nuclear power is expensive to maintain, plus needs all those expertise. and building the power plant takes like a decade+, and then you have to deal regulatory issues.
solar, you can pratically put that anywhere on the cheap.
We could have had this 30 years ago. There have been improvements in the tech and manufacturing, but the main reason for the price drop has been the scale of sales.
headline is clickbait. here’s the only thing it relies on:
According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.
Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.
so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear
We included solar panels and a battery when we built our new house in Tokyo, and even though it’s in a quite shadowy area, I’m surprised how much power we get out of them (even on cloudy days). Switching to an EV now too. It’s an absolute no-brainer.
Serious questions for people not looking to play political whack-a-mole and slapping people around online.
I haven’t taken the time to research - but is the “solar overtaking nuclear” because of the dramatic increase in solar farms? Or primarily from the increase of tech? I imagine an mix of both, but the quantity increase seems to be significant.
Are nuclear plants as efficient as they can be? Or are most of plants decades old with problems from aging?
Can the rise of solar be more person to person investment? Or is it’s increase mostly from huge cap ex from people wanting to own and charge for the energy? Nuke is obviously a huge expense begining to end.
And if Republicans weren’t such greedy assholes we’d have been here decades ago
You mean we can make FREE ENERGY in our BACKYARD for almost NO Money? This is TERRIBLE!
-LITERALLY Conservatives!
Turns out we already have fusion power, it’s just been placed safely 149.6 million km away. The solution to energy independence comes up every morning.
I know you are joking, but we have several commercial fusion plants that are in the construction phase.
Now you know why Big Oil is pushing so hard for massive profits. Between renewables and fusion the energy landscape is going to change dramatically.
149.6 million km
how many American hotdogs is that?
All energy comes from the sun except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum which might as well be the sun because it wouldn’t rotate without something to orbit around.
btw geothermal does not come from the earth’s rotation. it mostly comes from nuclear decay of heavy isotopes in the earth’s interior and the enormous heat capacity of the earth’s interior, which means it’s still warm from the friction heat from when the planet first formed. in other words it’s there since the Earth formed, independent of the sun.
also there’s another (practically accessible) form of energy that comes neither from geothermal nor from the sun: you can pull energy out of the tidal movement that comes from the moon’s changing gravity field as it orbits around our planet. i think that one’s not really being used though because the only way to really utilize it is to build dams across havens and important shipping routes and that interferes with trade, which is considered the more economically valuable activity from the two.
You mean a Dyson Sphere right?
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
Nuclear produces waste, which is mentioned often but it is usually responded by pointing out that it could be recycled and the worse to be buried.
Here is what people miss:
Are all our nuclear waste handled correctly today? If not then why should we imply that they will be in the future.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
And imo that’s a very valid argument on why we should use solar as much as we can.
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
Thats not even the biggest problem with nuclear power as the waste angle, at scale, will hit us decades in the future. The more urgent problem hitting us now on even on existing deployed nuclear plants is cooling water.
The byproduct of nuclear power generation is lots AND LOTS of waste heat. You have to get rid of this every second to continue to produce electricity. This is why nuclear power plants are typically built next to a large body of water. However, with reduced water supplies in reseviors theres less water to use for cooling nuclear plants. A double whammy is with climate change increasing temperatures, the water that remains is already hotter than it was, meaning it can carry away even less heat.
If a plant can’t get rid of its heat it needs to curtail (reduce) electricity production. This isn’t just theoretical. Its happening now in 2026 to existing power plants:
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Hungary - Aug 2026 Hungary plans to shut down only nuclear power plant amid drought
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Romania - Aug 2026 Nuclear power plants are being shut down as Europe’s drought becomes an energy crisis
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France & Switzerland - Aug 2026 Droughts cause nuclear power plants in Europe to reduce output
At the time when Europe was experiencing its worst heatwave is recorded history, many European reactors had to be turned down or off. 2026 isn’t the first time this has happened either, you can go back in the last 5 years or so and see many reports of nuclear plant curtailment because of lack of cooling capacity (cool water).
