I’ve seen plenty of conservatives say they’d rather have a loud data center than quiet solar farm near their home.
I don’t understand.
Turns out we already have fusion power, it’s just been placed safely 149.6 million km away. The solution to energy independence comes up every morning.
All energy comes from the sun except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum which might as well be the sun because it wouldn’t rotate without something to orbit around.
Technically nuclear came from a different star. The sun won’t create those kinds of heavier elements until it burns through its hydrogen and helium fuel to start fusing its way up to lead, and I don’t think it’s massive enough to actually reach the kind of supernova collapse required to smash lesser elements together into heavier elements than that in any significant amount. So technically, fission is the only the form of energy that isn’t based on solar. It’s just the still-cooling-embers leftover from someone else’s dying star, a whole bunch of billions of years ago. I guess you could say the sun’s gravity at least attracted it all into this general vicinity though, at least until the Earth’s own gravity started pulling its own weight.
All accessible energy originates from the low entropy state during the big bang.
Well, it’s like I told my old friend Einstein, everything’s relative!
well actually there’s renewable energy on the cosmological scale (look up E. Harris - Mining Energy In An Expanding Universe), at least theoretically. nobody’s ever practically utilized it (afaik).
btw geothermal does not come from the earth’s rotation. it mostly comes from nuclear decay of heavy isotopes in the earth’s interior and the enormous heat capacity of the earth’s interior, which means it’s still warm from the friction heat from when the planet first formed. in other words it’s there since the Earth formed, independent of the sun.
also there’s another (practically accessible) form of energy that comes neither from geothermal nor from the sun: you can pull energy out of the tidal movement that comes from the moon’s changing gravity field as it orbits around our planet. i think that one’s not really being used though because the only way to really utilize it is to build dams across havens and important shipping routes and that interferes with trade, which is considered the more economically valuable activity from the two.
Tidal energy is being used in many countries. You don’t have to block the canals. You can build structures in coastlines, or just put underground generators that run automatically without any dams because the water moves without the dams as well
except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum
emm that is not the source of geothermal energy…
TIL - according to one source 80% of the geothermal energy comes from radiation and the remaining 20% is from the sun.
Didn’t the molten core also originate in some way from the sun?
Yes but no. The sun didn’t form the Earth. The Earth and the sun both formed from a primordial star. You don’t hear much talk about the star that actually birthed us, because theres very little we can say for certain about it. We can’t even say for certain if Sol (the sun) is a second or third generation star because we only have vague notions about if the star that produced all the elements that aren’t hydrogen in the solar system was long lived or went nova in under a billion years.
The molten core is hot because a whole lot of rocks crashed into each other. Also, nuclear decay.
Well… those are remnants of a supernova aren’t they? So the velocities to have meaningful impacts came from a sun?
Definitely not what I was thinking or trying to say though, and not our sun, but kinda still all the energy comes from at least, a sun.
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Probably
geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum
umm… that is not the source of geothermal energy…
Yes it is, and the earth is gradually slowing down because of it.
149.6 million km
how many American hotdogs is that?
At least three.
Found the guy who buys the fancy third of an AU dogs.
Well you know what they say about the length of your sausage. If it cant reach Venus, then what’s the point, really?
km
American
You can’t mix units like that
I’d want to say “about a week”, but I learned not to overestimate people, so probably 5 days top
I know you are joking, but we have several commercial fusion plants that are in the construction phase.
Now you know why Big Oil is pushing so hard for massive profits. Between renewables and fusion the energy landscape is going to change dramatically.
…and it’s still 20 years away.
That is the propaganda big oil pushes. You are correct.
I’m curious, I wonder why something like a large magnifying glass, hasn’t been used to heat up something like a special metal/material or even oil or something, which can somehow be turned into storable energy for the grid 🤷♂️
Other than solar panels? Consumers have to pay for their implementation, with power sold to the grid at such a low rate these days, that for single occupier dwellings, they’re not worth it financially.
Do you mean something like the Mojave Solar Project, which has produced 5.1 million MegaWatt hours since 2015?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Solar_Project
Or do you mean something like a smaller scale, e.g. home use? Look up Parabolic Solar Collector.
Or are you thinking of an Heliostat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat Something like the Solar Two, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat#/media/File:Solar_two.jpg
Yes, something exactly like that, thank you for the link, I wonder why this idea hasn’t been replicated more around the world.
I’ll take a read today, maybe I’ll find out why this is so.
I’m wondering, too. I haven’t looked into the topic for some time, e.g. back when Solar 2 was being set up. At the time I had calculated that an efficient heliostat could scale down to the amount of power that four homes would use. And that was when I started thinking of forming a solar power coalition with my 3 closest neighbors. Of course we’d need a place to put the heliostat. So we’d need to raize the home on a fifth property. And of course we’d need gardens, sized for sustainable agriculture. Going from Jeavon’s How To Grow More Food, my property would have enough space for me, but I would need more for my partner. Assuming 2 of similarly sized properties for each of the above would be 8, plus one for the heliostat equals 9 properties, which is pretty much the whole block. Of course the HOA was going to have issues with that, so we had to take them over their properties as well. That was ages ago, and so now we’re realizing the need for additional power to run a moderate sized Data Center, and there IS that ridge to the North, which would be good placement for some discretely placed Wind Turbines… lol
You mean a Dyson Sphere right?
Dyson swarms would be more feasible. Heat rejection on a sphere would give an engineer a complete meltdown.
First a Dyson Ring; have you read any of the Ringworld series by David Niven? And for the time being solar panels, solar architecture, cardboard solar fucking ovens, solar deathray from a satellite dish, etc, etc, etc…
headline is clickbait. here’s the only thing it relies on:
According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.
Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.
so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear
How do you read “solar is more efficient than Nuclear” from that title? And what would that even mean? The title is clearly about the amount of solar power generation, not efficiency.
you know how usually you look at statistics and assume they’re per capita? that was my mistake, though replace per capita here with per unit
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I mean, the literal meaning of efficiency would be the capacity factor (how much energy is actually extracted out of the inputs over how much energy the input contains) which is very measurable. I’ll concede that that is unfair, but even then there’s the extremely accepted measurement of land use per unit of energy:
(Solar is represented as CSP, concentrated, and PV, photovoltaic)
Edit: energy over land use→land use per unit of energy
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Yes, so nuclear uses 100 times less land for the same energy. The unit is hectares per TWh.
The United States could meet its entire electricity demand just by putting solar panels on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol.
The land argument is beyond grasping at straws. The last refuge of the incompetent.
this is true. I’m not saying that we should stop efforts to install solar to install nuclear instead. as you say replacing the 12 million ha of corn ethanol with solar would produce nearly three times the US demand of 4200 TWh/y (with the averages from the chart above, you have 12 million/1000=12000) i’m for solar. however, i’m also saying that the us could meet nearly 300 times its entire electricity demand just by putting nuclear reactors on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol. we don’t have to debase nuclear for solar
Do you just burn piles of money for fun? Is that your hobby?
Who gives a crap what the maximal power output per land area is? It’s utterly irrelevant.
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what is your standard of evidence? you’ve moved the goalposts three times now. first it was “define efficiency”, then “by the definition solar is better”, and now this which i still don’t understand
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what does this even mean
they’re more economically efficient than nuclear, which means they give you more bang for the buck
so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear
We’ve known the ROI on Solar/Wind has been better than Nuclear for decades.
Nuclear usage is flat because it isn’t profitable to build or operate. The efficiency of Renewables is economic efficiency. Cheap scaling, low overhead, high profit margin
The main advantage nuclear has is size. It can produce more power per hectare of land than either solar or wind can, and this will be even more the case if the small scale reactors that Canada has been researching ever become a thing - basically a power plant in a shipping container, meant to service remote communities.
People have been trying to do small scale fission for decades. They always slam headfirst into the square cubed law and the fact that fission plants were built giant for a damn good reason. Fission is so cost inefficient that the only remote hope you can have of making it profitable is if you build giant reactors and hope for big economies of scale. The hope of building small reactors on assembly lines has proven to be a pipe dream. Many have tried it, and it has failed again and again.
Which is definitely helpful for utility that’s constrained by space. For instance, with the nuclear powered freight shipping that Jiangnan Shipyard is looking to pioneer.
But for urban grid power or industrial production at the continental scale, space isn’t an issue. One reason why states like Texas and California are running away with renewable power even in the face of hostile political headwinds. Real estate is far cheaper than the energy is produces.
