a 24 hour period. Unfortunately, load peaks when solar is producing no energy and load at its base when solar is producing the most energy [1]. Without storage, these excesses of solar production when load is at its base cannot be shifted to the time when load is at its peak.

Renewables look great if you just look at generation. But the goal isn't simply to generate clean energy, the goal is to displace fossil fuels. This is why non-intermittent sources like nuclear and hydroelectricity are, contrary to your assertion, far more valuable for decarbonization.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:Califor...

I live in NYC, and about 50% of energy coming to my apartment comes from nuclear and hydro sources, according to the energy company.

But NYC has a few gas-fired peaker plants, and during summer they are fired at the hottest time of the day, when AC load soars.

More solar power would certainly help this specific problem. I suppose that somewhere farther from ocean, where day and night temperatures vary more, a solar plant should have an even bigger effect in the summer.

(In the winter though the picture changes.)

Unfortunately the solar potential north in New York is pretty bad. It's not just the weather, it's the angle of incidence with the sun. The further away from the equator you go, the less light per square meter of land you get.

Indeed so! But I suppose there may be enough slanted surfaces facing approximately south. If solar were cheap enough to depoy, it could help. But possibly it may be not, due to labor costs.

I still see some (tall, multifamily / office) houses in Brooklyn and even on Manhattan adorning their roofs with solar panels. I know only one house that incorporated them right from the start though, it's on Coney Island, facing the ocean.

I think when someone comes up with translucent solar panels which can work as window shades on a skyscraper while looking good from the outside and not requiring a fortune to deploy, that will change the face of metropolises around the globe.

New York is at 40°N. It's more southern than most of Europe, where massive amounts of solar power is produced cheaply.

Actually, Europe's renewables - besides hydroelectricity - are mostly wind precisely for this reason. Wind is 12% of the EU's electricity generation as compared to 6% for solar [2]. Nuclear power is more than both combined at 25% [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

3. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...

Just wanted to say that your responses throughout this thread have been excellent

Europe's renewables are mostly wind because they have good wind resource and terrible local weather for solar. 40 degrees latitude makes very little difference to output and the 10% CF during mid winter available for fixed utility solar in new york still makes the energy considerably cheaper than nuclear.

The market disagrees with you. Solar booms in Europe. including the haunted frosty lands of Spain.

Most of what's south of switzerland or north of estonia has decent local weather for it. Finland's resources are quite good compared to even some equatorial places like PNG, just with higher seasonal variability. It's more the central part + UK. The point being that latitude is less important than weather, and as such claiming that solar is untenable in northern US or southern canada because it's merely okay in england is an obvious lie.

All of which is not to say solar won't be more important than gas, coal or nuclear in central europe going forward. Just that wind will take the front seat.

Finland has good weather for solar? You realize how far north they are? They gave good weather for solar in the summer when they don't need electricity for heating anyway. How much solar are they getting right now?

In case you aren't aware latitudes reduce solar energy collected per square meter of land. This can be motivated by tracking solar panels. But what can't be mitigated are shorter days in winter that get more extreme the further your are from the equator. In Helsinki right now the sun rises at 9:30 and sets just after 3pm.

If you lack the critical reasoning ability to understand how that could be useful or to understand that adding a thing that's biased towards summer to a thing that's biased towards winter gives you energy all year around, then we shouldn't really be listening to your energy infrastructure advice.

https://polarnightenergy.fi/sand-battery

How many gigawatts of sand storage have been provisioned (in terms of electricity output, not thermal output)? How many years of operational experience do we have? In fact I'm not aware of any project using thermal sand for electric storage, only for district heating. Finland uses about 87TWh electricity annually, working out to about 230 GWh daily. I'd be a lot more convinced of it's viability for seasonal storage if they're able to provision at least a day of storage.

I don't doubt your critical reasoning ability, but I do doubt the wisdom of treating the challenge of provisioning and operating massive seasonal storage on the order of terawatts as a solved problem because of a few district heating projects.

> How many years of operational experience do we have?

Yes. Huge problem. Very nice and good faith objection to something that can be done incredibly simply with a few dollars per kWh. What if some hot water or sand leaks out and contaminates an entire country?

Aren't you quoting numbers on grid electricity production?

In Europe many household solar installations are connected to batteries, and don't feed directly into the grid. You won't see such use in production statistics, only indirectly as a reduction in demand.

Some of those also don't produce electricity, but use solar for heating.

Maybe I'm wrong (either the numbers encompass that, or the difference isn't substantial). But it seems to me that you'd get a bias against solar if that's correct. Wind installations are usually more centralized, and feed into the grid.

Exactly. Worry about saturating when we are actually close to that happening.

It's not just close to happening, it already is happening in Australia and Hawaii: https://solarbuildermag.com/policy/grid-saturation-lessons-f...

