Hey, Germany, if Trump thinks you’re doing something right, take that as a warning.
If he was right on anything but the political spectrum, I would. I’m not sure what he is refering to, but while the current government is kinda pro nuclear, so far they have only announced more reliance on natural gas than previously planned, after the CDU had already criticized the planned capacity. This is meant as an equally reliable and more environmentally friendly replacement for coal, and it’s planned to eventually transition the gas grid to (hopefully green) Hydrogen. It is in no way reversing course on the green deal.
Disclaimer: I’m not a huge a fan of this plan, but it’s much more reasonable than Trump makes it sound.
AfD just scored high in the pols. A lot of them probably consider it high praise. :(
If a millionaire calls a practice bankrupt
They mean for millionaires
Thus, it’s a great idea for the 99%
Well the guy does know a thing or two about bankrupcy.
“Generally, the objective of gold is to lower your score…”
Another hour of “You’re shit, I’m the best” from psycho grandad.
“All green all bankrupt.”
“Sorry, hold on a sec, I need to shovel billions in subsidies to oil companies…”
Uhm, we don’t and won’t do nuclear anymore? Except for that wanna be food influencer in Bavaria everyone including the companies agree nuclear is dead.
Why is nuclear bad? Doesn’t it generate fuck ton of energy and is quite safe? The one in japan survived tsunami and earthquakes.
There’s an enormous amount of fear mongering around nuclear. A lot of concern is around the waste product despite the fact that far less is generated compared to coal and it is far more easily contained rather than just being dumped into our atmosphere.
Nuclear should be considered just another source of renewable energy.
Its not the nuclear part, it’s the part where Trump thinks public utilities should be for profit first.
Trump speeches are like a flame thrower on a pivot … your just turn on the unit and it starts burning random things within range and you won’t know where it will spew it’s flames.
Nuclear Energy is the way forward. But Trump is the express lane to everything backwards. So, I’m conflicted.
Solar is literally free energy with very little maintenance and overhead.
But cannot meet demands or surges like nuclear can.
You can’t just turn a reactor on and off whenever you feel like it
But the things actually generating the electricity (the turbines) most have some flexibility. Not on/off maybe
It’s not, it’s more costly and error prone than renewables especially long-term.
But we aren’t returning to nuclear energy? I wish we were …
Another good reason for me to be against nuclear
So you’re saying because trump goes on a rant and doesn’t slander nuclear power, that’s a reason not to continue to progress with the tech?
What a strange take.
It’s just a wrong take
For real. The only maybe compelling arguments are the risk of reactor meltdown and nuclear waste, but modern reactor design and safety practices make that essentially a non-issue (indeed, nuclear power is safer even than wind power, statistically), and people typically vastly overestimate the amount of waste that is produced (all of the nuclear waste from power generation that humanity has ever produced could fit on just six cargo ships with some room left over, and that ignores the fact that not all waste is equally dangerous) and it’s not like other power generation methods don’t generate pollutants and waste either, it typically just gets vented into the atmosphere. Personally, I’d rather the waste be in a form we can contain.
The only actual problem with nuclear is that there isn’t enough nuclear material in the world for it to provide for all of our power generation needs, but that’s not even really a problem so much as it just means it can’t be our only solution to the problem, and nuclear is incredible for generating a stable baseline, an advantage that something like wind and solar lack. Until we crack profitable fusion, it is far and away one of our best options.
Economics. Fission build out sucks ass. This is the one and only reason there aren’t any new reactors coming online in the US. The NRC is giving out new licenses, but nobody wants to fund that shit because it’s been a black hole of money.
True, but I would argue that this isn’t an issue with fission power so much as an argument that it should be handled, either in part or in whole, by the government rather than the market. All kinds of things exist which are necessary for a populace which are not economically viable for private operators (fire departments, postal services, public transit, etc.), and typically the role of government in that scenario would be to step in and either make it viable through subsidy or just pay the cost outright and personally operate it (indeed, this is part of a larger argument that public utilities like power probably shouldn’t be privately owned in the first place). Nonetheless, if we’re being realistic, that is unlikely to change anytime soon, particularly in the US, so I can see the value in assessing from a perspective of optimizing for raw economic pressure, as that is likely the only way we’ll be able to get the people and organizations with significant capital on hand to align with the goal of renewable energy.
There’s no particular reason to think that government dumping money into fission would produce a better result than dumping it into grid, solar, and wind.