When we know global temperature are rising, it looks like this will just get worse. How can we say nuclear is the future when the conditions for it working well are already declining?
Fuck, that’s a terrifying thought. Bring on the panic attacks! Yay!
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Being pro-nuclear was a very valid position up until a few years ago. Now solar has gotten so cheap that there is practically no reason to do it except to protect yourself against US imperialism.
Nuclear reactors could still be useful in things like the mass production of hydrogen through steam electrolysis or even using fancy stuff like thermochemical reactions.
I know China is planning on building the world’s first nuclear reactor integrated into an industrial area for the production of very hot steam.
Solar still has some huge problems when it comes to seasonality and day/night cycle. You either need massive battery build out or some other form of energy to handle base loads and/or offset when solar isn’t producing enough.
Not saying solar isn’t part of the future, but we literally can’t just rely on solar.
Battery tech is getting super good though, and the materials are recyclable. If solar becomes cheap enough we could even store it in creative (but less efficient) batteries like lake batteries or weight batteries and the like.
This isn’t a problem at City scales and beyond. You just can’t buy a bunch of nazi batteries so there isn’t a corp greasing politicians to build it.
Nuclear, both fission and fusion (which will never happen anyway) are relics of an era of cheap fossil fuels and relative world order.
Solar electricity is viable at scale but also indicates a change in our species’ living arrangements on this planet.
We have started to build the first commercial fusion plants now. You may want to update your rhetoric.
I look forward to seeing them produce energy in a short 20 years from now.
You should read up on the topic, I know I was surprised, the breakthroughs have recently happened. Now it is just permitting and building. Obviously there will still be issues, but there is little question to the reality now.
You do realize that you can support multiple things? You don’t have to be antinuclear to be pro-solar.
You need to choose a thing to build there is not unlimited budget.
To the disposal argument i like to ask; are we handling our waste from burning fossil fuels well?
Is run away climate change “doing it well”?
Would you rather your waste be buried in the ground or pumped into the atmosphere?
Containing the waste and burying it in the ground is the default for nuclear, meanwhile doing the same for CO2 is very challenging and it may never be viable.
But we are comparing solar to nuclear.
Being better than fossil fuels is a pretty low bar.
And yes better nuclear than oil but the whole thing about nuclear is that it has a very delayed start time, so the argument of needing it ASAP supports solar if anything.
IMHO another big issue with nuclear is concentration of power. nuclear is quite stable, but not always and when it fails you suddenly loose a huge bunch of production that becomes hard to replace. (and Im not even getting into safety here)
France had to deal with a lot of issues just this year, with around 20% of their nuclear plants unoperative, which increased prices dramatically.
Solar is mostly distributed by design (and need) and failures are smaller
A hailstorm wiped out 350mW of solar in Texas in 2024. But, they learned that the angle of panels was critical to avoid damage and now they have a hail storm mode that increases the angle to protect the panels.
Not sure if panels can survive hurricanes, certainly not tornados.
350mW
Maybe they should keep some AA batteries around just in case another hailstorm hits.
AAA might be more portable though Texas might loose them in a strong gust of wind
fire it into space futurama style
Would you trust a SpaceX rocket with radioactive waste?
I would. If my goal was crashing that waste into a random subdivision or exploding on the launchpad dirty bomb style.
Let’s just not do it Space 1999 style.
The fact is that humans are just not well equipt to deal with problems beyond human scales.
We’re not good at accurately assessing risks beyond human time scales and we’re not good correctly prioritizing action when the benefit is beyond human time scales.
Big Oil predicted global warming pretty spot on, they just fought it and hid the findings instead.
To some extent I think we’ve gotten pretty good at long term predictions on things like this, but no one wants to hear it.
Global warming is a great example of how terrible we are at dialing in the correct priority for issues beyond human scales.
When some humans worked out it was coming, nothing happened - the opposite of nothing. As more humans became aware, more effort was put into styming efforts than actually doing anything.