So don’t build more solar in those locations. That’s not an excuse for other places where this is not the case.

Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use? It's only a matter of time until the "other places" are also saturated. How do you get from 40-50% decarbonized energy to zero?

The solution is non-intermittent energy generation. Hydro and geothermal are great for places that have the right geography and geology. But nuclear is the only other non-intermittent form of decarbonized energy we have*.

* Some would point to biomass, but I don't consider them decarbonized: the biomass could have been a carbon sink if it wasn't burned. An it's not a very scalable form of energy anyway.

But nuclear is a terrible complement to intermittent power sources. Nuclear wants to run 24/7 - not intermittently.

IMO, gas is going to be around for quite a while as a peaker for renewables - and the more renewables come online, the less necessary it is as a peaker, but it will still be needed.

Right, which is why I'm more in favor of building nuclear to satisfy load all day around. Peak demand is when intermittent sources are producing the least. We need some form of decarbonized non-intermittent power to accommodate that. Hydro is great where we can build it. For everywhere else, there's nuclear power. And since nuclear power is just as cheap to operate around the clock, the latter regions can just skip the solar and wind.

I agree with you: if we use renewables we'll be using gas for 40-50% of our electricity needs until some scalable system of storage is found (batteries lack the scale, hydro lacks the geographic independency). But that's not an option if we want to decarbonize. The goal isn't to just have CO2 output. The goal is to eliminate CO2 output.

>Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use?

The cost effective way would be with wind farms, pumped/battery storage and demand shifting.

(this would be a nice problem to have, by the way, but we are STILL churning through terawatt hours of gas while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing all over).

Nuclear power isnt dispatchable. It's not just 5x more expensive. It would overproduce during times when we don't need electricity and underproduce when we do.

Pumped storage is geographically dependent. Batteries are nowhere near cost effective. "Demand shifting" is also hugely expensive: you can't just cut industrial inputs without causing adverse effects throughout the economy.

Nuclear power is dispatchable enough to satisfy grid usage. The difference between peak and minimum demand is typically 20-30%. And it's a pretty gradual transition, happening over the span of multiple hours. You're right, you can't just crank nuclear from 0 to 100% in an hour like a gas turbine, but a 100% nuclear grid is totally doable by overcooling the turbines to reduce outputs during low demand. The French have successfully used nuclear for over 85% of their electricity, so this is demonstrably capable.

You do exactly what Australia is doing and build PHES and dispatchable loads like electrolysis for fertilizer and smelting as well as adopting EVs.

Also your SA example is cherry picking a time when a bunch of transmission infrastructure has been destroyed because it was built to sub par standards and hit by a storm. When this happened last time there was only large centralised fossil fuel generation and there were weeks of blackouts and other problems. Seems like a pretty good case for more rooftop solar.

Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable. Hence why plans for a renewable grid assume that compressed air, heated sand, or giant flywheels will deliver storage at orders of magnitude better than the existing battery and pumped hydro systems. Australia is not a big success story: Fossil fuels still comprise over 60% of electricity sources for Australia - it's no better than the USA. They are not using renewables for chemical and metallurgy industries. And this is despite Australia having some of the best weather and geography for solar power.

Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point. Sweden also gets 40% of it's electricity from nuclear and 40% from hydropower, too. It's hardly a poster child for the success of wind and solar over nuclear power. Intermittent sources need to be backed by a dispatchable source. For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.

> Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable.

They're viable even without storage as evidenced by installing new capacity at a rate of net generation of about 20% of the entire cumulative nuclear fleet per year. And getting enough storage is well understood, it is just not a priority in most places until around 70% penetration and progress towards decarbonizing transport is met.

> Australia is not a big success story: Fossil fuels still comprise over 60% of electricity sources for Australia - it's no better than the USA. They are not using renewables for chemical and metallurgy industries. And this is despite Australia having some of the best weather and geography for solar power.

Australia has languished under a government that was openly hostile to renewables for years. South Australia has been operating at over 90% gross renewables for a week and this is after only a few years of large scale effort with insignificant storage and limited ability for interstate transmission due to storm damage.

> Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point.

https://gh2.org/countries/sweden

https://gh2.org/countries/australia

Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies?

> For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.

Yes. 90% for a week right near the beginning of the transition is a 'suppliment'. Very sound conclusion from the evidence at hand.

This constant lying must be exhausting. Just sell your coal shares.

Where are you getting the idea that 90% of South Australia's electricity is coming from renewables? Fossil fuels still account for ~35% of the state's generation [1]. You mention "for a week", so it sounds like this was under ideal conditions in the middle of the Australian summer. I could also cherry-pick data from the middle of winter to show a particularly bad week. The only state that has more renewable generation is Tasmania, and they produce it mostly through hydropower. Again, the constraints of intermittent sources energy continue to surface themselves. Australia has not found a way to escape this.

> Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies?

As per your links, Australia merely has targets while Sweden has actually produced and delivered green steel. In fact, again as per the link, Sweden has made the world's first delivery of steel produced without fossil fuels. I'm struggling to see how saying that the country that has actually produced green steel is making more progress than one that has not is a lie.

1. https://www.energy.gov.au/data/australian-electricity-genera....

It should be said that until the entire European energy supply is carbon free, green steel is not only incredibly expensive, but also bad for the climate.

It would be much better in both ways to feed that energy into the electric grid to replace fossil fueled power.

Norway has a similar initiative to produce carbon free ammonium, but that, too, depends on dirt cheap electricity supply to be rational.

https://www.horisontenergi.no/blue-ammonia/

In both cases, Hydrogen is used, and I suppose if large amounts of hydrogen becomes available and very cheap (for instance due to excess wind power supply), it _could_ be good to already have this tech available.

But based on what I can see from electricity flows from Denmark and Germany to Norway, it is still very rare for the European grid to have excess power due to good wind conditions.

https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Power-system-d...

Norway can still absorb a lot more wind power on such days by temporary pausing hydro production. (Max hydroelectric electricity production in Norway is around 20GW, or about 4KW per capita).

Sweden and Norway both have 100% decarbonized electricity. Makes sense that they're the ones that are starting to make progress on decarbonizing chemical and other industries besides electricity.

Sweden and Norway are both part of the European grid, so excess power can be exported to Germany, the UK, Denmark, Poland etc where it can replace coal/gas based power. (In fact Norway and Sweden are required to do so as part of the ACER agreement.)

For now, that makes a lot more sense economically AND it replaces more carbon emissions per kWh.

> Where are you getting the idea that 90% of South Australia's electricity is coming from renewables? Fossil fuels still account for ~35% of the state's generation [1].

You're still making the point for me here. After only 5 years or so of actually supporting renewables and meaningful growth, and around two years of solar being the cheapest option, they're meeting 65% of the total electricity.

> As per your links, Australia merely has targets while Sweden has actually produced and delivered green steel. In fact, again as per the link, Sweden has made the world's first delivery of steel produced without fossil fuels. I'm struggling to see how you conclude this is a lie when your own sources explain how Australia has no plants or production, while Sweden has actually produced green steel.

Ah, so you're back to claiming that things that aren't already finished are impossible and irrelevant. Really working hard to find somewhere you can put those goalposts.

Also Lulea is in Sweden's north so your pathetic attempt at a gotchya was powered with hydro and wind, not Nuclear.

Home battery to story a day’s worth of power, $15k, job done.

And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work? What powers the streetlights? Or datacenters that run your internet services and cell phone networks? Or the smelters, factories, and chemical plants essential to a developed society? If we're going to load shift (read: turn off the power) to these industries, then the cost of reduced industrial output needs to be included. If you only run your smelters half the time, then your steel output is reduced by half, and the cost of steel increases along with any products that use steel.

The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Global battery production is only build ~400 GWh of batteries per year. A day's energy storage amounts to over a century of battery production. Storage is nowhere near as simple as "buy a battery".

1st half 2022 china alone produced 280GWh of batteries.

This is 8 hours storage for every W of nuclear added in the largest historical year of generation.

> And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work

Because moving water around using wind power is far future scifi tech and not something done for centuries.

Right and China is also set to produce 80% of the world's batteries. Emphasizing "China alone" seems strange shen china alone produces the vast majority of the world's batteries. Between that and the lockdowns in China, I'll be interested in seeing if the final figures for lithium batteries are even close to the 1,000 GWh global production figures that people had predicted. Moore's law unfortunately doesn't play out in heavy industry.

And again, the question is how do you move the water around when the wind isn't blowing? Or do you think citizens are just going to be okay with plumbing that only works on windy days. The point is that household energy use is hardly the only kind of thing that needs to be backed up by a storage system. Energy demand cannot easily be cut without making significant sacrifices in standards of living and industrial output.

Yes, people have used wind pumps to pump wells in villages and homesteads. But that's because they didn't need that water on demand, it's just a labor saving device used opportunistically. But it's a lot harder to pump water to the top of a skyscraper, and to a city of millions of people. This kind of pump [1] is not a drop in replacement for this [2] kind of pump.

In conclusion, we'd need a way to provision massive amounts of storage to get renewables and o become a reliable source of primary energy. It's costs are being measured in the context of opportunistically replacing fossil fuel power. But in a context where fossil fuel use is not permitted, it would be highly impractical without an incredibly performant form of storage. Perhaps heated sand, compressed air, electrolysis, etc. will deliver that. But thus far they haven't, and in the absence of such a storage system nuclear power would be a more reliable path of decarbonization.

