Source - The colors of the grids represent CO2 emissions
The title is a reference to the 2021 Texas power crisis
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Well, if reality disagrees with you, it's usually not reality that's wrong. You can say that prices should have been decreasing, but I can show you that prices did not decrease, they increased, whereas prices for renewables have been decreasing.
Also, nuclear energy is the dream of the current fossil fuel industry - it's centralized (no individuals can produce their own energy), it's heavily subsidized (otherwise it would be way too expensive), and negative effects are socialized (cleanup is oftentimes not fully covered by the operator, and they also won't be held accountable in the case of accidents). They are terrified of renewables, as they'd lose control and gain more competition.
and housing prices are fucking insane, it doesnt mean that building houses is expensive.
Prices should have been decreasing, like they should have been with housing. But due to a lack of funding and manufacturing, modern nuclear power plants have very little R&D investment, and the entire labor pool surrounding nuclear plant fabrication doesn't really exist anymore.
The primary reason for the prices of renewables falling is more than likely china and chinese subsidies gunning for a market dominance, followed by technological advancement, Unfortunately these advances don't solve the problem of solar panels needing silicon, and batteries being expensive, and wind turbines being a maintenance nightmare, as well as a disposal nightmare (most wind turbine blades are made out of fiber glass, good luck have fun)
It's not the dream of the fossil fuel industry, if it were, it would be a successful technology that was actively in use, because the only thing fossil fuel companies care about is making money. Why do you think they wouldn't do nuclear if it was feasible? The answer is that it isn't in comparison to fossil fuels like oil and coal. And that's it.
Yes the grid is centralized. What next, going to the grocery store is centralized? Wait until you figure out what walmart did.
Exactly. This means that pumping money into this sector is ineffective if the goal is to combat climate change - the optimal build times will most likely not be met for any of the initial reactors that could be built, which pushes the first day of power generation back further and further. Renewables start to give some power immediately while you're building up more and more capacities.
Given the technological advancements and the current prices, it's a good idea to start investing massively. If this should affect pricing negatively instead of positively (it was the latter before), investments could ensure local production. Every country will want access to silicon anyway for chip production, so this is not a new problem, just a difference of scale.
The price of batteries keeps falling and falling. Recently, the price of renewables + grid-scale storage has fallen below the equivalent price of nuclear energy. Given the current pricing trends, investing in nuclear means hoping that the trend reverses. With renewables and grid-scale storage, you're simply betting on the same trends of the last decade continuing.
Just like with nuclear energy, these are problems of investments and scale. Because of the supply of used turbine blades increasing, there has been a lot of development and investment into recycling them, and the situation has already improved a lot. You're, again, hoping that the same will happen for nuclear energy on a short-enough timescale.
And that somehow means it should stay centralized? A decentralized grid has a bunch of advantages: lower costs for the individual participants, higher resilience during catastrophes, lower impact of maintenance/disruptions/attacks, and a much shorter time to first production.
i mean sure, but the more we do this, the less and less options we have in the event that idk, china stops fucking selling solar panel pre reqs and we get put 10 years behind automatically. Or the event that cobalt turns out to the new fucking asbestos or something. And it starts killing people on the regular. Though unlikely.
We simply cannot be reliant, on two forms of power generation. We need to invest in nuclear as well, it will take a while, however there are still current gen 3 and gen 2 (though outdated and old designs now) that you could be building and manufacturing. Nuclear energy is a very reliable, though not immediately accessible source of power, it's value should not be understated, you build a nuclear plant and you get 30-50 years of continual power production at a capacity factor of greater than 80% most of the time. Compared to solar having probably 30% (actually supported by the math too btw) capacity factor including optimal power consumption and storage it won't change much.
by the way, the rhetoric and arguments you're using for solar and wind right now are the same that were being used for nuclear power prior to chernobyl, fukushima, and TMI, all of which, except for chernobyl were relatively mild accidents. TMI didn't even have any reported radiation leakage, as it was all contained within the PCV, which did it's job. (though every single one of these should've been prevented to begin with)
i don't disagree, i think it's promising, but i think we're shooting ourselves in the foot here by not also dedicated focus to nuclear power, which is objectively a really good match for renewables, it takes significant load off of something like solar storage, while providing significant peak production during the midday, thanks to solar.
to be accurate, it's fallen below the cost of literally all power production methods entirely, i believe. We're still at a technological wall in terms of effective battery technology, we're hopeful for a breakthrough, but we have no guarantees other than, science always seems to move forward. The practicality in cheaper more commodity based battery technologies, is... Minor at best. The only practical source we have currently is those using heavy metals. We simply need more time.
and investing in solely renewables means you hope that nothing bad ever happens to the renewables market, surely nothing bad has ever happened in similar market segments prior to now? The economy and market was doing incredibly well up until 2008, until it all imploded.
This is a rather naive conceptualization of the market forces at play here. Nuclear energy situates itself into a different market segment, it serves a different purpose. Theoretically there is nothing stopping you from building tons of renewables, and then using it to subsidize nuclear energy, for example. That would be an incredibly valuable investment of that time and money.
yeah, i think there is plenty of time, we just have to conscious about what we're doing and not do goofy shit like, burn shit tons of coal in the mean time. We're quite literally already fucked, we have two options. One is to speedrun as fast as possible out of it, which is likely going to end disastrously (global energy market collapse, for example) or we can take a brisk but metered pace, hoping that it will simply, be good enough, and bet on the reliability of that out pacing the speedrun alternative.
Even russia is investing lots of R&D into nuclear power, in fact they're the leading developer with china following shortly behind. Both of them see it fit to invest money into those fields. Why should we not do the same?
it has advantages and disadvantages, it would be nice to have a fully decentralized grid, but this is going to increase the cost of housing, and maintenance drastically. Putting lots of people out of home ownership if they weren't already. Plus it also puts the centralized energy grid itself out of the market, which is the primary R&D driver for the field, presumably it would still exist otherwise, but there's no guarantee there. Markets are a cruel beast. It could also significantly hamper the pace at which we go renewable as well. Since now instead of hiring and training contractors at company scale, you're dealing with it across the country, across multiple different types of contractors, who operate under different principles, maintenance is vastly more problematic.
If you want to put solar and storage on your own property, you can. If you want to tie into the grid, you also can. There is nothing stopping you from doing either one of those. Hell if you want to go live in the middle of nowhere and build your own microgrid, again, there is nothing stopping you.