Even now, as the effects are near-universally understood, present, and killing people - still we fail to act on the threat with anything like an appropriate level of seriousness.
We also have limited potential stores of uranium. When Chinese reactors all get on line, maybe 40 years left.
Agreed. Are we seriously forecasting 5000 years of stable, deep, under-mountain storage. For all those years, waste storage is a prime target for contaminating locales.
The other quality argument I’ve heard from Lemmy, is that the security requirements for nuclear plants are essential and costly, due to plants being a similar target for creating contamination.
Essentially, nuclear power is a fascist tech, due to the centralised, militaristic, security apparatus required for the life of the plant and waste.
nuclear power is a fascist tech
Calm down, Francis.
Guess which single country is making all the PV panels?
Technically solar power is nuclear power ☝️🤓
All power is solar power if you go deep enough. Or to be more accurate, stellar power.
Big Bang Power
Tidal and geothermal are not.
Pretty sure if the sun stopped generating heat the oceans would freeze but I’m no astrophysicist.
This raises an interesting question in my mind, does tidal power make the earth get closer to the moon? Because if you got all the energy out of it, then the water wouldn’t move, so I guess it’s the same as gravitational potential in that sense, but I guess it’s removing it, so less gravitational potential means either less mass (not the case) or less distance.
The opposite happens. Tidal energy is what causes the moon to drift farther away from the earth, as the moon loses angular velocity.
But does harvesting it make it go faster or slower away?
If you mean harvesting tidal energy, the effect on the moon would be minimal. The loss of angular momentum the moon experiences is due to the mass of the earth’s waters. I could not imagine anything humans could build that could extract enough tidal energy that it would disrupt the moon without utterly destroying the environment at the same time (by way of nullifying tides somehow). In fact, to harness tidal energy, one way would be to use underwater turbines. They would have an immediate effect to the local environment but a negligible amount to the moon itself.
I know its minimal, I’m not saying it’s a concern, I’m just saying if we are harvesting it, doesn’t that mean it’s pulling us closer to it? It’s not magically free energy (in the physics sense), so what else could it be other than converting the potential gravitational energy between the earth and moon into something else?
You’re not deep enough yet, tides and earths core only exist because stars exploded billions of years ago and some particles eventually formed earth
Geothermal comes from friction inside the core, residual heat from planet formation, and radioactive decay. Since all elements heavier than hydrogen were fused inside stars, and heavier actinides like uranium are formed in second gen stars, and the inertia of dust that coalesces into planetary bodies including the earth and the moon originated from dying stars going supernovae, geothermal and tidal energy are products of stellar explosions, either inertial, kinetic, or radioactive. Tides are driven by the moon, whose energy is kinetic, stored from past supernovae
All stars came from the Big Bang.
So it’s all Big Bang powered.
Checkmate.
You’re right, we are all just passengers on this bang bus
Planet wouldn’t exist if stars didn’t explode billions of years ago, checkmate.
Most usable energy on Earth comes from fusion of hydrogen into helium in the Sun, creating radiation that hits the Earth. That’s solar energy, of course, either thermal or photovoltaics, but also the wind caused by uneven warming, the evaporation and condensation of water that flows downhill for hydro power, the chemical bonds formed by photosynthesis making renewable biofuels or older fossil fuels.
Some portion of energy on Earth is gravitational potential energy and the kinetic energy of stuff moving around settling into a lower energy state: the moon dragging the oceans around, the heat of the Earth’s core spinning and tectonic plates moving from the momentum of all the dust that got pulled into what is now a planet. Geothermal and tidal energy mostly come from these planet scale phenomena.
Some portion of energy is the release of energy stored in nuclei formed from some past supernova, of less stable isotopes of atoms heavier than iron. Some portion of geothermal is traceable to this kind of nuclear decay, and obviously we can isolate and enrich those nuclear elements into fission fuel for nuclear power, as well.
Hard to categorize the second and third categories into solar power, though. Yeah, it comes from astronomical phenomena tracing back to how our solar system and planets were formed, from the materials they’re made out of, and found their way into their current shapes and orbits, but is that solar power?