I get it, letting people like Trump oversee nuclear power is dangerous as hell. More responsible adults may be capable, but if you’ve got fascism and oligarchy in the mix, it should be avoided unless you like nuclear disasters and extremely unregulated storage of nuclear waste.
That sounds less like a problem with nuclear and more like a problem with authoritarianism. Throw it on the pile.
I’m totally for advancing. With the correct tech, of course, which is none of what can make a fascist happy
Germany shouldn’t be shutting down existing nuclear reactors that work perfectly well.
They also shouldn’t bother building new ones. Fission is a dead end tech.
That goes for just about everyone.
They also shouldn’t bother building new ones. Fission is a dead end tech.
We need something that eats old nuke waste and makes it into power or something; like the next gen nuke plants, which do that.
There’s a reason why you want to keep old nuke plants around - they work well, for a really long time - but that is the same reason to build more (and smaller) nuke plants.
This, rather than building new fission reactors, we should fund research on fusion. It is really promising, and addresses all the biggest issues of fission.
I agree we need to fund it more, absolutely, but I heavily disagree with your assessment. Our fossil fuel emissions are a problem we need to address now, and I think it would be incredibly unwise for us to gamble on the unknown timeline of fusion to mature enough to address the problem in time. In my view, we should be focusing on halting our emissions with current, proven tech first, and then once fusion power becomes viable and scalable, then we can start switching from fission to fusion.
Fission isn’t what you want, then. If you had 100 licenses from the NRC in hand today, not a single GW of new nuclear would come online in the US before 2030. Possibly not even 2035.
And how long before we get fusion?
A lot longer than making grid improvements, solar, and wind.
Correct. This is another part of why fission can’t be our only solution, but that doesn’t mean that we should be betting on fusion in place of fission. Typical times to build and operationalize a fission reactor are in the 5-15 year range from what I understand, but that is significantly lower than the expected timelines for us cracking fusion power and getting the tech mature enough to be able to implement it at scale for power generation. Additionally, the most likely type of fusion that we would be using in this case would be Deuterium-Tritium fusion, which generates neutron radiation and nuclear waste as a result (though significantly less than fission), so you would be likely to see similar waste disposal requirements. Consequently, I would expect similar timelines as fission power operationalization for a fusion plant (though likely still lower than fission, of course, due to the lack of reactor meltdown risk needing to be accounted for).
Between the research component which we have no true ability know the timeline of, only make educated guesses, alongside the construction and operationalization timeline, you’re probably looking at twice the length of time as bringing a fission plant online as a hard minimum, and I’m of the opinion it will likely be even longer. As a result, I think there’s a compelling argument for fission in the interim, though I will admit you are correct in that fusion research investment may have the ability to significantly change this calculus, so I understand your perspective.
The problem is that fission does not actually hybridize with solar/wind/water very well. There is one possible exception; on the question of fission, I’ve switched from “yes” to “no” to “maybe, but still probably no” due to that one exception.
Fission has extremely high up front capital costs, but relatively low ongoing costs. What that means is you really, really want to run it at 100% as close to 24/7 as you possibly can. You also can’t stop your fuel from undergoing decay even when it’s not at critical, though that’s somewhat minor.
Solar and wind have the issue that the amount of power you get from them doesn’t ever match the amount of power you want. They’re also so dirt cheap that we want to use as much of it as we possibly can. To complement them, we need something that can vary its power output.
That is not fission. It fights against that for economic and physics reasons. You end up having to shut off solar and wind at otherwise viable times because fission wants to keep dumping power on the grid.
Can’t seem to find the reference now, but there is one proposed type of plant that stores the superheated steam in the secondary loop, and can therefore vary its output as needed. This would hybridize much better with solar and wind. However, it hasn’t been proven in practice, and doesn’t address a number of other economic problems with fission.
All that said, grid upgrades, grid upgrades, grid upgrades. I can’t emphasize them enough, even though they’re really boring. When you have good long distance transmission, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun is shining somewhere for much of the day. You end up not needing nearly as much storage as you’d think. In fact, we may already have enough pumped hydro in the US to make it work. If not, then it’s fairly close.
Then if we want fission in 2035, we’ll have to start now. If we want fusion by 2035, we’re probably out of luck because we haven’t even got the tech to the point where we can produce net electricity with it yet (net energy from the reaction yes, but that’s not good enough for a power plant), and once we get that we need to refine it enough to produce enough energy to be worth the cost, and then we have to actually build the power plants. If we want neither, then we’ll probably still be using fossil fuels for a significant percentage of power generation by then, because while solar is cheap and should probably be the bulk of our future energy mix, is isn’t good for some use cases
That’s why you don’t solely fixate on solar. All viable plans involve a mix of solar, wind, water, and grid upgrades. That last one is particularly important. If you have long distance transmission, then there’s always wind or solar available.