For the places that have enough land and environmental conditions suitable for wind/solar, that is true. In remote communities, just getting the materials for a wind farm there is incredibly difficult if there’s no warm water port for a ship to deliver the blades for instance. A nuclear reactor in a shipping container can be driven by transport on the logging roads or even air-lifted in. It’s not a universal solution, it’s something specific to fit a community’s unique needs.
For the places that have enough land and environmental conditions suitable for wind/solar, that is true.
Again, who doesn’t have this access?
In remote communities, just getting the materials for a wind farm there is incredibly difficult
Remote communities don’t have the kind of energy demand that nuclear power fulfills. Nevermind how it’s always going to be more expensive to build a nuclear generator than a big fan connected to a dynamo.
It’s not a universal solution
It doesn’t need to be, when the bulk of what we’re trying to replace is coal and natural gas.
I agree with this; I think the “universal” argument and subsequent infighting is propped up by the oil lobby to slow us down. I just think it’s important to highlight how efficient nuclear is. We should be using both good tools to solve this and part of that is knowing how good both are so they’re not unnecessarily ignored.
That argument holds for existing proven tech like large nuclear and solar, but convincing governments to invest in unproven and unlikly tech is a great way to prevent actual transition to occur at all. They sop up cash and give governments reasons to build nothing now, or eventually build expensive tiny demonstration systems that do not effect the overall fossil fuel market. That list would include things like small modular reactors, hydrogen power, fusion, etc.
Again, who doesn’t have this access?
There are communities in northern Ontario that are only accessibly by airplane ~6 months of the year, and those 6 months also have very low amounts of sunlight. They’re not quite north enough to be completely dark all day, but they only get a few hours of useable light per day in the winter.
This means that a) solar is less effective in the winter, and b) if there is damage to a wind turbine blade in the winter, they may not be able to get a replacement until spring.
Remote communities don’t have the kind of energy demand that nuclear power fulfills
Each reactor cell produces about 1MW, which is about enough to power a small town of about 1,000 people. They can also be air-lifted meaning if it needs to be replaced during the winter, that is still possible.
SMRs will be neat if they actually work, but there is no demostration that they can be remotely economically feasible. Even considering carbon emissions, it would be cheaper and more effective to improve the carbon footprint of the main power grid by a tiny fraction of a percent and then just give those small northern communities modern fossil fuel plants, maybe supplemented with renewables over time.
For large northern communities, grid connections are going to be the eventual solution either way.
if there is damage to a wind turbine blade in the winter, they may not be able to get a replacement until spring.
And if there’s damage to a nuclear facility?
Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized (by nearly everybody but the US and Russia) to heck. This is like saying trains aren’t profitable because of how much the US subsidizes roads. Even then, nuclear ROI is still better in the long term, it just comes slower.
Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized
Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It’s entire existence is predicated on public R&D. Virtually all of its generators are public projects. It’s a notorious money loser to operate. We still don’t have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands and in Superfund sites, too.
That’s not the reason it lags the alternatives, though. If public spending got us cheap energy with zero trade offs, everyone would be France by now.
Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels. It outperforms in defiance of subsidies, often growing market share in states that are actively hostile to its expansion.
Even in the face of enormous cuts to public spending and bailouts to coal, under Trump 1 & 2, renewables increased their market share.
That’s because renewables aren’t just efficient, they’re profitable. Enormously profitable. The private sector loves high margins on their capex spend, and renewables consistently deliver.
Even France is replacing nuclear with other sources in the long term.
Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It’s entire existence is predicated on public R&D.
You seem to be implying that solar cells weren’t. I don’t believe that is true. Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites. (PV was initially discovered privately, but so was nuclear.) Solar was considered a notorious money loser to the point where it was only deployed for spaceflight. It was only after 60 years of public R&D that private commercial solar became variable in the 2010s.
We still don’t have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands
This I’ll concede. In fact, in the US, it’s worse than “public lands”: it’s often indigenous reservations, so land the US doesn’t even own and sacred sites.
I’ll note that despite this being indeed a very big issue, nuclear land use is still two orders of magnitude less than solar for equivalent energy generation.
Virtually all of its generators are public projects. […] Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels.
Not true at all. In FY 2016 alone, US subsidies were just 415 million to nuclear, compared to 3036 million for solar (https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf Tables A3, A4). That’s nearly an order of magnitude. Nuclear is operated by companies just as solar is.
Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research. Nuclear only got 40. I am simply saying we should give it the fair chance before you can say that there really is no potential.
You seem to be implying that solar cells weren’t. I don’t believe that is true
Tell it to Bell Labs. Tell it to the the Solar Energy Industries Association. Idk why Americans couldn’t get on the ball publicly. But solar was squarely in the private domain for generations.
Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites.
They were brought about by the industrialization of satellites, certainly. But the R&D was all heavily privatized by and for the private telecommunications sector.
When the US began rolling out large scale solar power plants in earnest, Walmart became the nation’s largest installer and purchaser. No state or federal department came close to it.
The largest investors in new build construction are NRG Energy and Google. Even the state regulated utilities lag behind.
Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research.
Largely overseas and financed by foreign governments or private firms. The US efforts at subsidizing solar are regularly stymied and gutted by conservative governments.
Nuclear power plants are much more subsidized than almost anything on the planet.
How many private sector nuclear power plants are there? How profitable are they? What is the cost per watt?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28903948
There are zero public-sector nuclear plants in the US.
It is literally impossible to operate a fission plant without government subsidies. Private insurers won’t touch the things, as the potential damage they can do in a worst case scenario is something only the budgets of nation states can absorb. Nuclear plants always rely on national insurance schemes to make them viable.
Solar is much more efficient at turning investment per watt than every over form of energy production. It has been so for years.
Nuclear plants - with high start-up costs, national security risks and high output - will always require concentrating large amounts of power in few hands.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Greater inequality results in a worse society in just about every imaginable way. And nuclear will always encourage that more than solar.
Yeah, damn governments holding all the uranium for themselves. It’s just not fair.
I know right. How can I become a super hero from exposure if I can’t get some uranium.
Just use urinium.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Not when we buy all our panels from China.
You buy the panels, and they last for 25+ years though.
In those 25+ years, there’s time to develop your own domestic supply chain.
You only buy them once though.
This is why SMRs are a thing, and may still take off.
So far, they are not a thing though.
Sure they are, they’re just relegated to government use atm.
Too expensive
Depends on the location. In some places space is the commodity.
Like on the north pole maybe, but otherwise it’s just a massive loss of economy of scale.
Uhh any major metropolitan area without US large area infrastructure? Also, underwater.
Cheaper to drag a cable there.
I… don’t think you are thinking this through.
Technically solar power is nuclear power ☝️🤓
All power is solar power if you go deep enough. Or to be more accurate, stellar power.
Tidal and geothermal are not.
You’re not deep enough yet, tides and earths core only exist because stars exploded billions of years ago and some particles eventually formed earth
That’s what she said
Geothermal comes from friction inside the core, residual heat from planet formation, and radioactive decay. Since all elements heavier than hydrogen were fused inside stars, and heavier actinides like uranium are formed in second gen stars, and the inertia of dust that coalesces into planetary bodies including the earth and the moon originated from dying stars going supernovae, geothermal and tidal energy are products of stellar explosions, either inertial, kinetic, or radioactive. Tides are driven by the moon, whose energy is kinetic, stored from past supernovae
All stars came from the Big Bang.
So it’s all Big Bang powered.
Checkmate.
You’re right, we are all just passengers on this bang bus
This raises an interesting question in my mind, does tidal power make the earth get closer to the moon? Because if you got all the energy out of it, then the water wouldn’t move, so I guess it’s the same as gravitational potential in that sense, but I guess it’s removing it, so less gravitational potential means either less mass (not the case) or less distance.
The opposite happens. Tidal energy is what causes the moon to drift farther away from the earth, as the moon loses angular velocity.
But does harvesting it make it go faster or slower away?
If you mean harvesting tidal energy, the effect on the moon would be minimal. The loss of angular momentum the moon experiences is due to the mass of the earth’s waters. I could not imagine anything humans could build that could extract enough tidal energy that it would disrupt the moon without utterly destroying the environment at the same time (by way of nullifying tides somehow). In fact, to harness tidal energy, one way would be to use underwater turbines. They would have an immediate effect to the local environment but a negligible amount to the moon itself.
