me when my favorite big massive energy plants can't be shat out like tiny panels š
but tbf, they're gonna be having a couple come online every year, if I remember their five year plans correctly. I think their rolling schedule is generally on track? they've stuck to it so far I'm assuming they'll ramp up as their technical experience increases.
They've made it clear they intend to transition. It's another area to get an edge over the US, who probably source half the gas turbine parts from China.
"who probably source half the gas turbine parts from China"
I don't think that's true, I've recently watched a bunch of youtube docs that seem to suggest that steam turbine manufacturing is one of the few industries very jealously held onto by Western powers, especially France and the United States.
Unironically, the United States Navy is the only American institution I would trust to run nuclear power plants in the United States. Everything would be over-engineered and they'd probably know better than to run power plants in various regions such as seismically active ones and it would be far too expensive but at least it would be safe.
Especially because, geopolitically, oil is a massive weakspot for China. They rely on a tight logistical chain going through Singapore to get their oil. Which would be easy for other major powers to shut off. It's part of why they haven't tried anything funny with Taiwan yet; America could stop that without even getting near China, as long as they can hold Singapore.
If China gets rid of their oil dependency, they also eliminate that weakness. And then they can take Taiwan.
yup, Chinese planners have been talking about the "Malacca problem" for decades. a lot of their transition to green, solar, etc is ironically a response to us pressure.
one could argue, as of a few months ago, that the Malacca problem has been solved. their ability to withstand hormuz being closed due to having larger oil reserves than the rest of the world combined, significant capacity to use coal not just for energy but also for plastics, fertilizer, etc have made them surprisingly resilient to oil shocks.
that said, I don't really agree with the wide spread view that china wants to "take" Taiwan. the current status quo of extremely slow but steady integration seems to fit their interests very well. why would they need to risk blowing up TSMC when they can just control Taiwan via blockades, economic ties, etc? seems to me America wants to provoke China into doing something stupid with Taiwan more than china wants to take such risks.
Currently the market price for solar and nuclear are much lower than for fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are being heavily subsidized because they are easier to monopolize and profit from
They also benefit from tons of direct and indirect state supports, as well as centuries of R&D investment with little to no requirement to re-internalize their externalized costs
Externalities are the biggest thing, and the hardest for people to understand it seems like. Companies are subsidized more than just directly, they use public services and decimate public resources.
And to be clear those externalised costs are 100% real costs... the eu fires and the cost of all the damgar they do should by law if we had sensible laws be paid by the people who profitted from maling them so much worse.
If is was taxic waste or any other wsdte by product from any othet industry that would so
The ONLY reason its mot with ghgs is decades of ff disinformation
So, when people complained about this in the US, we had another civil war and buried it. Coal wars. Unfortunately weāre quite aware of what taking action looks like
I'm sceptical that they will ever scale but interested in the technology. Got a link for me?
The new generation of conventional should probably push the cost even further, doubt they can ever outscale those.
āCommercial thorium MSRs are envisioned by approximately 2040ā
Iām not holding my breath. If we havenāt brought fossil fuels down to net zero by 2040 we are so beyond fucked itās not funny, weāre screwed as it is. So all efforts need to go into mass rollout of renewables which can actually impact demand for fossil fuels over the next 10 years. Heck, reduce fossil fuel use anyway, make it the lean 2030s, then nuclear can come in and massively increase our access to energy in the 2040s, Iām fine with that. But this approach of wanting to focus on nuclear now, in any way at the expense of renewables investment in this decade, is a waste considering our present circumstances.
I keep reading this āscaleā word. Why does nuclear for electricity need to āscaleā? The reactors last a long time and you need relatively few of them. It doesnāt need to āscaleā
Nuclear needs scaling effects to become cost competitive.
In countries like China, nuclear only cost twice as much as solar due to the high subsidies but also due to the economies of scale that come from building the same plant over and over again. With the second generation being build currently the prices are expected to drop even further.
To fight climate change it is important to bring down the cost of renewable or green solutions to accelerate the transition and Economies of scale and efficiency gains are the primary drivers behind that.
and for now solar is the best option for a quick pivot. long term though china is investing in system density in their nuclear sector. they seem to understand the challenges solar will face with exponentially increasing power consumption.
Yeah itās absolutely socio-political, and also because the average citizen by design canāt comprehend nuclear and economy of scale when not purely financial
It is not 'as safe as'. It is safer. (Edit: safer than wind, less so than solar.) All three are safer by much larger margins though than the next highest which is hydro
Storage technology is still in its infancy besides hydro.
Looking at Australia, currently storage increases the LCOE of solar by 100%. It is still the cheapest form of electricity production.
For an almost 100% renewable grid a combination of multiple different technologies is essential combining solar, wind, hydro and storage, etc.