1. http://www.historyofwindmills.com/images/historyofwindmills/...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Wood_Scr...

> I'll be interested in seeing if the final figures for lithium batteries are even close to the 1,000 GWh global production figures that people had predicted

Oh no, storage might only be buildable at a consistent 4x the peak rate of nuclear additions instead of 8x. Guess we better give up and use fossil fuels for 20 years while the nuclear industry starts up.

Not only are there a host of ways of covering constant energy demand with VRE, but you still don't seem to be able to comprehend the idea that water can go downhill. Why would we listen to energy advice from someone who doesn't understand ideas that are millenia old like a water tower or that bricks can stay hot for a day or two?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/realestate/how-new-york-w...

https://www.hkywater.org/education/i-didnt-know-that/why-wat...

For the handfull of situations where the buildings are too tall for more than firefighting water then batteries are more than sufficient.

So we displace the 70% of emissions that currently aren't electrical supply.

And oh look, now there is enough overprovision to increase grid penetration to 90%

Now with the leftover time and resources a little bit of storage still leaves us with change.

That does not mean the second best time is to start now though! The second best time to start could be never, assuming that renewables and storage will become significantly cheaper and more efficient in the next decades, which does not seem unlikely.

The law of diminishing returns suggests that it's unlikely.

The law of diminishing returns has thus far been wrong on battery and renewables. Previous estimates often were wrong due to assuming a slowdown. Not to say it can't or won't happen, but unlikely isn't the word I'd use.

The last two years were weird, especially regarding batteries due to prices increasing, but I'd put that on Covid and the resulting mess.

Especially as solar & wind is already cheaper than everything else by far, so the critical part is batteries which is a broad field with a huge increase in relevance & research over the past few years.

The chances are pretty good, but of course a slowdown could still happen.

Chemical batteries are nowhere near suitable for providing sustained load to the grid, and never will be.

What's happened is they're now cheap enough that for fast dispatch load levelling applications, you can install them where instead you'd have to consider bringing a whole powerplant online inefficiently.

In the next 100 years, I predict no overnight load is going to be handled by installed grid batteries as part of a major energy grid: it'll only ever be backup capacity to make smooth the small scale variations of renewables (i.e. a cloud blowing over a solar farm briefly).

Right now, household batteries are being installed by those that can afford them (and the prices dropping). They are enough to handle overnight load. And electric vehicles are becoming popular, usually with double or more capacity, which will replace the household batteries. The uptake is high and will only get higher because it saves people money. Even people who can't afford a household batteries themselves will be able to get one installed, as the cost saving will allow someone else to profit. So grid batteries are easily able to provide sustained load to the grid, by simply pricing power from the batteries higher than power direct from the generator. Household batteries kick in because it saves people money, and turns out you need very little grid storage at all to handle overnight load. The trick is handling black swan events, such as extended periods without wind or ash/dust blocking sun, across the entire grid area (usually solved by making the grid bigger, such as connecting to neighboring countries).

Any civilisation that can produce a 60kWh battery or three per residence for gigantic EVs can trivially produce a 30kWh battery for overnight storage. Prices are at around $150/kWh at the cell level and assembly costs are plummeting, there's no real reason to think 12 hour Sodium-ion, Iron flow or ZnBR storage won't be available for prices close to the PV required to drive it daily.

It won't be needed because renewables can provide 70-95% of hours just by adding dispatchable loads even without adding more PHES or CSP, but it's not because batteries will be exorbitant compared to non-renewable generation options.

While the law is there, the grid-scale battery tech is pretty far from the point where the returns start diminishing. I'd say that it's now in the lower part of the S-curve, with a lot of lower-hanging fruit to crop.

I'm saying this as a definite proponent of nuclear power and of renewables.

The experience curve for PV follows a power law, where a doubling of cumulative production reduces cost by about 20%. At that rate, when the world is powered by PV, the PV would be producing energy at < $0.01/kWh, and even less in the best locations.

With that cheap solar, it would be better to just heat up a big pile of rocks with resistive heat and use that to drive steam turbines, instead of using nuclear fission to make the steam. Artificial geothermal.

There's a company named Thorcon building a modern nuclear salt reactor in Indonesia that's actually doing it in what seems like a legitimately safe, scalable, cheap, easily reproducible way using shipyard/ship manufacturing techniques.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qtJE7VmyoU

> "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago."

But the second best time is now.

The average lifetime of a nuclear reactor is also ~40 years. Sure maybe some of those were early closures due to political pressure, but it's still a big challenge. Not only do you have to convince the public now, but also every 40 years or so

Everyone's saying "we should've started building nuclear 20 years ago" but the thing we really should've started 20 years ago is heavy investments in our education system

> It takes too long to build, though.

