Nobody is saying we should build coal plant instead of nuclear, that’s the strawman. Every godamm nuclear defender always uses.
“but there are worse energy sources”
Yes we fckin know, doesn’t make your energy good.
Keep you strawman false arguments to yourself until nuclear has less cost and less contamination then renewables (forever).
Redjard@reddthat.com 6 days ago
Renewables are cheaper and also faster to build. Advocating for nuclear now is a delay tactic benefitting fossile fuels.
Renewables don’t create a permanent waste problem.
(Also CO₂ is not as long-term as nuclear waste. It’s not easy or doable near-term, but you can let nature pull it out of the air and store the results. This can be done with none of the risks of failed nuclear storage.)
quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
It’s the other way around. Nuclear is not competing against renewables’ spot, it competes with fossil fuels. Advocating for nuclear doesn’t try to use it instead of renewables, it tries to use it instead of fossil fuels. The opposition to nuclear is what benefits fossil fuels.
The choice is what you want renewables combined with, nuclear or fossil. Those are the choices.
Redjard@reddthat.com 6 days ago
There is a set amount of budget for replacing power infrastructure, and a set amount of capacity to be filled.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
If you need a GW of plants, you won’t build both a nuclear and a renewable GW plant, you pick one. If that GW replaces a coal plant, then nuclear will see the coal being burned for 10 more years while under construction.
The grid produces as needed, prices don’t vary enough anyone will use less power because low-emission sources are not yet available. Any nuclear power capacity under construction that could have been renewables will cause their equivalent capacity in fossile sources to be used an additional 10 years compared to if renewables had been built.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.
And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren’t incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn’t build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you’ll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you’ll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.
What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains “in favour of bikes”, you’re actually promoting cars. And vice versa.
quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Who is GW? And why do you bring him in?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
But solar and nuclear aren’t the same thing. You can’t compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.
The choice isn’t “Solar/Wind OR Nuclear”, the choice is “Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels” or “Solar/Wind AND nuclear”. Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you’re promoting renewables.
Redjard@reddthat.com 5 days ago
That is priced in yeah. Until recently that would have made it more expensive, but we now have the tipping point where overbuilt solar and batteries beat nuclear in price so finally there are no more caveats. Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.
I see a ton of them being spammed out like that now, solar fields with batteries in a small house in the middle, or in boxes along one side of the field.
Solar itself is so cheap, that overbuilding or latitude hardly factor in, it’s mostly about the batteries.
The solar costs are also mainly the land and the construction of the frames.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Honestly, that sounds extremely unlikely. I don’t live that far north in europe, and while I manage about 0kWh on my residental panels on a yearly basis. Thanks to seasonal changes, I would either need 5 more rooftops to keep the power on during january, or I would need to bank something like 700kWh to make it through 3 winter months. That’s not counting the electric car, or heating. Heating would roughly quadruple the numbers (being almost entirely clustered when solar isn’t producing), and the car would add roughly another house on top (assuming 50% is charged away from home).
Quick maths that I did because I wanted to try going off-grid: I would need ~100m2 of solar panels, and 2500kWh of battery storage. Or on a national level, 63 TWh of storage as well as just under a 1000km2 of solar panels if everyone lived as low-footprint as we do. And that’s just housing, it doesn’t include commercial buildings or industry.