I know its minimal, I’m not saying it’s a concern, I’m just saying if we are harvesting it, doesn’t that mean it’s pulling us closer to it? It’s not magically free energy (in the physics sense), so what else could it be other than converting the potential gravitational energy between the earth and moon into something else?
actually, the moon gains angular momentum from the tidal movement that it causes, and that’s what makes it move further away. the reason is that it takes Earth about 1 day to rotate once around its axis, but it takes the moon 28 days to rotate once around Earth’s axis. so Earth has a higher angular velocity, and the tidal movement tries to reduce that difference to make the two tidally locked eventually. ironically, this process transfers angular momentum to the moon (to speed it up), which makes it move further away and thus the angular velocity actually decreases. yeah, orbital mechanics is weird.
(btw this is not a joke. it’s really that way, difficult to comprehend i know).
Planet wouldn’t exist if stars didn’t explode billions of years ago, checkmate.
Pretty sure if the sun stopped generating heat the oceans would freeze but I’m no astrophysicist.
Big Bang Power
Most usable energy on Earth comes from fusion of hydrogen into helium in the Sun, creating radiation that hits the Earth. That’s solar energy, of course, either thermal or photovoltaics, but also the wind caused by uneven warming, the evaporation and condensation of water that flows downhill for hydro power, the chemical bonds formed by photosynthesis making renewable biofuels or older fossil fuels.
Some portion of energy on Earth is gravitational potential energy and the kinetic energy of stuff moving around settling into a lower energy state: the moon dragging the oceans around, the heat of the Earth’s core spinning and tectonic plates moving from the momentum of all the dust that got pulled into what is now a planet. Geothermal and tidal energy mostly come from these planet scale phenomena.
Some portion of energy is the release of energy stored in nuclei formed from some past supernova, of less stable isotopes of atoms heavier than iron. Some portion of geothermal is traceable to this kind of nuclear decay, and obviously we can isolate and enrich those nuclear elements into fission fuel for nuclear power, as well.
Hard to categorize the second and third categories into solar power, though. Yeah, it comes from astronomical phenomena tracing back to how our solar system and planets were formed, from the materials they’re made out of, and found their way into their current shapes and orbits, but is that solar power?
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Stellar? Mmmm never thought about this word much. Constellation? Stars? Stellar?
I have some holes to go down
Fusion as well
Goated power generation method because no form of water needed.
nuclear power is expensive to maintain, plus needs all those expertise. and building the power plant takes like a decade+, and then you have to deal regulatory issues.
solar, you can pratically put that anywhere on the cheap.
Nuclear is the best for investors. They invest a fixed amount of money and the government pays dividends. Minimum kWh promised. Minimum price promised. There is no wonder why everyone wants nuclear.
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
Nuclear produces waste, which is mentioned often but it is usually responded by pointing out that it could be recycled and the worse to be buried.
Here is what people miss:
Are all our nuclear waste handled correctly today? If not then why should we imply that they will be in the future.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
And imo that’s a very valid argument on why we should use solar as much as we can.
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
Thats not even the biggest problem with nuclear power as the waste angle, at scale, will hit us decades in the future. The more urgent problem hitting us now on even on existing deployed nuclear plants is cooling water.
The byproduct of nuclear power generation is lots AND LOTS of waste heat. You have to get rid of this every second to continue to produce electricity. This is why nuclear power plants are typically built next to a large body of water. However, with reduced water supplies in reseviors theres less water to use for cooling nuclear plants. A double whammy is with climate change increasing temperatures, the water that remains is already hotter than it was, meaning it can carry away even less heat.
If a plant can’t get rid of its heat it needs to curtail (reduce) electricity production. This isn’t just theoretical. Its happening now in 2026 to existing power plants:
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Hungary - Aug 2026 Hungary plans to shut down only nuclear power plant amid drought
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Romania - Aug 2026 Nuclear power plants are being shut down as Europe’s drought becomes an energy crisis
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France & Switzerland - Aug 2026 Droughts cause nuclear power plants in Europe to reduce output
At the time when Europe was experiencing its worst heatwave is recorded history, many European reactors had to be turned down or off. 2026 isn’t the first time this has happened either, you can go back in the last 5 years or so and see many reports of nuclear plant curtailment because of lack of cooling capacity (cool water).
When we know global temperature are rising, it looks like this will just get worse. How can we say nuclear is the future when the conditions for it working well are already declining?
Fuck, that’s a terrifying thought. Bring on the panic attacks! Yay!
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Being pro-nuclear was a very valid position up until a few years ago. Now solar has gotten so cheap that there is practically no reason to do it except to protect yourself against US imperialism.
You do realize that you can support multiple things? You don’t have to be antinuclear to be pro-solar.
This is true. I am mostly pro-solar and mostly anti-nuclear, but if we decided to build a huge multi-national plant to combat/reverse global warming and it needed obscene amounts of energy to operate, I think that might be a perfect task for nuclear. The same doesn’t hold true for AI data centers though. I hope those guys have to generate their power by daisy chaining potato batteries.
You need to choose a thing to build there is not unlimited budget.
Solar still has some huge problems when it comes to seasonality and day/night cycle. You either need massive battery build out or some other form of energy to handle base loads and/or offset when solar isn’t producing enough.
Not saying solar isn’t part of the future, but we literally can’t just rely on solar.
Battery tech is getting super good though, and the materials are recyclable. If solar becomes cheap enough we could even store it in creative (but less efficient) batteries like lake batteries or weight batteries and the like.
I had heard of lake batteries over the years, but never a weight battery. Thank you for teaching me something new today!
You know what else I haven’t heard of in a while? Thermal solar, where they use a parabolic mirror array to concentrate the sun onto a small tube full of water pushing a steam turbine. Even the plain steam could be used for heating and more. Steam can absolutely be concentrated under pressure (more of a capacitor than a battery since the temp won’t hold, but it does provide stability). The steampunk future from comic books is at our finger tips only we will generate the steam using the sun rather than big factories of iron and steel.
You haven’t heard of a weight battery because the weights need to weigh something close to a lake to be useful.
Companies come up every so often selling the idea and then people realise that the energy stored in the tower, mine, or whatever is about the same as a couple of EV batteries unless you have something the size of a lake.
You have to over build and you have to diversify. As many different types of generation as you can.
Nuclear probably has a role. However it doesn’t fit well in a dynamic generation scenario. It doesn’t like just sitting there waiting to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. It wants to be a full power all the time just due to economics.
If we could get tidal working, that would be superb. Regular, predictable and almost universal.
Solar panels have become more than ten times cheaper than they were a decade ago. They are easily able to gather half the energy of what they did a decade ago in the summer now in the winter.
So even in the winter solar is twice as price efficient.
Yes there is downtime but solar is a fast and cheap way to replace most electricity cost. Then the rest can be fixed with nuclear in 20 years. We need clean cheap energy now and we can mostly get it.
I’m not talking about price, I’m talking about generation.
I have solar panels, they are great. However, I get too much energy in the summer, not nearly enough in the winter, and no power at night. Since I’m on a grid that doesn’t matter too much for me, but highlights some of the issues.
Even if I installed a battery, I’d end up with extra power in the summer and not enough in the winter. Which just highlights the discrepancy in production. Batteries obviously help solve this, but some mixture of wind/nuclear/other is needed.
This isn’t a problem at City scales and beyond. You just can’t buy a bunch of nazi batteries so there isn’t a corp greasing politicians to build it.
Nuclear, both fission and fusion (which will never happen anyway) are relics of an era of cheap fossil fuels and relative world order.
Solar electricity is viable at scale but also indicates a change in our species’ living arrangements on this planet.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. If it’s not just about the power and the cost, there are actually a lot of other factors that we have glossed over.
Solar is cooperative and local while nuclear necessitates centralization. In a nuclear future, large nuclear generating corporations are the sellers and we are the buyers. In a solar future, we pool and exchange our power depending on current production ability and current electric need… comrade.
Yes, but the bonanza of fossil fuels that rocket-propelled humanity from 1859 onwards with chemicals and pesticides and fertilizer is not sustainable with only renewable energy and resources.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
You think things are kind of uncomfortable now wrt inflation and fuel prices? Oh hold on, it’s not going to get better!
We have started to build the first commercial fusion plants now. You may want to update your rhetoric.
I look forward to seeing them produce energy in a short 20 years from now.
You should read up on the topic, I know I was surprised, the breakthroughs have recently happened. Now it is just permitting and building. Obviously there will still be issues, but there is little question to the reality now.
I’ve read of smaller reactors that should speed up prototyping, but nothing about actual net positive energy production. That’s still far away.
This happened a long time ago. Prototyping is over. I was very skeptical as well up until they figured out a practical reactor design and are in the process of building and permitting several commercial plants around the world.