Compared to purely imaginary renewables that do not actually exist at grid scale, you mean.

How many net GW of new renewables were added in the past year?

How many net GW of new nuclear were added in the year with the highest addition?

> How many net GW of new nuclear were added in the year with the highest addition?

There were six (6) new reactors > 1 Gw connected to the grid this year, totaling 7.4 Gw capacity, and eight (8) new reactor construction starts, totaling 9.7 Gw capacity.

There were zero (0) new solar plants > 4 Gw (which you realistically need to be equivalent to a 1 Gw nuke) brought online in this year. In fact, there weren't even any > 1 Gw (equivalent to a 250 Mw nuke) brought online.

And no, putting a few solar panels on your roof isn't going to replace grid scale generation stations when it comes to running an industrial civilization. It's a fantasy akin to Mao's idea that people were going to be smelting iron in small furnaces in their back yard.

Hahah. Nice mental gymnastics. Utility solar doesn't exist unless it's all in one place and industrial machinery explodes if a joule of energy that comes fron a residential roof powers it.

You're really hunting for somewhere to move those goalposts to now.

Are you going to answer the question or are you going to cry victim?

I made a (provably) true statement, namely that grid-scale renewables largely do not exist.

You tried to change the subject to something else. Sorry, you don't get to do that. I don't owe you any of my time to discuss a different topic of your choosing, especially not when (based on our previous encounter) you:

1) don't understand the difference between power and energy

2) don't understand the difference between energy storage and energy production

and

3) are rude and abusive.

So lying and crying victim and then trying to ad hominem based on your failure at reading comprehension then.

If you want people to treat you with respect, you could try making a single good faith comment, rather than a ridiculous stretch using tortured definitions and then cry bullying when people point out how ridiculous it is.

I'm not "crying" about anything.

I'm just not letting you waste any more of my time.

Deal.

The best time to invest in wind and solar instead of wasting time and money on nuclear was before fission was discovered.

The second best time is now.

It's cheatcode with a 1% catastrophic failure rate we rightfully are not using.

The article is neglecting a few critical details, to say the least.

Then the money being wasted on all of the renewable stuff should be invested in nuclear safety improvements. Problem solved.

1% sounds very high for 3 failures worldwide over many many years.

What does the 1% represent?

Three?

Three Mile Island wrecked the plant due to government idiots keeping the operators from handling it right. There was basically zero radiation release (if you lived at the reactor fence it was more dangerous to walk across one street in evacuating than it was to stay put), it shouldn't really be counted.

Chernobyl was a major disaster caused by blatant disregard for safety protocols that never would have happened in a country with a functioning regulatory commission. The plant operators knew what the boss was doing was insane but there was nothing they could do about it.

Fukushima should have had a death toll of approximately zero (because a fraction of a person can't die--the expected death toll was well under 1) but hundreds died due to the politically motivated evacuation of the area. It probably wouldn't be a good idea to eat things grown locally for some time but the threat from simply living there was minuscule. (Not to mention that there seems to be no relationship between background radiation rates and cancer.)

Nuclear power is a half baked technology that hasn’t had any real advancement since the Cold War ended.

Unfortunately advancing the technology is beyond us. Like going to the moon, the costs are too high. Nuclear can and is commercialized, but the technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous given how relatively primitive it is.

Maybe go global scale with 10th gen nuclear, but what we have is barely better than 50 years ago still.

Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe, as in an emergency once their backup generators fail the core will meltdown.

A passively safe reactor was demonstrated 36 years ago.

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

Most reactors today are older or based on older designs, but this is largely for regulatory reasons, not because we don’t have the technology.

(And even these older reactors are among our safest energy sources: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)

Maybe if they’ve been maturing that experimental design for 36 years then you’d have a point, but they haven’t so you don’t.

And I'd blame anti-nuclear folks for keeping nuclear less safe than it could be, even though it's already one of the least dangerous energy sources in existence

It’s the government not putting money into R&D across the board.

Oh and it’s ridiculously dangerous to the point everything around it must be super protected and over engineered.

Nuclear power is not half-baked, it's corrupted. The powers that be co-opted it for nuclear weapons programs. We chose to invest exclusively in war-time applications while pretending to seek peacetime uses.

Only now are we going back and looking at solutions that don't create ingredients for fission and fission-fusion warheads, and the lack of progress there means that countries who we don't want to join the nuclear arm's race are in a prickly position because the nuclear plants they can build leave them with ingredients the UN doesn't really want to proliferate.

You could argue if it weren’t war we wouldn’t have nuclear power or have landed in the moon, and many other things. There are many technologies out there completely obtainable, but without the investment of billions it won’t happen.

Commercialization is the commoditization of an established technology. Many technological leaps are far beyond what any company is capable due to the amount of investment and risk required.

