Comment by pil0u

Comment by pil0u 12 hours ago

Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.

LinXitoW 12 minutes ago

Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.

And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.

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pfdietz 12 hours ago

Even with that, renewables are cheaper.

One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

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johanyc 11 hours ago

The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it

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- nilslindemann 10 hours ago
  
  No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you.
  Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
  
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  chickenbig 3 hours ago
  
  > Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
  Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
  
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- mperham 7 hours ago
  
  You should check out these things called batteries.
  
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  realusername 3 hours ago
  
  You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose.
  
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- pfdietz 9 hours ago
  
  With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).
  In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
  
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bluefirebrand 4 hours ago

Who the actually cares about cheaper I want better and more reliable
Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper?

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- pfdietz 4 hours ago
  
  Renewables and storage would be cheaper at the same level of reliability.
  
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