No, there won’t. You sound like you’ve never heard of a scam. Here’s one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaren
Just, no.
Living in denial as they are building commercial plants. Looks like Big Oil propaganda got you.
You may want to update your physics, engineering, and reality.
You can remain ignorant, it is up to you. Cheers!
Haha! Hilarious. Get back to me in a year. Cheers yourself!
You can still like it if you are looking far enough in the future to realize it’s the only viable energy source for space travel past like… Mars. Further than that and solar panels just won’t generate enough.
The trends on wind and solar have been clear for at least a decade if not more. The time for nuclear was last century when it had no serious competition.
Nuclear reactors could still be useful in things like the mass production of hydrogen through steam electrolysis or even using fancy stuff like thermochemical reactions.
I know China is planning on building the world’s first nuclear reactor integrated into an industrial area for the production of very hot steam.
To the disposal argument i like to ask; are we handling our waste from burning fossil fuels well?
Is run away climate change “doing it well”?
Would you rather your waste be buried in the ground or pumped into the atmosphere?
Containing the waste and burying it in the ground is the default for nuclear, meanwhile doing the same for CO2 is very challenging and it may never be viable.
But we are comparing solar to nuclear.
Being better than fossil fuels is a pretty low bar.
And yes better nuclear than oil but the whole thing about nuclear is that it has a very delayed start time, so the argument of needing it ASAP supports solar if anything.
IMHO another big issue with nuclear is concentration of power. nuclear is quite stable, but not always and when it fails you suddenly loose a huge bunch of production that becomes hard to replace. (and Im not even getting into safety here)
France had to deal with a lot of issues just this year, with around 20% of their nuclear plants unoperative, which increased prices dramatically.
Solar is mostly distributed by design (and need) and failures are smaller
A hailstorm wiped out 350mW of solar in Texas in 2024. But, they learned that the angle of panels was critical to avoid damage and now they have a hail storm mode that increases the angle to protect the panels.
Not sure if panels can survive hurricanes, certainly not tornados.
350mW
Maybe they should keep some AA batteries around just in case another hailstorm hits.
AAA might be more portable though Texas might loose them in a strong gust of wind
fire it into space futurama style
Would you trust a SpaceX rocket with radioactive waste?
I would. If my goal was crashing that waste into a random subdivision or exploding on the launchpad dirty bomb style.
Let’s just not do it Space 1999 style.
The fact is that humans are just not well equipt to deal with problems beyond human scales.
We’re not good at accurately assessing risks beyond human time scales and we’re not good correctly prioritizing action when the benefit is beyond human time scales.
Big Oil predicted global warming pretty spot on, they just fought it and hid the findings instead.
To some extent I think we’ve gotten pretty good at long term predictions on things like this, but no one wants to hear it.
Global warming is a great example of how terrible we are at dialing in the correct priority for issues beyond human scales.
When some humans worked out it was coming, nothing happened - the opposite of nothing. As more humans became aware, more effort was put into styming efforts than actually doing anything.
Even now, as the effects are near-universally understood, present, and killing people - still we fail to act on the threat with anything like an appropriate level of seriousness.
I don’t think that’s fair unless by “we” you mean the oil companies and their bought politicians.
We also have limited potential stores of uranium. When Chinese reactors all get on line, maybe 40 years left.
Agreed. Are we seriously forecasting 5000 years of stable, deep, under-mountain storage. For all those years, waste storage is a prime target for contaminating locales.
The other quality argument I’ve heard from Lemmy, is that the security requirements for nuclear plants are essential and costly, due to plants being a similar target for creating contamination.
Essentially, nuclear power is a fascist tech, due to the centralised, militaristic, security apparatus required for the life of the plant and waste.
nuclear power is a fascist tech
Calm down, Francis.
Guess which single country is making all the PV panels?
We could have had this 30 years ago. There have been improvements in the tech and manufacturing, but the main reason for the price drop has been the scale of sales.
Wind Turbine technology has improved very marginally over the last 30 years
What’s really changed is capacity of production (and scale - these turbines are truly collosal) combined with the rapidly rising retail cost of electricity.
Marginally? Wind turbines are close to 15MW each now. 10 years ago it was more like 5-10MW. 30 years ago it was 3MW for an offshore turbine.
You don’t think that’s significant progress? 5x the power. You don’t think that requires improvements in technology?
Wind turbines are close to 15MW each now. 10 years ago it was more like 5-10MW. 30 years ago it was 3MW for an offshore turbine.
That’s almost entirely been due to size increases.
The average new build rotor in the US is 133 meters, 5x the size of 90s era standard blades
You don’t think that’s significant progress? 5x the power.
Biggest Blades = More Energy
Yeah. Just bolt bigger blades on it. Simples.
We included solar panels and a battery when we built our new house in Tokyo, and even though it’s in a quite shadowy area, I’m surprised how much power we get out of them (even on cloudy days). Switching to an EV now too. It’s an absolute no-brainer.
Only dark clouds reduce solar panel outputs. Panels don’t care if the light is hitting directly from the sun or diffused by cloud, as long as sum of incoming radiation over surface is high, you get your energy
Lucky you. I tried to get solar installed but around here it’s still ridiculously expensive. Unfortunately it’s also one of the scammiest industries. I went through a good dozen installers without finding one that didn’t make me feel ripped off, and that’s even before spending money.
Anyway, government incentives expired and the prices to consumers are still so high that there really isn’t a payback period. While I understand that the market should be able to stand on its own, we should have had a few more years to get off to a good start and build economies of scale or something.
Anyhow I was looking at $30k+ to cover half my electricity usage. Even worse, none of them wanted to actually sell me anything. Even when I made it an initial condition, they all wanted to dazzle me with word salad and sell me a lease or PPA agreement (totally not a lease, bro.)
Turns out the sun has a few competitive advantages over nuclear: free fuel, no radioactive waste, and it doesn’t need a decade of permits before it starts shining. The real bottleneck now is grids and storage. Imagine losing the energy race to a giant fusion reactor 93 million miles away. 😎
It has its issues, but yeah currently it is the cheapest source of power, it got so cheep that individuals can build their personal power plant for their home.
And we still have idiots fighting it. Even if you don’t care about environment (you are “drill baby drill” kind of person) it still makes sense economically.
The weirdest thing about it are fascists who support oil and gas imports from Russia and complain about woke left-green sleep paralysis demons but at the same time they have solar cells on their roofs and will tell you how much money they‘re saving them and how liberating it is. Call them renewables however and you can expect a rant about woke conspiracies and chemtrails or something.
The real bottleneck now is grids and storage.
And turns out nuclear has a few competitive advantages over solar. They are both great and serve different purposes.
Nuclear’s big selling point is that the sun goes down. Batteries have apparently missed that memo: they keep getting cheaper, better, and more efficient. Storage won’t solve every grid problem overnight, but pretending today’s limitations are permanent is a strange way to plan tomorrow’s energy system.
another big selling point of nuclear is it’s easy to drop in at old coal plants that already have grid connections ready to go.
pretending today’s limitations are permanent is a strange way to plan tomorrow’s energy system.
how long are you willing to wait for perfect energy storage?
obviously battery tech will improve, but the point is we cannot afford to assume that problem will be solved 100%, meanwhile experiencing more and more irreversible damage to our environment. We need to put our eggs into all clean energy baskets to get off CO2 as soon as possible. Not whenever battery tech happens to be ready to handle everything.
Nobody’s asking us to bet on miracle batteries: Wind and solar paired with storage are already cheaper than building new nuclear. Reusing a coal plant’s grid connection doesn’t magically make a reactor cheap or quick to build. If speed and CO2 matter, follow the numbers, not the nostalgia.
“Cheaper” is not the most important metric.
Maybe cheaper in money terms, not others, first of all space.
But how much would cost to build a solar farm with the same output of a nuclear plant, both on days and night ?There are a bunch of studies about that, the point of all those articles like this one coming out recently is that solar has become so cheap it even beats nuclear when you factor in the still very high cost of storing the power
“it’s easy to drop at a place that has grid connections”
Funny, because solar or literally any other plant will also benefit from having existing connections, and all of them are easier and cheaper to build than nuclear.
Nuclear is dead but for niche applications.
In your world, is “tomorrow’s energy system” exclusively solar/hydro?
No, in my world tomorrow’s grid uses whatever delivers reliable electricity at the lowest total cost: solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, storage, and yes, nuclear if it can compete. This isn’t a religion with approved energy sources. It’s an engineering problem with a price tag, and nobody gets bonus points for glowing in the dark.