Biotech for example is so far behind compared to our advancements in computers.

Plenty of countries without nuclear weapons have extensive nuclear power industries: Belgium, Slovakia, Sweden, Korea.

Sweden had a nuclear weapons program, it was moth balled in the seventies but only tore it down just now.

Co-opted?

This is a weird history of nuclear fission.

The Manhattan project developed nuclear fission to make bombs

The weapons programs were extended to generate power

I didn't understand how true this was until someone in the pebble reactor camp pointed out that these ideas were already known before the Manhattan project, and that there was a moment where the direction of investment was still up in the air and the war hawks won. I figured that was something someone discovered in the 80's and took a while to popularize. Nope.

Coal power kills a million people every year. Go check how many die from nuclear then x15 that as a thought experiment and then tell me which technology is dangerous and half baked

Are you comparing deaths so far or total lifetime mortality of the effluent from both processes?

I guess people don’t like abandoning entire cities for decades when an accident happens.

Poisoning the entire planets food chain with mercury on the other hand…

Better to evacuate a city than kill a city--and that's what coal does. It's just the deaths are spread out and not attributed to coal.

Besides, Fukushima shouldn't have been evacuated.

> technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous

That's a common fallacy.

If you look at mortality rate by terawatt-hour for each energy source, nuclear is going to be orders of magnitude below coal/gas/oil.

Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.

Precautionary Principle doesn't work that way. Also you're assigning a terawatt value for a human life. We do that anyway often enough, but when you do it consciously it's ghoulish.

Like, how else should we talk about the topic in any other objective way? Sure, the death of any person is said and tragic. But true zero and true one probability simply doesn’t exist in reality. And we require energy, otherwise hospitals could not operate killing much much more people. So simply by that logic, one can minimize the amount of human suffering by nuclear.

And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy, release orders of magnitude more radiation, let alone other carcinogenic gases.

Humanity isn't a process of talking about things in an objective way. You're talking about people as if they are numbers.

> And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy

I once heard the circus of Congressional, reactionary policies described as thus:

"Something has to be done. This is something, so we will do it."

Yes, that's all perfectly true, and something absolutely has to be done. Many things actually. We're making good progress on a number of them. And turning off coal fired plants at a steady clip. It matters what you replace it with.

One of the things missing here is that when humans are involved, choices and the illusion of choice apply a multiplier on the risks. People volunteer for risks all the time, and they are happy to do so. Which is effectively what this is saying:

> Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.

If we only cared about traffic numbers we'd ban automobiles and force everyone to take public transit and airplanes to go anywhere. We'd save more people than we would by replacing coal with nuclear, and banning the cars would also reduce death by pollution by something like 10%.

Do you count deaths caused by mining rare minerals which is needed for the production of renewables?

Re your car example: And that’s why everything should be talked about in context. Cars are essential for our modern lives and it would be close to impossible the negative impact of its disappearance. And the relevant such context for energetics is the deaths per unit energy.

Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you don't consciously put a value on a human life, you'll probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh is exactly what you want in order to fulfill our energy needs with as few people dying as possible. If a little "ghoulishness" saves lives, then I'll happily be a ghoul.

If you're willing to look at it from a different lens, I'm actually increasing value of a human life that has already been assigned naturally.

The point of the "Nuclear waste" is that it is perceived as dangerous. If someone gives a numerical argument to rebate a perception and your comeback is that "using numbers like that is ghoulish", then I know who is winning the argument.

We know who’s already won that argument, yes, but we also spend a lot of time here talking about the dystopian mess created by reducing everything to a number. This is the same exact situation.

I didn’t make an accusation to win the argument. I made the accusation to make the accusation.

Some risk and complexity is just intrinsic. Flying is risky because of hitting the ground. Nuclear power is risky because of the nature of radioactive material. Mitigating those risks add complexity and cost.

You need more redundancy, higher quality materials, better QA, more pro-active maintenance, more security, etc. And many of your staff will need to be very highly trained and expensive. This all adds up in terms of expense and timescales. Flying may be cheaper but we all still drive!

We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal

> We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal

Driving has more deaths than flying because we hold flying to higher standards than driving. If both were held to the same standard, there would be more deaths flying. That's because flying is inherently less forgiving: the energy involved is higher (both kinetic and potential energy), and you cannot "just stop" like a land vehicle can.

The same applies to nuclear: if we built nuclear power plants the same way we build coal power plants, the health consequences would be worse than coal.

But we should be holding driving and coal to a higher standard. And many people are trying to do exactly that.

I think an interesting part of this question is consent. People have a reasonable understanding of the road and are implicitly consenting to that risk. And as a society we make a conscious choice to balance safety and convenience. But that is just not true with flying, nuclear or even coal power. People don't understand and they absolutely don't consent to the risk. As professionals and scientists that does change things. As a hypothetical example imagine a lab testing the cold virus. It needs expensive safety equipment and an ethics review board. A scientist who just has a cold just needs a box of tissues. It is ethically different.