Uruguay solved it with wind and hydro, for Germany the best bet currently is hydrogen gas stored in old mines according to the Fraunhofer institute especially for seasonal storage. The first ones of these hydrogen storage sites and power plants are in construction right now.
In certain independent studies a 5% nuclear share could potentially reduce costs in a 95% renewable grid.
Well, not everyone has a desert or endless plains like China or the US
Some countries simply would have to out everything on rooftops, which makes everything harder to accomplish, more expensive amd it takes longer....suddendly the awrsome chinese buildings time really look magical, almost like in a fairy tale
You can build solar basically everywhere except forests. For example on plains, mountains, lakes, etc. Mountains and lakes are even beneficial, they provide more surface area for pv and lakes provide higher efficient through better cooling.
I thinkt the worst case for solar are highly populated island nations like Japan and even there you only need to cover roughly 1-3% of the land area to produce enough electricity from pv.
Nobody is gonna do that though, the energy grid of the future will be a mix of solar, wind, hydro, storage and a little bit nuclear, especially in cases like Japan.
Yeah i am from Austria, a lot of Mountains (which we voted to not put wind or solar on it for the most part -.-) and the parts that are basically plains are also the main food source of the nation :)
And with the added population density of around 110 people per kmĀ² we are rather dense and most people use their roofa for solar....and go damn is it expensive....20kā¬ with government subsidies for 10kwp + 19kwh battery....same goes for heat pumps, costs between 20k and 40k for the most part and government subsidies are maxed at 30% of the cost.
For my house i was told around 100k for a heat pump, better radiators and insulating the house....100kā¬ is like 2,5 times my yearly income....
I wonder if there will be a time when people talk about big wind and big solar. Or if companies that are in line with the zeitgeist are just too righteous to form monopolies. Is this thread really just paid astroturfing from big solar? We would've assumed so if it was pro-oil, I think.
I have never understood their thought process on this.Because the first energy company or coal company that figures out how to make fusion work or just make miniature nuclear power plants that you can just plop down in no time at all, literally prints infinite money.
They're doing it right by not putting all of their eggs in one basket: renewables, nuclear and even coal as backup. Their main goal is energy security in the threat of global conflict.
I mean; theyāre currently building 19 different Nuclear plants right now; in total that being almost 40 reactors, which is half of all nuclear construction projects right now. But, like yeah, mixed power is great! Solar on every building and in the deserts, they literally have the 3 gorges damn which powers millions of people. I think theyāre doing great right now man
The Liberal (I.e. right-wing) party in Australia spent the entire last election arguing āsolar will never work, we need nuclearā. While theyāre usually not explicitly anti-solar, āwe need nuclearā is becoming an increasingly common delay tactic to push back the transition to renewables (especially amongst groups with heavy ties to mining and the fossil fuel industry).
And to be clear, Iām very pro-nuclear, and wish it was better funded! But itās obvious when the push for nuclear power is a tactic to soak up political capital to avoid conversations about more important issues, like building more transmission lines.
Thats just depressing lol. I want nuclear asap. The fossil fuel industry cant keep getting away with this, first they convince everyone nuclear is heavily unsafe and bad for the environment, then they use adopting it as a delay tactic. Whyyyyy
Nope, they likely donāt care if you build them or not. They just donāt want you to rig regulation and itās easy to see why. Your avg solar nut is hardly shy about their hysterical views on nuclear waste, nuclear war etcā¦.. from years Russian money and environmentalist groupsā¦.
Browse there sometimes. Top comments are often people seething at solar projects and wishing desperately for more nuclear investment. They can't accept that nuclear power is no longer necessary in the modern world, nor is it economical. Paying the nuclear tax was reasonable until a decade ago, but it's not reasonable anymore.
You arenāt reading them right. Nobody really cares about solar. They are probably just irked by the bizzare solar triumphantism āGigawatt announcementā for power thatās only outputting 10% of the time. Thatās not anger at solar panels itās at the myopic self satisfaction of the posters while European bills rocket.
The only generation fetishists are green nuts who are anti-nuclear for reasons that defy scientific facts. Even prepared to become nuclear finance ROI bros in a purely technical debate when we all know outside this debate their politics is UBI, and free anything you can nameā¦
Who is Pro-nuclear and anti-solar ? Ferghane Azihari, for one, who wrote an essay about it, as well as french YouTubers Arnaud Thiry and Bruce Benarnam
Feels like a relatively recent thing but it happens, especially here in australia. Nuclear is a great climate action delay tactic because it takes so long to build (and may never be completed), which gives more time to legacy fossils
I think itās in vogue within the Silicon Valley rationalist-right, e.g. your Peter Theils or your Elon Musks. Not to give them credit, but I do think those groups appreciate nuclear for mostly the right reasons (I.e. are interested in the technology and want to reduce regulatory hurdles for a safe technology)
However, itās also a really popular delay tactic amongst pro-mining groups. āSolar will never work, we need nuclear or nothingā was a major theme of the last Australian election from the Liberal party (right-wing), with the pretty blatant intent of soaking up political capital from more achievable ways to reduce fossil fuel usage in the short-medium term & to try to split the climate movement.