Exactly, this is an engineering problem. You’re talking it like it’s an accounting one. Reliability, emergency use, redundancy, generating potential and universal scalability are the most important factors. Cost is a completely separate issue governed by separate factors, many of which are 100% artificial.
You’re stringing worlds together at this point.
Cost is the single largest factor in the deployment of new power plants, and solar is just impossible to match right now.
You could spend literally decades and billions building a nuclear plant, or start deploying solar right this minute and immediately reap the rewards of that investment.
It’s a no-brainer.
Cost is the single largest factor in the deployment of new power plants, and solar is just impossible to match right now.
I would say that even availability is an important factor, maybe more important then the mere price.
But it doesn’t need to be one or the other. The more diverse the grid the better. I’ll also say again, cost on both sides is mostly artificial anyway.
Dude, the cost is the final decision point after all those concerns are handled…
nobody gets bonus points for glowing in the dark.
where the fuck did anybody say that?
“Glowing in the dark” refers to nuclear power sources. Hope this helps.
yes i know that, genius. the point is that is not an argument people are using for nuclear. it’s a blatant straw man from someone clearly not engaging in a goood faith discussion.
A lot of people support nuclear for largely cultural reasons.
What cultural reasons would anybody support it for?
Nuclear is simply incompatible with renewables, if the price tag is of any concern to you. Nuclear reactors take long and cost a lot to build, still aren’t cheap to operate if you include the infrastructure cost of getting, handling and storing the fuel, can’t respond to changing demand quickly and are centralized.
Nuclear power plants need subsidies over their whole life, mainly to handle the risk inherent with nuclear fuel and the finincial risk of having to handle spent fuel for centuries to come. Nuclear power plants need to run at full power, which costs money every time renewables are pushing the energy price into the negatives. Nuclear power plants need a centralized power grid.
Renewables work in exactly the opposite way. They are cheap to build and maintain, they are variable and decentralized. So to use renewables effectively, you need to build a decentralized grid and ideally on-premise energy storage.
Renewable energy simply wins in terms of cost, risk-management and scalability. So the energy grid of the future will be purpose-built to accomodate renewable energy. Trying to force nuclear energy generation into that mix only makes sense, if you have a clear, non-monetary reason to do so, like enriching uranium for bombs. For strictly commercial use, nuclear power is dead.
Nuclear is simply incompatible with renewables, if the price tag is of any concern to you. Nuclear reactors take long and cost a lot to build, still aren’t cheap to operate if you include the infrastructure cost of getting, handling and storing the fuel, can’t respond to chaning demand quickly and are centralized.
The fact is that the price tag is not the only factor.
It is true that a 1000 MW nuclear plant cost about 10 times the equivalent solar field (about 6-9 billions for the nuclear plant Vs about 800 millions for panels) but at this point you use about 15 square Km to just match the output of the nuclear plant, with no storage, and only in the best case scenario.In a real case scenario the price tag of building a solar field that could replace a nuclear plant is probably not that different anymore.
To produce the same amount of power in every condition you could not install the exact amout of panels, you need way more (double ? triple ?) with the associated costs and space requirements.
And then you need batteries to be able to offer energy also at night and to store energy for the days when the sun is not enough to produce the energy required.I would say that to match a nucler plant a solar field would cost about half of it for the same power generation but with the additional problem that you need way more space, which itself is a cost.
Nuclear power plants need subsidies over their whole life, mainly to handle the risk inherent with nuclear fuel and the finincial risk of having to handle spent fuel for centuries to come.
We have nuclear power plants that uses less problematic fuel which is easier to handle and less risky.
Nuclear power plants need to run at full power, which costs money every time renewables are pushing the energy price into the negatives.
True, but when the renewables are not producing enough ?
Nuclear power plants need a centralized power grid.
Like a solar farm.
Renewables work in exactly the opposite way. They are cheap to build and maintain, they are variable and decentralized. So to use renewables effectively, you need to build a decentralized grid and ideall, on-premise energy storage.
No, they work in the exactly same way. What is different is that renewables can be made decentralized. Solar panels on the roof produce only for the house, not for the power grid (even if you can connect them to the grid to fill in the surplus).
I think you are comparing a nuclear plant with the small panels you install on your roof but you cannot make such comparison.
So the energy grid of the future will be purpose-built to accomodate renewable energy.
As far as I remember, what was told me when I worked in the field was that power grids does not care about the source, only the power: a power grid do not care if the 10 Gw power it transfer comes from a nuclear plant, a solar farm or from a squirrel on a wheel.
And the grid is already ready, we are already able (ok at least here) to send to the grid the surplus generated by the solars panels on the roof. And adding the batteries will not require anything done on the grid itself (at least this is what my collegues said).
Trying to force nuclear energy generation into that mix only makes sense, if you have a clear, non-monetary reason to do so, like enriching uranium for bombs. For strictly commercial use, nuclear power is dead.
What about being sure that a 5 days of bad weather cannot stop a society ?
You are mixing up many different things.
First, you don’t have to install the solar capacity in one huge blob. Solar farms also don’t have to be the only use of the land. You can still farm crops that like shade, you can hold cattle, build the energy storage right beneath the solar farm, a car park or what have you. There is also a lot of currently “wasted space”, such as roof tops or existing car parks. There are also swimming solar pannels that have the added benefit of keeping lake temparatures in check in the summer. You also have wind turbines that can contribute their fair share to the energy mix. So no, you don’t need to build huge over-capacity and you don’t need to bulldoze huge swaths of land to install solar. And the price to build solar and battery storage is still going down.
Where are the nuclear plants that use “safer fuels”?
Renewables are cheaper to build and run, meaning that renewable energy is always cheaper than nuclear power. You’d need to artificially limit the amount of renewables companies are allowed to build or subidize nuclear, otherwise renewables will price nuclear out of the market.
No, solar farms don’t need centralized grids nearly as much as nuclear power does. What is much more important for renewables is monitoring the local grids, so they don’t get overwhelmed by people providing power to the grid with their solar pannels.
And people already absolutely do provide power to the grid with their own solar pannels, you denying that just shows that you haven’t mich thought about/experienced local “grass roots” energy production. In Germany, the capacity of the local grids is one of two big hurdles renewable energy production is facing right now. Commercial and private energy producers are complaining that the utility companies are forcibly cutting their power plants from the energy grid to stabilize it.
And like I said in other comments already, hydrogen/natural gas power plants are a much better fit to handle extended lulls in wind and solar.
First, you don’t have to install the solar capacity in one huge blob.
We are comparing a nuclear power plant with renewables, it make sense comparing them this way.
Solar farms also don’t have to be the only use of the land. You can still farm crops that like shade, you can hold cattle, build the energy storage right beneath the solar farm, a car park or what have you. There is also a lot of currently “wasted space”, such as roof tops or existing car parks.
Partially true. but still, we are comparing solar with a nuclear plant not with a distributed system.
Obviously you can make some use of the land under the panels but you still need the same surface if not more.There are also swimming solar pannels that have the added benefit of keeping lake temparatures in check in the summer. You also have wind turbines that can contribute their fair share to the energy mix. So no, you don’t need to build huge over-capacity
You still need over-capacity unless you are planning to use some other sources during the night. If your needs is 1000 MW/h during the day and 300 MW/h during the night, during the day you need to generate the power you need and all the energy you will need for the night. It is the reason why if I put solar panels on my roof the system come with batteries.
and you don’t need to bulldoze huge swaths of land to install solar.
Yes if you want to make a comparison with a power plant, no if you talk about distributed installations (roofs and so on) but at this point you are comparing apples with oranges.
And the price to build solar and battery storage is still going down.
True, but this is the same as saying “some technology will solve the problem in the future”. What is the cost now to build a plant based on renewables source that can be a drop-in replacement for a 1000 MW nuclear power plant ?
Where are the nuclear plants that use “safer fuels”?
Thorium for one.
Renewables are cheaper to build and run, meaning that renewable energy is always cheaper than nuclear power. You’d need to artificially limit the amount of renewables companies are allowed to build or subidize nuclear, otherwise renewables will price nuclear out of the market.
As I said, cost is not the only factor. Renewables are cheaper, but less than you think when comparing the output, but they have other limitations: solar is good only by day and the generation highly depends on how much sun is out, now panels can produce even if not in optimal exposure but of course they produce less; wind turbines have a range of wind they can be used else they broke for example.