Which is ultimately caused or released by gravity.
Stellar? Mmmm never thought about this word much. Constellation? Stars? Stellar?
I have some holes to go down
Fusion as well
Goated power generation method because no form of water needed.
Averaging nuclear over the entire world really doesn’t give it a fair shake, since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones. Where I am, the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is more than five times what’s supplied by solar and wind combined, and we’re doing just fine (and building out more nuclear in addition to more renewables).
Nuclear is slow. Solar is fast.
Nuclear has been slow, for a variety of reasons, but that is about to change.
Solar is fast now. We need fast now.
You’re not wrong, but it was slow for a good reason.
SMR
Modular reactors are fast. Ontario will have three online in 2 years.
Solar is still faster
Solar is fast and getting better continuously. The new battery technologies like Sodium Ion are eliminating the downsides to it. We just need a big battery shack on every block with safe sodium battery storage and solar panels on all the house roofs.
In UK in 2010, 10 new nuclear plants were announced. Since then 5 older plants have been shut leaving us with 5 active. 1 of the 10 new ones started construction and it’s massively over budget and delayed.
In the same time we’ve added about 20GW of solar.
New nuclear plants take like 10 years to build, and need to plan out a 50+ year useful life in order to be worth the up-front construction costs.
I wonder what the state of energy production in 2075 will be, where a nuclear power plant designed in 2025 and completed in 2035 will still have 10 years in order to break even on cost, competing with whatever the state of the art is on generation in 2075. Fusion? Widespread solar+wind+geothermal+batteries? Something we haven’t even dreamed of?
That’s why I’m skeptical of nuclear fission these days. It locks us in too long.
I’m all in on solar for most places.
Sure it uses a bit more land, but it makes no noise, no pollution, there’s zero risk of an accident, no targets for terrorism and your grid isn’t completely shut down if it is somehow turned offline.
You don’t depend on others for your own resilience. No need for oil, gas or uranium.
Unless you live in the high northern latitudes, there is almost no reason to not be building a durable and resilient battery-renewable grid
Solar should be in every parking lot and the median of every highway as the baseline, already space we’ve developed and can (more) easily add to.
Solar and wind don’t render entire regions uninhabitable when something goes wrong.
Its possible to build reactors that don’t fail spectacularly. Just look at penslyvania with the three mile island nuclear plant or hell you could even look at fukushima. People still live around those locations.
edit: Build out more solar too because that is a great way to generate power but don’t snub other things just because they aren’t “perfect” from your perspective.
Solar and wind alone can’t run a grid unless there is a significant amount of battery storage.
Sorry if this is an uninformed question, but can’t we just pump infinity liters of water uphill?
Sure if you have the infrastructure and topography to do so. But this adds to the cost.
The problem is everyone always compares solar alone to nuclear in this comparison it looks really good. However when you include the cost of storage, it doesn’t look as good.
The analyses I’ve seen suggest that we will need to build at least some nuclear to achieve the fastest and cheapest decarbonization.
Okay? That doesn’t have anything to do with the issue.
I think the main advantage is how much easier and cheaper solar is than nuclear. Also apparently nuclear will have diminishing returns as the earth warms up, due to cooling issues.
Also with things like balcony solar, you can easily get a distributed power network.
That being said, nuclear is also great. Especially the newer powerplants behind produce very little waste material.
since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones
Most jurisdictions aren’t allowed to build nuclear, for nonproliferation reasons. That’s because nuclear technology can be used for nefarious purposes, and requires a highly functioning security apparatus in order to enforce safety requirements. So as a society we’ve tried to keep it out of the hands of those that the great powers have decided can’t be trusted with the tech.
Which then raises the uncomfortable question of whether we should trust ourselves, the current great powers, with this technology? If we plan out a 50-year useful life for a power plant, do we trust that the governments and companies operating that plant (and its supply chains and its waste management) will still be doing things safely in 50 years?
These days, I’m less sure.
