> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Or when you're stuck running on 1960s technology because nothing new has been built in 60 years.
Crazy requirements like being able to survive a 1-10000 earthquake and etc seem overly cumbersome until it happens. Sure a giant oil spill is not great but you were allowed to go to the Gulf of Mexico post-spill(s) and not so much for Chernobyl. So the DOE should keep its red tape so it can keep its (better than the military, see Spain) record with nuclear power.
I said to reduce red tape. Things like peforming multiple regulatory approvals at the same time. (do you really need to wait for the environment review to finish before you start the reactor safety review?) Or pre-approve reactor designs, so they don't all have to be redone from scratch for every new reactor.
There is a TON of ways to speed up approvals in a way that don't comprimise safety.. but that was a great strawman agrument!
The fact that pollution doesn't make a big boom pushes our animal instinct to focus on nuclear as dangerous but it's not even close.
1: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=heat...
Earth uninhabitable? No, every nuclear plant in the world failing at once wouldn't make 1% of the earth uninhabitable, cut the hyperbole.
Nuke fantasies? Vs what, the fantasy that somehow wind and solar are going to be always-on sources of energy? You need a reliable backup, right now it's either fossil fuels or nuclear. The fantasy is thinking that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear - they are not.
Compare nuclear to wind and solar and try to find any case it makes sense in.
As far as efficiency I roughly agree. There's likely to be a 15-20% drop per 20 years so I think they'll still be 8-10% conversion efficient assuming they are clean and unbroken.
An acre is 4046 square meters. A solar module is maybe $75 per square meter. If we cover half the acre with modules, the modules alone cost $150,000/acre. Now add in cost of mounting hardware and inverters.
Land cost is close to negligible for solar, unless you're building it in very expensive places. If land cost ever did become generally significant, PV would be so cheap it would already have driven all other energy sources off the market.
But putting solar on land need not interfere with other uses. Rather, solar increases the value of the land for the other uses; a roof lasts longer with solar on. On a parking lot solar provides shade and stops rain. On pasture or crop land, solar reduces heat and water stress, increasing yield and cutting irrigation demand. On a reservoir or canal, it reduces evaporation loss, and runs cooler, thus more efficiently.
Solar and wind is the cheapest energy. Then gas, then coal then nuclear.
Yes, we should (and will, the trend makes it inevitable) replace coal and gas with solar and wind.
We should also replace the most expensive (nuclear) energy with cheap and clean solar and wind.
We're not grading on a curve here. It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it.
No matter how much money we throw at them, though, they produce zero when the sun isnt shining or the wind isnt blowing.
Factor in the cost of batteries, and aside from a few exceptional locations, they aren't all that cheap anymore.
Factor in the cost of batteries and longer term storage and they're still going to be cheaper than new nuclear power plants.
That is a absurd thing to say. If the reason is "because we intentionally made it that way" then of course it matters because we can address that reason with the (nearly free) stroke of a pen.
And you won't bring down nuke cost without cutting out the corruption. And, even if you did, it would remain uncompetitive with the storage that will have been long since built out by the time you could bring one online.
Nuclear hasn't. This alone condemns nuclear in the face of its constantly improving competitors.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is a pretty interesting article.
How much cost has been added to nuclear projects due to additional safety requirements? I think it's plausible to say "over 9 billion", as an extremely conservative estimate. Would you object to this? (That's the cost overrun for just one reactor, for context)
If so, that means that those additional safety regulations have reduced nuclear deaths in the US by at least 1000 deaths.
This does not seem plausible to me, as the worst case for a meltdown in the US with 70s-era designs is not "Chernobyl style uncontained accident" but instead something rather close to Fukushima or 3 Mile Island, purely due to containment structures. Given how many people died from radiation in the wake of Fukushima (literally one - and less than 100 estimated in the counterfactual scenario where there was no evacuation) and 3-Mile Island (zero confirmed), I think it's reasonable to say that there is no way for the NRC's regulations to have prevented even 1000 deaths over the past 50 years.
https://allthingsnuclear.org/lgronlund/how-many-cancers-did-...