I think a problem we have is that some historical things have managed to escape the ethics review board because people are used to them. Cars cause cancer and yet people are presumed to consent to that. A solar farm with no real impact has to spend years getting consent. It is unbalanced.

Maybe the biggets problem with nuclear is that it is mostly driven by careful responsible professional people. In renewables society can cut corners (relative to nuclear) and get away with it because risk is just so much lower.

> hasn’t had any real advancement since the Cold War ended.

That's just plain ignorance.

> Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe

Most reactors in use today sure, but we've already established that we haven't been building new reactors for a while now. Any new reactor built today would be failsafe.

The ‘new’ reactors are barely more advanced than the old ones and even more complicated.

Nuclear is pretty high end technology, it needs real investment to move forward. The government has shown little interest. Few reactors are built, what we have is aging, the number of people doing R&D is next to nothing.

I disagree, there seems to be a fair amount of R&D happening around small modular reactors, this is likely the future of Nuclear.

Small, self contained, fail safe, sealed reactors that can be build centrally on an assembly line and shipped to destination.

I've seen several different announcements over the last few years of different SMR type reactors.

They have been talking about that for 30 years. It could be done in a very short period of time if real R&D was put into it. Look at submarine nuclear reactors for example.

They have them, they exist but the regulatory frameworks to build and deploy any nuclear technology is horrendously slow.

But they are being built.

https://www.power-technology.com/features/where-will-the-fir...

Look at this project in Canada

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/research-reactors/o...

The application was submitted almost 3 years ago and we're barely halfway through the approval process.

So sure rollout has been mega slow but that doesn't mean the technology has not advanced it 30 years. Only that our deployment of it has been slow.

It would take about 6000 3 GW(th) plants to supply the world's current average rate of primary energy consumption (18 TW). And if these were today's thermal reactors we'd run out of the current estimate of the global resource of U (at < $260/kg) in less than a decade.

Increase in price would increase amount of mineable U. Nobody even prospected it in last 50 years. There is enough of of known deposits, why trying to find new ones?

That is like peak oil stories. Increase price twice or thrice and suddenly there is enough place where it is worth mining. Nobody even talks about peak oil anymore. It's not like U is significant part of a cost/kWh. We could get U even from seawater.

Sea mining as an alternative to renewables + storage is an absolutely riotous joke. Take a look at the results of practical attempts and see if you can find the punchlines (there are at least three).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30648847/

https://www.ornl.gov/publication/investigations-reusability-...

Powering a single 1000 MW(e) LWR reactor with sea water uranium would require an adsorber field covering 170 square kilometers of continental shelf. The average power/area would be considerably worse than solar.

You missed the really funny bit where to reduce costs to a "mere" ~$400/kg you attach the sea mining equipment to supply 5MW to an offshore wind turbine which in 2022 will produce around 10MW net. Then it produces enough vanadium to add about 1hr or storage in flow batteries for the wind turbine each year.

It also requires a constant supply of polymer that caps the EROI around 10.

Good thing we only extract 10% of the energy from the Uranium today. Also, you wouldn't go 100% nuclear with today's PWRs. Gen 4 reactors will be much more responsive and efficient with the fuel.

Yes, that's why I'm saying breeders would be required. To scale from existing operating breeder reactors to powering the world would require increasing the number of such reactors by a factor of 5000. Scaling up renewables and storage is a much smaller multiplier, in comparison.

> To scale from existing operating breeder reactors to powering the world would require increasing the number of such reactors by a factor of 5000

That's a very silly way to frame it because there's only like 3 commercial breeder reactors today. Why is that the case? Because energy has been cheap, we know how to do PWRs so there's little reason to do the work necessary to use Uranium more efficiently. It's only in the last 3 or 4 years that the world has collectively realized the extent of our problems.

> Scaling up renewables and storage is a much smaller multiplier, in comparison.

I feel that you don't appreciate the sheer number of machines we'd have to build to accomplish a renewable only primary energy design. How much mining and refining we'd have to do. Things that we cannot do at scale today without fossil fuels. Nuclear energy's main advantages are the sheer energy density you get, on demand. 6000 power plants to replace global primary energy is a bargain compared to the hundreds of millions of machines we'd have to build to do that with solar/wind. If solar/wind weren't intermittent, it might be doable. But we really suck at storing energy today.