You can combine them, it is the most intelligent thing to do honestly, but if you want to use only renewables you need to generate more power than you need and then store the surplus to be used when it rain or there is not (or too much) wind.
No, solar farms don’t need centralized grids nearly as much as nuclear power does. What is much more important for renewables is monitoring the local grids, so they don’t get overwhelmed by people providing power to the grid with their solar pannels.
Still, you are comparing a single nuclear plant with a distributed system.
To the grid a nuclear power plant and a solar farm are no different: both introduce 1000 MW/h in the system.
In both cases you have a single point of entry to the grid and what is behind this point is irrelevant: you can also have an army of hamsters on wheels.What are you saying is the obvious thing: if we had n-thousand entry point we need to monitor the grid but even this is not dependent on how you produce the power. If you connect to the grid n-thousand 1 kW/h gas generators you have the same problems.
And people already absolutely do provide power to the grid with their own solar pannels, you denying that just shows that you haven’t mich thought about/experienced local “grass roots” energy production.
In Italy we’ve been doing this for ages, at the time we were even paid to provide the surplus to the grid. It is nothing new to me.
And like I said in other comments already, hydrogen/natural gas power plants are a much better fit to handle extended lulls in wind and solar.
Maybe natural gas, not hydrogen at the time
I’m not going to entertain the completely ridiculous and idiotic scenario, in which an energy provider is forced to install all solar capacity in one location. Solar’s biggest strength is its distribited nature and you want to take that away to make your comparison work?
There will be diversity in the future grid, but that diversity will be in the forms of energy storage used. I think the grid of the future is almost entirely solar but with different energy storage systems optimized for different time scales. For storage on the order of seconds, you use fly wheels to replace the spinning mass once provided by gas turbines. For daily swings, vast warehouses full of old electric car batteries work well. For longer term storage, you can use chemical energy storage or flow batteries. Think making vast tanks of ammonia or methane. You use excess electricity in the summer, store it as chemical energy in vast tank farms, and then burn it or run it through a fuel cell in the winter.
Although, for seasonal variation, the most practical solution might be just to spam solar panels. It just depends on the price ratio of solar panel cost to storage cost. You could have a grid that just had so much solar deployed that it is able to cover energy demand even on cloudy winter days. You just flat out build that many panels. Maybe then in the summertime you’re capable of producing 10x your normal power needs.
Seems wasteful, but this would just encourage a lot of very energy-intensive industries to become more seasonal. We have a farming season, why not an steal smelting season? Why not an AI model training season? Maybe for datacenters, the big runs are done during the summer when power is dirt cheap. Then the companies spend the winter planning next year’s runs, etc. Or the extra power could be used to make synthetic fuels from CO2 pulled from the air. Maybe we never figure out how to make batteries good enough to power a trans-oceanic jumbo jet. But maybe we don’t have to. You offer dirt cheap energy on a seasonal basis, and people will find uses for it eventually.
Take Germany that has solar and wind combined production capacity between 4 and 5 time its needs in electricity. Yet, It can not cover its needs. If you cannot produce electricity to cover your needs, you are far from being able to store an excess of your production. The last solar farm Germany was building south of Berlin had an estimated efficiency of 10%… The capacity of the power grid isn’t a light issue, and it is far from being resolved.
So before thinking about having a full working renewable power grid, you have to rely on a working mass production system. Germany choose coal and gas, which makes their emission of CO2 for producing electricity high during most of the year
Now take France. It has a solid capacity of electricity based on nuclear. It is among the least CO2 emitter in the world to produce electricity. Now, if their energetic politics was a future oriented one, France would ramp up its renewable capacity while maintaining its nuclear capacity (so building new reactors to replace old ones) to not loose on stability.
Nuclear isn’t the energy of the past, nor a nostalgic one. It is probably the most efficient mass production system for electricity we have to transitionning to renewable while not messing up the CO2 emissions.
Not all countries have ideal solar exposition, nor constant wind… Not to mention that hydroelectricity requires land specifics advantages and geothermal energy isn’t an everywhere solution, as drilling can cause problems.
There is no miracle solution, only partially satisfying ones.
Most of the country that have a 100% or near 100% renewable power grid rely on hydroelectricity. Which is not achievable by all.It’s not a race between technologies, it is a race to find the most efficient way to produce low CO2 electricity… while maintaining the confort of people and factory productivity, because, you know… Shareholders are the most important thing in the world… Apparently…
The problem in germany is that we been ruled by Conservatives who failed to expand the grid so the cheap energy (in the north) gets where it’s needed (in the south).
Expanding the grid and the storage is still cheaper than investing in nuclear.
And despite all the fossil driven propaganda the german power grid still operates very reliable. (Execpt when terrorists cut a single line, because again we’ve been ruled by Conservatives and they don’t seem to know what redundancy means)
Do you mean that renewable are mostly concentrated in the north of Germany and fossil fueled power plant are mostly used in the south ?
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Searching for Germany, I see many articles on grid storage - basically at its infancy but exploding in popularity. I also see huge expectations on pumped hydro storage
Seems like you’re arguing that we should stop building out these proven, low cost solutions in favor of dumping tons more money into a problematic technology that will take decades and billions of dollarseach
The hydro storage has the same problem than the battery storage. You have to build a reliable eletricity production that cover your needs before being able to store your excess.
How much power can you store with hydro storage ? Do you have enough land/mountain to create the artifical lakes at different elevation ? Can you store enough energy to compensate the reduced production of solar power during winter ? For now, storage is either for short periode ,(days, maybe weeks, with batteries) or limited capacity (hydro pumping). If you are interested on storage technology you should look on the CO2 storage that Italy built lately.
It is complicated to rely on yet to develop technologies to power an entire country. Some can, they should, other can’t, and have to rely on non renewable energy.
I’ve written than Nuclear is probably the best way to produced decarbonated electricity while waiting for good solutions for the renewable energy. I’ve never said that we should stop developping renewable. While the world spend money on an energy and water consuming technoloy like IA, it would be way more intelligent to focuse all that money on developping renewable… Yet to produce solar panel, wind turbin, concrete, we still need fossile fuel or nuclear. So giving up on it would only make things more complicated.
Time is the missing value here.
- that disregards the massive time commitment needed to build out nuclear. When each plant takes over a decade to build and there is no ready supply chain, they can’t be mass produced, scaling out would take many many years
- while also ignoring that even the fast solar buildout takes time. Even with ready supply chain, mass production, mature technology, we need to expect scaling out to take 20+ years. We may not have all the answers for storage yet but it’s all known technology and we have 20+ years to figure it out. It’s ok to lag behind solar a bit
To be fair the construction time on a star is actually a really long compared to nuclear.
And what happens when the sun goes out?
Riddle me that, solar elitists.
It always reignites in the morning.
While very impressive, solar power is not the the ultimate power source.
For us in the nordic regions we don’t get enough sun during the winter just as we need it.
We still need nuclear power unless we make ourselves dependent on other nations for power generation and transfer.
Just look at how Russia tried to hold Europe’s supply of gas hostage after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I don’t want us to ever be so completely dependant on another nation/entity again.
“Oh, but we can use batteries!”
Sure, but batteries degrade over time, meaning we will need a continous way to replace them, and since most manufacturers of batteries are located in China (same goes for solar panels) we will just become dependent on China for our energy needs, so we have replaced Russia’s gas monopoly with China’s solar and battery monopoly.
Untill we have the ability to build and deploy solar panels and batteries at scale inside the EU we should be careful about giving up our current traditional powerplants.
Modern batteries degrade much slower than earlier generations did. Especially if you remove the size- and weight requirements of mobile batteries, we already have battery technologies that push a century in usable time.
Cool, I didn’t know that.
batteries degrade over time, meaning we will need a continous way to replace them, and since most manufacturers of batteries are located in China
Batteries are largely recyclable and worth recycling, at least the ones of the scale used for grid-scale power storage.
And manufacturing can be done outside of china; it’s just a bit more expensive.
Do you realize how heavily Europe still depends on fossil fuels today? And that some of its nuclear reactors still use fuel supplied by Russia? If your big argument is avoiding dependence on hostile suppliers, swapping Russian gas for Russian nuclear fuel is a pretty spectacular blind spot.
Do you realize how heavily Europe still depends on fossil fuels today? And that some of its nuclear reactors still use fuel supplied by Russia?
Yes.
If your big argument is avoiding dependence on hostile suppliers, swapping Russian gas for Russian nuclear fuel is a pretty spectacular blind spot.
When did I mention using Russian nuclear fuel?