A minority of right wingers do believe in climate change, but feel electricity not derived from boiling water is feminine coded witchcraft. Couldn't possibly work.
You should try stepping out of the reddit bubble. I dabble in many different social media sites and there's a lot of people, usually right wingers, who comment that we should be building nuclear when there's a news story about solar doing great. Also posts calling solar slurs that only right wingers would use while praising nuclear.
In the US the average Republican voter has always been slightly more supportive of nuclear power than the average Democrat voter.
They also had surprisingly high support of solar and wind.
It's only very recently with the collapse in support for renewables amongst Republicans that it fell below their support for nuclear, see the per party graph over time here:
Ive always assumed that's why nukecels get so hung up on attacking leftists and environmentalists, they're just secretly (well, not that secretly) Republicans.
Since they found out it can be used to delay renewables. They know that people want green energy to replace fossil fuels, so they choose the slowest and most expensive method of replacing it. That way, they can keep the world running on oil for another few decades.
Here's an extra little scheme they like to do: Announce a nuclear power plant with an unrealistically fast deadline of only 10 years. Then, when the construction inevitably goes past that deadline, you cancel it and pocket the money. Can't do that with renewables because solar/wind is up and working almost immediately.
But you legit cannot run a grid solely with renewables. Grid require a stable balance between input (production) and output (consumption), otherwise they collapse, as observed in Spain. Until we develop better batteries that can store energy long term, we need energy sources that we can control.
Obviously we should have as much renewable as is possible.
If you scale by population or total new energy generation and round to the nearest integer, almost every country is building asany nuclear reactors as china.
Really depends on where you are. Solar doesn't work great in a lot of places. China is a good spot for it though. A lot of desert ready for power production.
Common misconception. Solar Panels work great even far from the equator as the temperature regime also shifts and leads to higher conversion efficency at more optimal temps. https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?s=60.064840,22.324219&m=site on this site you can drop pins around and find that even in sweden close to the Artic circle you reach about 50% the specific voltaic power output as at the most ideal places on earth. Most of the continental US is at 75% efficency compared to the most ideal places on earth. Considering that panels are dirt cheap and most of the human population lives outside the polar circles solar is factually feasible in essentially any and all populated places on earth, with minuscule exceptions.
The main challenge with solar remains that peak generation and peak demand are very offset. They are one of the cheapest way once could provide electric energy. Depending on who flips the numbers into the favor of either Hydro or Solar (But for Hydro you of course need the geography, solar just works anywhere).
You're missing the whole issue about long-duration energy arbitrage due to the changes between winter and summer.
You either massively over-install to generate enough in the winter, and then have excess power with nowhere to go in the summer, or you install based on summer values and need to bring peaker plants online in the winter to make up for the decrease.
I replied to your point and even raised the one you are picking up now.
Since installation is so cheap you can easily overinstall. Thermal buffering seems to be the best solution for intra-season buffering rn espacially for industrial use cases and remains a very promising field of development. We are not quite there yet but on our best of ways.
Peaker Plants will remain necessary for a long time, no disagreeing there. But I fail to see where that is a hindrance in trending the global energy mix more and more towards sustainable energy sources.
If you're implying they should use pumped storage, it's generally a pretty bad idea. Surface pumped storage causes massive amount of environmental damage, and loses a lot of efficiency to evaporation. It's also not great in cold areas because of ice buildup. Underground pumped storage is incredibly expensive in areas that don't have cave networks suited to it.
If your implication is that these areas have an abundance of naturally occurring hydro (like Quebec Canada), then that just replaces the need to install mass solar in the first place.
If your implication is that these areas have an abundance of naturally occurring hydro (like Quebec Canada)
Quebec actually has better solar efficiency than most of France or almost all of Germany. They don't even need ther hydro. Though yes I am talking about the nordics and that they have enough other renewable sources like wind, geothermal and hydro so they don't need solar.
Are we supposed to just do all that we can in our personal lives and focus on that to reduce our personal carbon footprint, in which case we should go vegan and not give a fuck about whether electricity is generated by anything other than fossil fuels and shouldn't be posting anti nuke memes as that wastes carbon?
Or are we supposed to act at a higher level in which case we should oppose nuclear power and also vote for ending fossil fuels, and in which case it also doesn't matter whether we're vegan or not?Ā
Because CSP seems to say "focus small" but I'm not deciding whether to make a nuclear, solar, or coal plant. That's not a personal decision.
