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points by recursive 3 days ago | 0 comments

Build nuke and solar then. The more the merrier.

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If you know the energy system and are not operating off out of date thinking, it absolutely does not.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A bit of a waste if the nuclear is obsolete by the time it comes online and we could have spent the money on renewables instead.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.