Re:In Europe, Wind and Solar Overtake Fossil Fuels
by suddenlybananas on Friday January 23, 2026 @04:51AM
(#46730512)
The reason Nuclear takes so long is that people are neurotic about it and so the regulations are totally excessive. If we had a standardised reactor, it wouldn't be that difficult to churn them out.
Re:In Europe, Wind and Solar Overtake Fossil Fuels
by natmaka on Friday January 23, 2026 @07:00AM
(#46731472)
The nuclear industry rightly fears excessive standardization because the more units of a given reactor model are built, the more drastically production is reduced by the discovery of a serious bug that leads to their immediate shutdown.
This is one of the major design problems of SMRs (along with the abandonment of economies of scale).
Re:In Europe, Wind and Solar Overtake Fossil Fuels
by triceratops on Friday January 23, 2026 @07:30AM
(#46731693)
Since you clearly didn't read past the second sentence in my post I'm going to repeat myself. Why doesn't China repeal "excessive" and "neurotic" regulations and build more nuclear instead of solar? Rather than the other way around?
Re:In Europe, Wind and Solar Overtake Fossil Fuels
by suddenlybananas on Friday January 23, 2026 @04:03PM
(#46737897)
because they sell the solar panels abroad and can't sell nuclear power plants abroad.
Re:In Europe, Wind and Solar Overtake Fossil Fuels
by triceratops on Monday January 26, 2026 @09:42AM
(#46766202)
That's why they're installing 100x as much solar as nuclear domestically too?
Why can't they sell nuclear plants abroad? Sure Western countries won't buy them but the rest of the world probably would if the price were right.
As for
> those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create
You've swallowed Big Oil propaganda and are choosing to parrot it without thinking. The actual truth?
"Every year, [ICE vehicles] consume over 17 times more tons of oil (2,150 million tons per year) than the amount of battery minerals we’d need to extract just once to run transportation forever. Even when including the weight of other raw materials in ore and brine, one-off mineral demand would still end up over 30% lighter than annual oil extraction for road transport. And unlike minerals, oil products are promptly burned in internal combustion engines and must be replaced each year, forever
Admittedly this is about minerals for batteries. But solar panels are also recyclable.
Source: https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_b...