Nuclear plants - with high start-up costs, national security risks and high output - will always require concentrating large amounts of power in few hands.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Greater inequality results in a worse society in just about every imaginable way. And nuclear will always encourage that more than solar.
Yeah, damn governments holding all the uranium for themselves. It’s just not fair.
I know right. How can I become a super hero from exposure if I can’t get some uranium.
Just use urinium.
My son would argue that governments should have invested heavily in thorium reactor technology instead.
That is remains a cool potential technology, but why spend billions of dollars trying to develop a worse technology when solar already exists and for much cheaper? It’s just being sidetracked while letting investors enrich themselves on government research money
Plus it harkens back to the old adage about base power. No, we don’t need base power when we have large scale grid storage. Thats just coal propaganda
That is remains a cool potential technology, but why spend billions of dollars trying to develop a worse technology when solar already exists and for much cheaper?
This was the exact same argument made against solar. We should research and improve energy technologies. I doubt Thorium is the solution, but we’ve discovered a lot of our technology by researching something else and then discovering an interesting function or byproduct unrelated to the original goals.
Plus space exploration will need to be nuclear.
LOL
Why bring Space Nuttery into this?
Nuttery?
Every dollar spent at NASA has returned so much more. They develop things for space travel that have uses far beyond space. We wouldn’t even have satellites and GPS if we didn’t venture into space.
Space has a lot for us to explore and a ton of resources we can use. Why strip mine the Earth when we could just take it from the asteroid belt?
You really need to disconnect space exploration from the likes of Musk or Bezos. We’ve been advancing humanity through space exploration before those two assholes were born
NASA has nothing to do with nuclear research. The world would benefit from nuclear research more than sending another group for a lap around the moon.
Nuclear power is a very important technology for space vehicles, probes and bases. There’s proven potential for greatly improved propulsion systems as well.
You can’t just hear the word space and declare it “nuttery”, that’s just ignoring whole industries and areas of active research and engineering.
Space Nuttery is thinking it’s somehow important or relevant for humanity going forward.
A power source for a floating camera to go take pictures of dead rocks and frozen chemicals is a niche interest. No one has a RTG powered city.
“You can’t just hear the word space and declare it “nuttery”,”
You can’t just hear “Space Nuttery” and talk about space. Space is a mostly empty sucking vacuum hostile to all life and a radiation-blasted hell.
Space Nuttery is living in a fantasy world where we’ll just somehow go space mining and colonizing Mars with water from Saturn’s rings like it’s just a question of a longer trip to Home Depot.
It’s an intellectual dead end.
Your response is exactly Space Nuttery. Dream-like nerd fantasies.
I seriously doubt there’s any useful overlap between nuclear for space and for terrestrial power generation. Even if there were, we’ve spent close to a century proving that nuclear is expensive and time consuming to run and thorium’s theoretical advantages re mostly only in comparison to existing nuclear technology. Research is always good, but that really looks like a dead end, especially in comparison to something that is cheap and ubiquitous, and entirely ready, just needs scale out. Even that is already happening
especially in comparison to something that is cheap and ubiquitous
In some countries nuclear is cheap and ubiquitous. The key is simple standardization.
In France for instance, nuclear accounts for about 70% of their power. They operate 57 nuclear reactors, all of which are one of 4 reactor designs. By having standardized designs these reactors are cheaper to maintain, parts and equipment are more available. The engineers that run the facilities are more familiar with every aspect of the plant, operating procedures are better understood. It’s easier to find qualified engineers and technicians. Accidents are uncommon (I believe they’ve never had any kind of major accident).
The price French households pay for power is comparable to what we pay in the US and they generate significantly less CO2 per capita. They also have less reliance on oil states.
We could have that too if we were motivated to make it happen.
And trains!
I think thorium reactors are more complicated though. You have to achieve very high pressure or they don’t work. They just hasn’t really been an impetus to develop the technology.
Thorium has been imminent for the last 40 years, like fusion.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Not when we buy all our panels from China.