Sweden has actually a fair bit of uranium, we could mine it, have France process it and run our nuclear plants on our own fuel.
You may import turbines or panels, but no foreign government can turn off your wind or sunshine. Equipment supply chains can be diversified: imported fuel remains a recurring dependency. That’s a pretty important difference.
I just mentioned that we have the fuel and the enrichment facilities in the EU…
Having enrichment facilities doesn’t mean controlling the entire nuclear fuel cycle:
France still imports Russian enriched uranium and relies on Russia to convert and enrich recycled uranium. Longstanding contracts and missing European processing capacity explain why. Energy independence is clearly more complicated than owning uranium deposits.
A reactor needs an industrial fuel supply chain, while wind and solar need no fuel imports once installed. Nobody can embargo the breeze. If energy independence is the goal, why treat fuel free generation as an afterthought?
I feel like we have strayed too far away from my main point, solar doesn’t work when it is dark outside.
It is dark for long streaches of time in the Nordics.
When it is dark, we use more energy to heat and light our homes.
Batteries can’t supply enough power during that time.
Importing power is expensive.
So domestic power generation it is, and since nuclear power is one of the most environmentally friendly power sources we have and will work in the dark, it makes sense to use it to complement renewables.
also nuclear needs billions in upfront costs, plus hiring all those scientists and technicians isnt cheap.
*long term storage, cause batteries are good for ~24 hrs
That’s why they’re sending mirror satellites to blot out the sun unless you subscribe to Sun+. Can’t have free electricity for the masses
Edit: this would have sounded like the most batshit crazy conspiracy theory a decade ago; look where we are now
Yup, it’s all about the economics. Solar + Lithium batteries is cheaper is cheaper than anything else. When Sodium batteries start getting cranked out it’ll be even cheaper.
Unless you’re in Epstein Land of America where coal is now the golden standard for the predator administration
I have solar power at home in the USA. I just set it up by myself without asking permission.
Coal is for cowards, burn whale blubber and trees
Now we just need a cheap sustainable storage medium for all that solar power and we’re golden. Anyone?
Batteries would like a word. They’re already storing solar power, getting cheaper, and improving at a pace nuclear construction schedules can only dream of. For longer gaps, pumped hydro and thermal storage can pitch in. Turns out the answer isn’t one magical box, but a bunch of technologies that actually exist.
From what I know, for large scale solar farms, batteries arent there yet. The maintainance and replacement costs cut into the money saved by using solar by quite a lot.
From what I know there are many many many such projects in the permit phase in Germany, all of them run on capitalist interest without state funding. The only thing between now and them getting build is our government which seems to prefer a 180° turn into the fossil age.
One thing is to build them, another thing is if once built they deliver
That’s outdated information, solar + batteries already reached parity in cost with nuclear and continue to get cheaper
Could you please point me to a place which talks about this new kind of system? Id like to read up on it.
Not enough to reduce the benefits to zero and that’s all we need. As improvements come in you can upgrade the batteries over time and get better and better margins. But the system is already good enough for deployment.
It’s not as easy as just replacing the batteries though, each battery needs its own infrastructure and from what I extrapolate it’s not very easy to just swap out.
For long term storage most countries will need more than pumping hydro. But green hydrogen can be produced from wind and solar to use in times of need in claasic power plants adapted for hydrogen. This technology also exists. But it is very inefficient, so should and will he used only as a backup.
Hydrogen is also a huge pain to store. It’s really hard to keep it from leaking.
Difficult? Yes. But it’s a solved engineering problem. There are chemical industries that need hydrogen. It is being transported and stored for decades. There are even small pipelines in operation for a long time by now.
But it can be stored as Methane in exactly those containers that many countries already have at a large scale for their winters.
Which is stupid and insanely expensive, since methane itself is an insanely potent greenhouse gas and methane has plenty of fugitive emissions.but, back up a second: isn’t the main reason for banking so much methane in the winter… heating? Because we can easily 10x the efficiency and 100x the cost - efficiency, by skipping the hydrogen - methane crap and storing heat directly.
See, you can store heat trivially in insulated thermal mass. “Thermal mass” is basically just mass, I.e. dirt-cheap materials such as rocks or dirt. You can skip a whole raft of fluid-handling stuff (methane and hydrogen being fluids, and fluids requiring pipes, pumps, leakage handling, inspections etc) by just using electricity from summer solar to resistively heat a 20m-diameter cylinder full of rocks wrapped in 1m of insulation, and when you need heat in winter you can just run air through the vents to extract that heat. It’s based on 1950s technology (probably older tbh) and most of the materials are literally dirt-cheap. Hook it up to district heating and you have an effectively infinite battery to handle your winter heating needs, based on informed summer renewables costs. Sand, insulation, a big cylinder (probably the most expensive part), resistive heating, an air vent. None of it is expensive (except the land, but those 300sqm can be located underground if it helps) and it’ll last for a century because there’s nothing that can even break.
It’s basically just a bunch of sand wrapped in an electric blanket (and an actual blanket). It’s dead simple.
Compare all that to a hydrogen electrolyser on a river, with a chemical plant to transform the hydrogen into methane (with carbon from where, exactly?) then a pipe or tanker or truck to transfer the methane to a big methane storage cavern, which is then piped to an individual furnace to burn. That’s a Rube Goldberg machine.
Sounds great. Let’s do that. We’ll need electricity in winter too, though.
Yep, it won’t replace batteries - it only solves part of the winter problem. But it solves that part very efficiently, and winter heating is a big part (at least, toward the poles it is).
I like to say that we need a series of half-solutions, instead of trying to create a perfect solution for everything all at once.
Adding to the other answer, for longer lulls in energy generation, the power can be used to create hydrogen gas that can be burnt in gas plants.
So, why isn’t everybody building hydrogen burning generators?
Right, because hydrogen is not working. It’s expensive to produce but most importantly incredibly hard to store and very dangerous if it catches fire.
I propose we use antimatter energy storage instead. No risk of it catching fire if you use anti-hydrogen!
Anti-hidrogen can still burn in the presence of anti-oxygen, but that’s way safer than being in the presence of regular oxygen
Because hydrogen-ready power plants are not the same as natural gas power plants, as hydrogen gas is not a drop-in replacement for natural gas. And right now, when natural gas is still relatively cheap and renewable energy is not yet absolutely dominating the energy mix, politicians are fearing the cost of building the infrastructure for generating, transporting, storing and burning hydrogen gas.
In the future, hydrogen gas plants promise to be the best fit to pair renewable energy with, but right now the cost of it and the availability of fossil fuels do not force the hand of the people responsible for planning the future of the energy grid.
Battery tech has been there for at least half a decade. Many of Australia’s houses have solar (so much so that we have too much of it during the day so it’s free), and an ever increasing number have batteries. Many don’t need to use grid power ever. It’s not hard. The problem has been fixed.
As more EVs do V2G connections, that will get even less demand. The grid of the future is becoming a lot more decentralised and based off solar and batteries
Quite a broad statement to make globally.
Hydrogen works, as do pump-storage plants.
No, it does
doesnot. If it did, we’d have it everywhere.Yeah, yeah, same arguments as with solar, too expensive, not feasible, yadda yadda. Always the same.
No, it’s different with hydrogen. If you want green hydrogen, you’ll waste at least 50% of energy. Then there are storage and flammability etc. We have everything we need for using hydrogen today, but somehow it is not used besides minor experiments.
Yeah, but does energy waste matter if the other option is that you turn wind or solar input off? It should not run during high peak, of course, but if there is more energy in the grid than it uses? Turn it into hydrogen.
And storage, strangely that safety topic never gets raised with nuclear. If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage.
True, if we have huge surplus of renewables, then the cost doesn’t matter that much.
As per storage. Nuclear is far less problematic to handle in many aspects. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to store and if we go at scale, there would be massive amounts of hydrogen stored everywhere. A tiny spark away of a huge bomb.
If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage.
They’re facing entirely different problems.
And storage, strangely that safety topic never gets raised with nuclear. If we can build safe nuclear, we can build safe hydrogen storage
We can safely store nuclear waste. What do you think happens to all the radioactive waste produced by hospitals ?
For one you need special alloys to store hydrogen, to avoid corrosion.
And solar and wind alno have not the same security problems of hydrogen, I am sure you understand that a tank of hydrogen that for some incident detonate is pretty bad (to use an euphemism)Solar was rapidly getting cheaper, hydrogen isn’t. Sooner or later, batteries will be more energy-dense than hydrogen - I don’t think you understand just how dogshit hydrogen truly is.
