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points by khalic 3 days ago | 0 comments

New projects are decades from completion given the size of the any reactor, modular is unproven. We need clean power right now, actually 20 years ago

[–] caymanjim 3 days ago

A single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant also takes many years to come online. You're not wrong that new nuclear projects take a long time to start producing, longer than any other power solution, but new solar projects of that magnitude don't pop up overnight. There's still bureaucracy, funding, land acquisition (and boy do you need a lot of land for enough solar to offset even one nuclear plant), construction, power grid connections, and sourcing/manufacturing the actual panels.

The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.

This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.

Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.

[–] pjc50 2 days ago

Or the Pakistani solution: over 3 years, import 55GW of panels and distribute them across roofs. https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/pakistan-the-solar-revolut...

By comparison, the country's nuclear programme is targeting 2050, and I suspect that may get overtaken by events. Although it's still required for nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Pakistan

> You're making it sound like solar is power available now

It is. It's a thing you can buy from Aliexpress.

[–] tialaramex 2 days ago

But you don't need "a single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant". This is electricity, it's fungible, ten tiny projects produces the same power as one large project.

The UK's biggest solar farm, Cleve Hill has 373 MW nameplate capacity but over the last two years the UK brought 10x that much total subsidised grid solar online - not to mention the unsubsidised which is likely many times more because if you're a gambler the subsidy is mitigating a risk you wanted† I don't have blow-by-blow data for unsubsidised schemes because only the subsidy needs to track that.

† The UK uses Contracts for Difference to subsidise these energy projects. In effect these contracts guarantee you a price, your "strike price" when you sign the contract, plus automatic inflation tracking. But for Solar PV that price can be (and for years now has been) lower than wholesale electricity prices you'd keep outright if you were willing to gamble and risk the wholesale price collapsing. Cleve Hill paid about £3.5M to us because their guaranteed price was lower than the wholesale price they received most of the time.

[–] khalic 3 days ago

Thanks very interesting perspective

[–] recursive 3 days ago

Build nuke and solar then. The more the merrier.

[–] boringg 3 days ago

Nuke, storage, solar and wind. They all work together. You need redundancy, resiliency and dedicate quality power.

No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.

If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?

[–] garbagewoman 3 days ago

> How will we get to fusion?

By researching fusion? Imagine how much research you could do with all the money that you didn't waste on building uneconomical nuclear power plants

[–] pbkompasz 3 days ago

Or subsidizing oil and gas... It's such a shame that a certain political ideology which strongly believes in the free market (or so they claim) made energy a political issue...

[–] pingou 3 days ago

They don't really work together, actually. Nuclear is the opposite of solar, it has a consistent output at all times that makes no sense to stop or curtail. It doesn't play particularly well with renewables, unlike gas, which is expensive to run and polluting, but is already built and can be run when renewables are not producing.

[–] marcosdumay 2 days ago

If you add enough batteries, nuclear comes back the original economics.

I'm not sure the "enough batteries" part is a good investment, and the original economics is already not competitive with renewables. But maybe after you add in long term storage and the possibility of black swan risks it can make sense to subsidize a bit of other kinds of power on some regions.

[–] boringg 2 days ago

If you know the energy system it absolutely does. Theres a large portion of power that is always in demand. Industrial power needs high quality power and constant on.

[–] dalyons 2 days ago

If you know the energy system and are not operating off out of date thinking, it absolutely does not. Wind and solar shifted with batteries is munching its way through this night time supply window . On a timeframe of 20 years this obsolete “baseload supply” economic niche will absolutely no longer exist.

[–] rcxdude 3 days ago

A bit of a waste if the nuclear is obsolete by the time it comes online and we could have spent the money on renewables instead.

[–] crote 3 days ago

Money can only be spent once. Similarly, a construction crew can only be at one construction site at a time. Investing in building new nuclear power plants will slow down construction of solar.

[–] recursive 3 days ago

> Money can only be spent once

Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.

The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.

[–] boringg 3 days ago

What? Construction crews are completely different - different tranches of money. Couldn't be more wrong about this.