You only buy them once though.
This is why SMRs are a thing, and may still take off.
Too expensive
Depends on the location. In some places space is the commodity.
Big star object provide energy for everyone for most of day, it s possible now to make it available for entire day with battery tech, affordable with less waste and risk than old fossils energy. Sounds good and should applied to all of place asap.
I have been do disenfranchised with this world.
I had a private education and strong interest into alternative fuels and power. I was so happy to learn about hydrogen fuelcell cars, solar, and wind energy.
I really thought we were all collectively passionate about saving the planet, back when I was 14 and learning about this stuff in grade 7.
Now, 25 years later and its a joke. Billionaires are going to burn up the world.
Same, friend.
You could see it in things like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted about how awesome the future was going to be.
It only takes a few of these guys to throw all of humanity in the shitter too. I mean, there’s the people that put them into power and all that, but it is the key people were people seem to love a charlatan.
The majority of human history was solar powered. It took fossil fuels to allow us to reach 8 billion with our current level of resource use.
Please describe how sunshine alone will sustain this unchanged.
Please describe how sunshine alone will sustain this unchanged.
Because you’re ignoring the hugely inefficient baseline of how much sunlight we have historically been able to harvest.
From this page, sunlight-to-biomass efficiency of wild plants is less than 1%. For crops specifically bred over thousands of years to grow as much useful biomass as quickly as possible in each season, the number ticks up to 2%. But even that number also fails to account for the periods in which fields lay fallow between seasons, or for crop rotation.
Then, once you have that biomass, converting it into a useful form of fuel for burning, or food for biomechanical energy, has huge efficiency losses along the way.
Meanwhile, solar panels achieve approximately 25% solar efficiency.
That’s how we can collect far more energy from the sun today than at any point in the past. Biology is inefficient compared to photovoltaics.
Best to think of fossil fuels as a shot in the arm of the development of human civilization. On that timescale, It was always going to be temporary, whether due to climate change or simply the limits of availible fuel. We were always going to need to use it to bootstrap onto something else within a couple hundred years of the invention of the steam engine. The math is reasonable and yes, total solar power isnt a problem (storage and distribution is, but total availability isnt hard).
We didn’t have means to convert it into electricity for the majority of human history or machines to run with that electricity that made it possible to produce enough to support all those people. We’re able to do a lot of shit with just electricity now that used to require engines running fossil fuels
Who said we need to sustain it? Personally, I think we should reduce our energy use. Fewer private vehicles and more public transit, for example.
Solar is great but so is nuclear. They have different use cases, we need both.
Nukes are very expensive to build, but easily the cheapest energy is that you have a nuclear power plant up already and you keep it running. Germany royally fucked that one up.
Nuclear is not there when you need it. It’s prohibitively expensive to build, it takes decades to finish. If we wait for nuclear power to replace coal, we’ll be at 4°C.
Better stop complaining about that fantastical technology and use the tools that are there. They’re quite good already, we can do it.
I live in Finland, in a few months it’ll be -20C outside and about 0-10 hours of sun per month, depending on cloud coverage. Solar is not really an option for half the time here. Wind is bit better, but unfortunately doesn’t quite work at the coldest times.
It’s possible that nobody should live in Finland…
You guys may be fine with 4°C and already have nuclear power. Weird country.
What about using both instead of being idiots who fight about which is better? They clearly have their use cases. We can use all kind of renewables to decommission coals and meanwhile build nuclear reactors.
Because it can be accomplished without nuclear, meaning nuclear is a huge expense and a lot of toxic waste for no advantage?
Nuclear waste can mostly be reused and what remaiin can just be sealed off, also, they are experimentig with thorium rn which is a LOT more safe; you also ignore that solar energy uses a lot of terrain
And also the mining and manufacturing and disposal/recycling for the panels. They don’t just pop into existence at the supply warehouse. Any full analysis should include the environmental entire manufacturing chain, regardless of whether it’s solar, wind, or nuclear.