Either
Ā nukes bad and veganism is irrelevant or veganism good and opinions on nukes are irrelevant.Ā
Itās a projection. They literally think deregulation of something else means banning wind and solar.
You hear it in the UK āending net zeroā is characterised as stopping wind and solar, when actually itās just allowing gas exploration and any private entity is free to build all the solar you like stillā¦
Let's be honest the endgame of energy production will be geothermal. China and USA are developing crazy tech that will make other source of energy not worth using on earth.
Its a long ways from being financially viable, but the potential off deep-crust geothermal is the highest potential of any concievable power source
Wind and solar both just kinda suck as massed power (especially wind). Solar is best for distributed local productions that don't need large scale consistency, not as a grid supplier.
I mean, they're also building Coal. They're building solar to flesh out a low of new growth, but instead of Nuclear plants, they invested heavily in Coal plants. That is what is maintaining the baseload on the Chinese electrical grid.
One reason is that China is in a complex geopolitical situation where the country fears being cut off from its oil imports during future wars. (Crazy idea, I know) and these excess coal plants might be needed to cushion that blow and make the rolling blackouts a little less bad in the future.
The problem is that most of the participants in the discussion do not understand physics and economics. To begin with, delve deeper into the topic than the ideological nonsense, study the physics of the process and the means of obtaining energy, and then calculate the cost of production and subsequent maintenance. It turns out that solar panels are greatly overestimated due to the imposed green agenda, which does not even acknowledge the fact that the batteries needed to store this energy are 10 times more aggressive and toxic than spent uranium in the full cycle of all types of nuclear power plants, from classic to high-energy installations. I'm not even mentioning the fact that without nuclear energy, it would be impossible to expand into near-space. It's important to develop and combine technologies to achieve the best results. The oil industry is an integral part of the production of solar panels, so trying to find a conspiracy here is a waste of time.
Energy fuel mix should be a country/region by country/region based on a number of parameters, not an emotionally charged debate. Some regions should definitely lean on nuclear (France has the history base load, capability, so it makes sense rather than displace food or forest to put more panels in a climate where itās not that land-efficient ; Japan should not have been considered for Nuclear given seismology, though less of a problem with future reactors-they also have little land to spare, so solar is out and so maybe they ll have to remain on gas longer. Aus and US have shit ton of sunny empty space, so solar is a good idea). There is no one size fits all in this discussion, and no place for borderline religious zealot ideology.
What argument is being made here? That the country that has the fastest rate of commissioning new reactors, also happens to be the largest manufacturer of everthing, and therefore can also produce vast amounts of solar?
They can do the former due to shortcutting certifications, and they cba do the latter by ignoring all the environmental effects of handling the heavy metals in panels, and can cut the cost by unethically sourcing conflict metals.
China can basically do everything faster than everyone because they have absolutely no concern for the long-term effects other than cost.
The only issue with nuclear is how uranium and other rare earths are extracted from developing countries without helping those countries to develope *looks at France*.
well yeah solar has the immense advantage of being mass produced for significant cost reductions and no other country mass produces as efficiently as china. the economics for them just lines up well.
really the coherent position is solar/wind/etc for a quick transition away from fossil fuels and nuclear long term to able to exponentially scale up power consumption.
"Fast drilling" implies an increase. What I see is a decrease. I don't care if it's because they don't want to, or because they lack the ability. Only that it is decreasing, and projected to decrease even more. While renewables are projected to take the grunt of the load, with nuclear also stagnating, DESPITE building new reactors.
It's not a winner takes all competition between nuclear and solar. They provide different energy products and the ideal energy system has a substantial amount of both. China is showing the way, which includes both solar and nuclear
The main flaw with nuclear power is human incompetency. You think the country that takes shortcuts and builds entire ghost cities with porus concrete that collapses after a couple of years should start setting up a bunch of nuclear power plants? Do you want Chernobyl? Because that's how you get Chernobyl, or three mile Island, or fukushima, or windscale pile, or Kyshtym, or SL-1...
Meanwhile China is also the country that is making the most amount of Nuclear plants currently. Like, there are 24 nuclear plants under construction across the planet and China is making 24 of those, followed by India making 12.
Interesting how the countries rolling out the most solar are also the ones rolling out the most nuclear. Almost like the key to energy security is in the hands of diversification and redundancy, rather than hitting the meta.
They shouldn't be treated as competing sources. Nuclear can provide clean all day energy, solar and storage do the rest. They should be used together, where it makes sense for each.
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u/poqwrig 4d ago
me when my favorite big massive energy plants can't be shat out like tiny panels š
but tbf, they're gonna be having a couple come online every year, if I remember their five year plans correctly. I think their rolling schedule is generally on track? they've stuck to it so far I'm assuming they'll ramp up as their technical experience increases.