points by boringg 3 days ago | 0 comments
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
[–] 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 2 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If you know the energy system and are not operating off out of date thinking, it absolutely does not.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.
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