Should also included the conseguences of installing them: will it disrupt any habitat? Will the color of the materials/object affect the temperature of the zone? Etc etc
they are experimentig with thorium rn
For the last 50 years.
a LOT more safe
There’s a reason why Texas bought 8 CANDU reactors.
Because nuclear is just an expensive and time consuming distraction at this point. Itis usually brought up mostly to delay the energy transition
You’ve got some valid points in your criticism of nuclear. They are also points that could be addressed - we built lots of nuclear power plants within budget and timelines, once. Like solar, and like everything, nuclear benefits from scale.
Similarly, there are valid points of criticism that solar gushing ignores: Power is needed 24/7, solar doesn’t deliver power 24/7 and batteries (pumped hydro, chemical, heat etc) are nowhere near large enough to see the whole of society powered through the winter. If we built renewables like we built traditional power plants we would say “I’d like 1 GW, 95% availability, steerable down to 0.6 GW”. Solar right now goes “weeell, not really my problem what you want - I can give you power sometimes and sometimes not”.
So like coal power socialises the cost of pollution, renewables socialises the cost of consistency.
We could instead say “storage is the solar field operators’ concern” and then you’d be able to see what solar really costs”.
And hear me right; I’m ALL in on renewables. I’m also ALL in on nuclear. We need everything that can deliver power with low carbon output. If nuclear goes away, you’ll have to start a tonne of gas peaker plants when there’s not enough wind and not enough sun to power everything.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
The underlying issue with energy is always storage. That has always been the appeal of fossil fuels and now nuclear.
Shelf stable energy ready to be unlocked in a rock or liquid that nature provides right out of the ground.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.
My point is globally. Globally we need nuclear.
Australia has a perfect proposal -https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/2024/2024-integrated-system-plan-isp.pdf
the planet has a finite amount of uranium. It’s rare.
New nuclear power plants and current reprocessing can absolutely make this a non-problem. There’s plenty of radioactive material.
I hear your argument, it’s old. But I also listen to news, and the storage problem seems to not be a technological problem anymore. Battery storages for the evenings/nights are almost trivial today, it’s a matter of just allowing investors to build.
For winters, the solution could be green methane in existing storages, and for that we’ll also need gas plants. Green methane is sorta inefficient to produce, I get that, but we’re still in a phase where we need much more solar and wind to get across spring and fall. Simultaneously we need to shut the existing production off in summer. Let’s not do that, and produce inefficient methane instead.
But for this transformation we’re constantly held up by the “what about nuclear” argument straight from the fossil lobby playbook. Sorry to say that, but if you are pro sustainability you should be careful whose arguments you repeat. Just like the individual CO2 footprint, there are a number of popular stories propagated by the fossil lobby with the purpose to sow doubt, and therefore stagnation.
The fossil fuel industry was the one stopping nuclear in the 20th century because they were worried about being replaced. Maybe you should also look at who’s talking points you’re copying
Which battery technology are you referring to?
Lithium-ion has pretty big operational safety concerns (thermal runaway) and as far as I know we haven’t completely figured out the recycling either.
Pumped storage has massive environmental implications and is typically very difficult to get approved by local governments.
Flow batteries are still a very infant technology. There’s very big design differences between manufacturers that have very big tradeoffs. But I do believe these will “win” the storage race, eventually.
Flywheel and gravity storage don’t have the magnitude and duration requirements for grid-level storage solutions.
Lithium grid batteries are a non-issue for safety, in practice. They’re LFP (which is really forgiving heatwise, as lithium batteries go) and adding a ton of passive cooling isn’t a big deal since weight isn’t a problem when it’s stationary. And sodium-ion will only be better in this regard.
Recycling is overblown as a problem. Like any industry, recycling needs scale to be economical, and every new tech isn’t recycled at scale until 1) it’s produced at scale, and 2) that generation produced at scale reaches EOL and needs to be recycled.