Hydrogen is, IIRC, ~30% efficient roundtrip (multiply the efficiency of the electrolyser (70%?) with the efficiency of the fuel cell (50%?)), where batteries are 90%. And batteries are waaay cheaper per cycle. That’s why BEVs are selling like hotcakes whereas surplus hydrogen cars from failed hydrogen car initiatives can’t be sold (that’s not entirely true - they’re being bought up and converted into BEVs).
So batteries are cheaper, their power source is cheaper (because they’re ~3x the efficiency of hydrogen - and BTW that basically won’t change due to thermodynamics, hydrogen is just fundamentally rather inefficient), and you need a ridiculously absurdly expensive pressurized pumping system just to refill your hydrogen tank (which BTW has huge problems of its own because when you pump hydrogen into an empty tank it expands, and when hydrogen or helium expands it heats up, which then needs cooling which takes a bunch of power and engineering work), what’s the advantage of hydrogen?
Well theoretically hydrogen is more energy-dense. Except there are two types of “energy density” (the term is often used loosely/wrong) - there’s power per weight (specific energy), and there’s power per volume (energy density). And hydrogen is literally the least dense substance in the universe, that’s why we filled airships with it, and it’s why we need pressurised tanks in hydrogen cars. Pressurizing the tanks helps, but not by much. It still sucks unless you’re using it as rocket fuel (which cares a lot about weight, not so much for volume)
So, hydrogen needs pressurized tanks. Pressurised tanks weigh a lot, and they weigh more the smaller the tank! (the weight overhead follows the cube-square law). And car fuel tanks are much smaller than rockets.
What’s worse is that unlike fuel tanks, hydrogen tanks need to be cylindrical (or theoretically spherical) to efficiently contain the pressure. Which means they’re a pain in the ass to fit onto a car, because they can’t be flat. They’re in practice way worse than batteries, volumetrically, because batteries can be low and flat on the bottom of the car, in the middle between the axles for a nice clean centre of gravity. You can sort of flatten the hydrogen tank by having two cylinders side by side, but that’s inefficient and adds a ton of weight, which undercuts the point of using hydrogen in the first place.
Hydrogen refills quickly… But so do batteries nowadays. And of course if you really care them you can just make batteries swappable (check out Janus trucks, they have swappable batteries that take less than 5 minutes to swap with a forklift, and they’re actually commercially used in the real world on public roads, unlike hydrogen trucks).
By the way, you know how BEVs can literally be charged with a $20 power cord plugged into a standard wall outlet? Guess how much a hydrogen refuelling station costs (keep in mind the entire thing has to be pressurised). Are you ready?
$3million.
LOL
(Even a DC fast-charger is sub-$100k (might be closer to $10k I forget)
All that to pay more than petrol costs (even post-Hormuz, hydrogen is still 10x more expensive IIRC). But still, if you ignore the practical range limitations, you still have more range than a BEV though right?
Yes, you do. I forget the numbers but it’s not that much better (like 20% or 30% maybe?) and absolutely not worth almost literally everything else being worse than batteries.
But I forgot the worst part of hydrogen: it can’t be produced by unfirmed solar panels. It’s not a flexible chemical process, so realistically you need batteries to firm the solar panels while they electrolyze. Chuck that onto the giant “technical breakthroughs required to make hydrogen fuel a thing” pile, I suppose.
We’ll still need green hydrogen as a chemical input, it just doesn’t make sense as a fuel.
Seriously, why adopt the world’s most explosively flammable gas that’s also a chemical Houdini when you could just… Not handle fluid transfers in the first place and just transfer electricity normally, with a wire?
Why would anyone consider mass-adopting a 30%-efficient battery?
Hydrogen electrolysis currently requires an iridium catalyst for practical long-term durable efficient electrolysis, and might always require one. Iridium is stupidly expensive and a major reason why hydrogen can’t currently scale. Chuck it onto the “technical breakthroughs required” pile, I suppose.
I do think hydrogen-based energy has a future, funnily enough - I have high hopes for the TABQ “proton batteries” (AKA hydrogen-ion, which is like lithium-ion but a positive hydrogen ion is literally just a proton. It should be theoretically more efficient - hydrogen is lighter than lithium, after all). It’s a cool tech, if very new, and I hope it succeeds. It’s just a normal battery, one made from an organic molecule (TABQ) with no need for rare materials.
I used to be on the hydrogen hype train myself, but it took me an embarassingly long while to realise that hydrogen was motivated by hype and wrong thinking more than any technical merit. Especially said thinking by chemical and car companies. Hydrogen is a fuel, like hydrocarbons, and if you can’t imagine a world without fuel - a world where you don’t take your car to the fuel station and fill it up - then hydrogen is the only alternative. BEVs charge slower because they don’t need to charge quickly at home - in other words, they’re different and we have to think of them differently. Hydrogen is in basically every way the type of round-peg square-hole thinking that’s preventing adaptation to climate change; it’s this absolute turd that people are nonetheless actually considering adopting.
Seriously, why would you want to reinvent fuels? To paraphrase Technology Connections, the problem with fuel is that you have to literally light it on fire and replace it every time you use it. CATL’s latest Sodium-ion batteries claim a cycle-life of 15000 cycles, whereas hydrogen fuel has a cycle life of 1. Battery cycle life is only getting better, hydrogen will always be single-use, just like diesel.
We have commercially-viable battery-electric planes (namely the Heart X1, a 30-seat regional airliner - not just a wimpy Cessna replacement, although we have an electric Cessna knockoff too) before we have commercially viable hydrogen planes. Because batteries let airlines save money on fuel. If there’s one place where hydrogen’s better energy-weight ratio should dominate, it’s aerospace, but hydrogen has nothing.
I guess what I’m saying is: if you were wrong and hydrogen is indeed a pipedream, what would look different to our current situation?
Hydrogen EVs are not the topic, that might only make sense to replace diesel locomotives, if that. I am talking about standard store and use instead of coal or gas powerplants.
That’s an argument from 2017. Today the Technologies are there, and we can build it on scale. Battery for short term, green gas for the longer term.
It doesn’t really matter what we have if it’s not commercially viable, or we are missing something from the supply chain.
It is commercially viable
Approaching this problem like it has one perfect solution is pure ignorance.
I don’t feel like this article is doing that?
It doesn’t need one perfect solution, just needs the best solution to become dominant. Obviously solar is not perfect or even best in every situation, but you don’t need 100%.
In the end, the cheapest reliable kilowatt hour wins. Not the technology with the loudest fan club, the best nostalgia, or the most impressive lobbying budget. Energy markets don’t award participation trophies for expensive electricity.
Not really addressing what I said at all. But hey, the words sound good if you’re ignorant on the subject.
Then, by all means elaborate on your perspective.
I personally view this issue as a fight between energy technology and energy resources.
If the main energy system is based on a technology that utilises the environment, such as solar, wind, hydro, tidal and others, of course energy output fluctuates due to conditions, but you can mass manufacture and slowly iterate on them overtime, just like how solar pricing has dropped almost exponentially.
If the main energy system is based on utilising a resource, such as natural gas, coal, uranium, thorium and others, of course you’ll get a ton of energy output and systems within can keep it perfectly stable, but the downside is that emissions, accidents, centralisation and the ethics of mining these resources are a pretty substantial issue.
Ideally, we should have an energy grid mostly consisting of passive technology based energy systems, with suitable resource based energy systems coming in second, since we can have the benefits of decentralisation allowing building based and community micro grids to continue functioning, while also having the redundancy of resource energy systems to account for any defects caused by environmental issues, such as volcanic ash blocking the sun in certain areas, but realistically the need for resource energy systems would be low, as the whole environment can’t be nullified by conditions. If there isn’t sun, there would likely still be wind, tidal and hydro, and vice versa for all.
It’d be interesting to see your take.
I don’t believe a decentralized grid is a good thing in most situations. In fact I think that’s extremely dangerous. So, we likely won’t find common ground there. I wont waste time trying to convince you otherwise.
The crux of your point seems to be that renewables should be the majority (excluding nuclear) and fuel based systems (including nuclear) should be the minority. If we take nuclear out of the equation I agree with you. I’m not anti renewables, I’ve spent my career working in various forms of generation, including oil, gas, comb cycle and hydro. My stance is that they all have a place, even gas and oil but especially nuclear.
Side note, the ethics of mining could be pointed at heavily for the current state of battery and solar pannel tech as well.
Thank you for putting it this way. I hope it helps others.
Grüße gehen raus an unsere Gaskathi