Let's look at a large scale off shore wind farm in the US. We use offshore wind because they get the highest capacity factors and therefore the most bang for the buck. The Dominion offshore wind farm is a 112,000 acre 2.6 GW (peak) project planning to utilize 180 state-of-the-art Siemens Gamesa 15 MW turbines for a cost of 10 Billion USD. Let's say it gets an amazing 50% capacity factor because it is 27 miles off the Virginia coast. That means, it will produce 1.3 GW on average. But wait, we need battery storage because the output can randomly go from 0 to 100% in several minutes. Let's eyeball it and say we want to be able to provide an hour of buffer. So 2.6 GWh of battery storage. That is the same as the combined capacity of all the grid batteries that existed in the US in 2020. Source: https://sandia.gov/ess-ssl/gesdb/public/statistics.html

Or we could build a single APR-1400 nuclear plant for 1.35 GW on demand. The UAE just built 4 of them in 10 years, for 6B each. And each of them will last at least 2 times as long as the turbines.

> That's a very silly way to frame it because there's only like 3 commercial breeder reactors today. Why is that the case? Because energy has been cheap, we know how to do PWRs so there's little reason to do the work necessary to use Uranium more efficiently. It's only in the last 3 or 4 years that the world has collectively realized the extent of our problems.

There are zero commercial breeders today. There are zero demonstration breeders that use Pu239 or U233 as their fissile fuel. There is one reactor doing something approximating breeding by playing a shell game with MOX and has made no public claim of producing more Pu239 than it consumses under normal operation.

Your argument about not being needed does, however, apply to pumped hydro which has geography for thousands of >50GWh sites all around the world. Only a tiny handful of them are needed.

> I feel that you don't appreciate the sheer number of machines we'd have to build to accomplish a renewable only primary energy design. How much mining and refining we'd have to do. Things that we cannot do at scale today without fossil fuels. Nuclear energy's main advantages are the sheer energy density you get, on demand. 6000 power plants to replace global primary energy is a bargain compared to the hundreds of millions of machines we'd have to build to do that with solar/wind. If solar/wind weren't intermittent, it might be doable. But we really suck at storing energy today.

"Big number scary" is not an argument. What matters is raw materials and cost. These both favor monocrystalline solar by such a large margin that there's no contest. A mix with onshore wind using modular foundations has reached concrete parity with Gen III reactors or an EPR and offshore is not far behind. Nuclear reactors require less iron, but far more chromium. Only the latter is in anything approximating short supply and iron mining for either pales in comparison to the tens of billions of tonnes of ore that need to be mined (or leached where geography or apathy towards the locals allows) to fuel the reactors.

The overwhelming majority of Uranium ore is an absolutely terrible fuel barely more energy dense than coal if used in a PWR (but requiring much more processing), and its only redeeming features are low carbon emissions and portability once you mill and refine it.

> Or we could build a single APR-1400 nuclear plant for 1.35 GW on demand. The UAE just built 4 of them in 10 years, for 6B each. And each of them will last at least 2 times as long as the turbines.

You forgot the mandatory service contract to KEPCO for another $20 billion, that its net power is 1.1GW per reactor even when nothing goes wrong (Korea's rractors historically have about a 7% unplanned outage rate on top of the 15% planned) and that O&M which is on top of the service contract costs as much as replacing the entire wind turbine (rather than just repowering which is commensurable with normal maintenance on a thermal generator assuming there isn't a massive upgrade available for lower than the original price).

Breeder reactors. Fuel supply 142x. And it's not actually that scarce, demand more and they would find more.

We need the power now, not in 15 years. The magic wand that waves away all of nuclear's problems that prevent this from happening sooner, simply does not exist. There seem to be lots of delusional dreamers that pretend otherwise but they don't have a whole lot of GW of power to show for their wishful thinking.

Nuclear has been a no show during the Ukraine crisis. People talk about it. But it's all a bit academic. A whole lot of could have, would have, should have, but not a whole lot of actual new capacity coming online. What little there is under construction tends to have eye watering budgets and lots of delays. This crisis will be ancient history by the time any new nuclear planned this year actually comes online. Solar and wind on the other hand are outstripping nuclear in terms of growth by no small margin.

It's the cheat code we have and we're using it to make hundreds of GW of new power generation happen in the next few years.

Did you not read the article? Stop pulling the 15 year number out of your ass. It's plainly possible to build nuclear power plants in under 4 years.

Solar and wind are outstripping nuclear in growth because their contribution is laughably small, and there's plenty low hanging fruit that can be achieved with small investments.

If we'd invested in nuclear power plants in 2010, like we said we needed to and then we didn't then we wouldn't have been dependent on Russian oil in 2022 during a fucking war while playing with windmills and solar panels like toddlers in a fucking sandbox.

Look what all that supposed growth in windmills has given us. Ask the layed off employees from aluminium power plants if wind energy was cheap enough for them. You want to know how you can tell windmills are a joke the energy industry is playing on you? They're in every fucking Shell "we've changed" TV commercial, that's how.