In practice, recycling lithium batteries is a non-issue because a lithium battery contains an entire battery’s worth of lithium (it’s ~10%+ lithium - and that lithium is a liquid that, when drained out, is >99% lithium!), whereas lithium brine is like 0.1% lithium. It’s not hard to recycle most of the battery, and the other parts will only be learned after we have mountains of free dead batteries to practice on, not before.
I listen to news, some of them dedicated to sustainable energy markets, but I’m not an engineer nor so I pretend to be. That news reported in depths about how many large scale battery power plants want to get permission, being blocked primarily by regulation, not technology.
fantastical technology
Ah, the “fantastical technology” of the 1950s.
It’s only prohibitively expensive the way that we’re currently doing it in the US, there are better ways.
Not in France, Great Britain or Germany either. Or Poland or Spain. To my knowledge not in Japan either.
Probably you are talking about some countey with lax regulations. Which is curious , because proponents of nuclear power always say Chernobyl could not have happened in a country with good regulations (so Japan probably is not included in that list either)
Fukushima survived an earthquake and then a tsunami before partly going prompt critical. The meltdown was incredibly controlled compared to Chernobyl.
That…is remarkable brain acrobatics to paint Fukushima somehow in a good light. Tell that shit to yourself. The lucky thing that happened to them was the wind blowing seaside, and not towards Tokyo, else they’d have to evacuate a 30 million inhabitant metropolis. That’s not an achievement of well controlled technology.
People say nuclear power is cheap, but I love near a failed nuclear plant that was too expensive to ever turn on. Nuclear shills consistently downvote me for this, but like I’m sorry, I’m just not very impressed by how “cheap” this technology is. I understand that it’s cheap once it’s running, but crucially, that doesn’t matter because it’s so dang expensive to get it running in the first place.
I also love that lemmy is apparently big enough to get nuclear shills
Nuclear plants that are already running are very cheap to continue running.
That’s mostly beside the point, though, because, as you explain, they’re very expensive to construct, and that’s before even getting to the ones that never get completed because the cost overruns get the project canceled.
So I’m always in favor of running existing nuclear plants as long as possible, but am pretty skeptical of building any new nuclear plants.
Sure, we’ll put it down your street and bury all the waste in your backyard if you don’t mind.
This is such a cheap shot, nuclear power generation and waste disposal is mostly a solved and highly regulated and enforced problem. I can just as easily ask what is the solution to the waste regarding batteries/panels? I know the industry is saying recycling, may I ask the figures, especially regarding normal folks at home.
Don’t get me wrong, I am pro solar just as much pro nuclear. The future should be a mix of what works best at a given location and constraints. Solar saved my country South Africa, read about how a corrupt government destroyed a world class energy company, built the most cost and time overrun and largest two coal plants in the world, they fucked up. We sat for years in the dark and the private sector built the same capacity, using mostly solar, as the two coal plants within 4 years.
Recurring blackouts, load shedding, are a thing of the past.
It’s highly regulated to evade them just dumping it in your backyard. As for solved… A decade after shutting down the power plants, Germany is still looking for a final storage.
We’ll find it any day now! Promise! /s
Batteries can be recycled into… new batteries. The panels are mostly glass and metals.
I hate that this is the arguement that nuclear bros always make. It is not the same, and you know that. And if you don’t, you are not educated enough to have an opinion on this, broken glass, metal, and batteries do not give people cancer and poisoning for just standing within a few feet of them.
Unclear waste disposal is “solved” by saying “just leave it”. Thats not an answer
We actually have kind of solved that problem in Finland. It’s essentially burying the waste in our backyard, but the backyard is half a kilometer underground.
Great solution. Will you take ours, too? Sincerely, Germany.
I think you guys also have an underground. Have you checked?
Endlessly, and with no results.
If you use breeder reactors there is very little waste. And they extract significantly more energy from uranium than something like a light water reactor.
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If I could have a small modular reactor in my neighborhood, I would be all over that.
no problem.
Unless you’re in Epstein Land of America where coal is now the golden standard for the predator administration
Coal is for cowards, burn whale blubber and trees
I have solar power at home in the USA. I just set it up by myself without asking permission.