That’s where I realized Greenpeace (and related Green parties worldwide) has it all wrong.
In high school in the 90s, I was reading up on nuclear power and came across an article from Greenpeace about it. Of course, they’re against fission, but when it got to the portion on nuclear fusion, they were still against it on the basis of “we could be putting that money in solar and wind”.
That’s when I knew Greenpeace was not led by serious people. Have yet to see a reason to change that position.
While I do agree that we should research fusion, it doesn’t really address all the issues of fission. It still has some nuclear waste generation; not from spent fuel but from the reactor walls being bombarded with neutrons, causing some of that material to become radioactive, and it will likely require even more complex facilities and so have the “you need to spend a massive amount of time and money to get a reactor online” economic issues fission has, but possibly even worse. The physics technically give you more energy per amount of fuel and the fuel is more abundant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting electricity will be cheaper, especially when both systems use so little fuel anyway.
It does avoid the possibility of a runaway reaction/meltdown I guess, but modern reactors are pretty good about avoiding that anyway. For that matter, newer (relatively speaking) fission reactor designs exist that can process waste into more fuel (not forever obviously, the fuel can’t be infinite, but enough to greatly extend the fuel supply and deal with much of the waste issue at the same time). The fission waste issue is also a bit overblown; the actual volume is very low, so just digging a handful of very deep storage facilities to stick it in is a viable option for an extremely long time.
The biggest issue for fission, imho, is that we simply don’t build very much of it. The less of it we make, the smaller the pool of people and facilities that are equipped to run it, maintain it, build the components etc, and the more expensive running it or building more becomes.
If people are still building fossil fuel plants, it’s preferable that they build nuclear instead. Nuclear has the downsides of what to do with the waste (modern reactors produce much less than older designs, and some actually use the waste from older designs as fuel), expansion of fossil fuels have the downside that we won’t live long enough for nuclear waste to become any kind of real problem
Obviously renewables are best, but whilst we’ve not got the battery tech ready for 100% renewable base load, it’s not enough on its own.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Base load doesn’t exist. At least not in the way you consider it to.
Right now energy production is based on demand. With renewables, this should be reversed: Demand should adjust to the supply.
One very quick way to achieve this is by mandating dynamic electricity pricing for everyone - company or individual alike.
It will not take long for energy intensive companies to construct their own battery storage (since “purchasing” at -1 cent/kWh is much more economical than at 60 ct/kWh). Consumer demand will also adjust. If your washing machine costs 3€ to run at midnight and -10 ct at 2 pm, when do you think people will wash their clothes? The same goes for charging their EV, vacuuming etc.
The sole remaining factor is heating in winter. Which can not be solved by better battery storage but rather by building thousands of wind turbines everywhere.
The sole remaining factor is heating in winter. Which can not be solved by better battery storage
My parents house used to have thermal storage heating which seemed to work well. Each room had what looked like a standard sized radiator that stored heat, much more cheaply than a battery: nothing toxic, nothing expendable, nothing expensive. Overnight when rates were low, the unit heated up. During the day when rates were high, we just needed a small circulation fan to keep room temperature consistent with almost no power use.
I just had to get a new heat pump installed and looked for similar functionality but it doesn’t seem to exist.
Thermal storage heat would make a huge difference in shifting power usage from heating to account for factors like solar energy, and it would be much cheaper than batteries.
A prerequisite has to be smart appliances, and not in the current sense of a great way to milk more money from a customer through advertising and lock-in.
My thermostat, dishwasher, washer, dryer, car charger have timers so I can schedule them overnight (typical for cheaper electricity in the past, before solar). But other appliances don’t, and none can respond to less predictable changes in rates.
Do standard solar installs have the smarts to trigger appliances based on what they’re generating? Most of them are “smart” but they’ll only talk about monitoring and bill paying. I’ve been trying to find that out all summer but solar providers don’t know or are otherwise unable to answer.
I’m all for dynamic pricing of electricity but we don’t have the appliance intelligence to support it. That can take decades to roll out so we need to nail this down NOW
Point is that I want the people who can make it perfect to profit from it, not the ones that will only make it good selling it for better.
