Oil and coal are cheap because its cost doesn’t include externalities…which in itself is a form of subsidy.
If we subsidized nuclear the same way, we could build plants faster and have cheaper energy.
Comment on A fossil-fuel plant seeing nuclear coming...
bier@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
7ct per kwh vs ~50ct per kwh and a build time of 10 - 15 years just speaks for itself not even talking about the potential risk vs basically no risk with renewables
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Redjard@reddthat.com 11 hours ago
We should charge fossils for them, else we are just disadvantaging everything but fossil and nuclear.
Green doesn’t get subsidies either and still competes on price with fossils, and it does not have home solar (except arguably residential solar in some places).
A CO₂ tax has been demanded by lots of organizations over the years, but in the EU (and I presume elsewhere) has been repeatedly obstructed by fossil lobyists.
ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
Renewables often have storage issues since they aren’t on demand.
Redjard@reddthat.com 10 hours ago
Batteries need to be included if you want to compare renewables to batteries, yeah. Still by now they beat nuclear on price, including the batteries.
Hydro can be disregarded since it’s usually already built, as you mentioned.For solar and wind, especially solar, things have changed quite a bit. Of course mainly batteries just got a lot cheaper and better, but the power production got so ridiculously cheap that you can use over-provisioning. Meaning you build way more power than you’d need if you could store it, and them simply don’t store it all. For example you build enough solar to supply average power for a rainy day in winter, and then only build batteries for the night, completely disregarding seasonal and weather-based storage.
Overprovisioning compared to naive numbers (still thrown around by lobyists) can save you like 80% of battery capacity.
And as a bonus you can run power-based industry (aluminum, hydrogen, titanium, …) for free when you are otherwise not using the over-capacity, if you don’t mind running the machinery on-demand.
ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Overall, I agree. I run my own yard offgrid with solar and battery, but I still end up firing up the generator a fair bit in winter because the demand periods don’t match the production peak.
But it seems like that’s just a scaling problem, and it seems like a few billion spent on batteries is a less technical solution than a fission plant, depending on the design and scale. But it hasn’t really happened yet, even in China where the parts are produced. They’re further along, but they’re still firing up coal and nuclear at a scale unmatched by the western countries right now, alongside record solar production. So something in that theory isn’t lining up.
Redjard@reddthat.com 6 hours ago
The price stuff is only relevant for new production, there’s not yet a financial reason to replace all existing plants with renewables.
As for China, I’m not fully sure why they aren’t. Either it’s internal lobbying, making decisions against the public interest, or it could be China wanting to keep their market control.
There is still limited supply, for example building solar cell fabs is a very involved process. China might well be able to use their entire production internally for a long time before fabs scale past their demand. And in the mean time, the rest of the world would first see price increases or shortages, and then build their own fabs taking chinas market control.There is also the very short-term thing where they are replacing oil with coal due to the Iran war (best war in the history of war, maybe ever).
Waryle@jlai.lu 10 hours ago
Except for:
In comparison, nuclear has been proven to work reliably and cheaply for entire nations, its problems are political and therefore way easier and realistical to solve than the law-of-physics problem solar and wind need to solve.
Redjard@reddthat.com 6 hours ago
Solar is the main source of interest, since it’s gotten so cheap. And solar is fundamentally a thin slice of silicon with trace amounts of mystery elements. The entire thing can be made extremely thin, but it doesn’t really matter. Because silicon is just fancy sand, and we have enough, it’s not a concern. The trace amounts of mystery elements (dopants) are so minor they don’t matter, regardless of what they are and how they are sourced. Then there are conductors and structural elements, for which you can use what is available. This would be say aluminum for contacts (though they are very thin so you can still use fancier elements), aluminum and epoxy for the frames and protective layers, …
In sum solar has no problematic elements, and the amounts involved are minor on the scale of large construction projects.
Wind I want to say is similar. Mainly bulk construction materials like resin, concrete, steel. With some electrical components. The main difference is that here you have generators that might need a lot of copper. Though that is changing, I am not sure how far that is in the rollout but it won’t a concern into the future. Generators won’t need nearly as much copper in the future.
The only thing relevant for pollution, oil use, cost, supply, … in the constituent resources are the batteries. If you put electric car batteries from 10 years ago into a box, you’ll have a bad time.
Since then though, we’ve seen chemistries that make good lithium batteries without problematic elements like cobalt or nickel.
Making batteries that don’t move lets you optimize things even further than for cars in that respect. The production for car vs grid batteries are now also separate due to that.
The main issue of current grid batteries is thus lithium. Which is environmentally problematic to refine, and is expensive, but is readily available and does not depend on oil to my knowledge. The existing production also does not emit enough CO₂ to matter in the ultimate CO₂/kWh numbers when those go into grid use for decades, especially under overprovisioning where you need less batteries per renewable power production to begin with.
And ofc there are many developments in battery tech. Lithium is not inherently necessary for all batteries, there will be alternate chemistries available not too far into the future.
If you are thinking of building a nuclear plant now, then you need to consider what batteries you would need to buy in 10 years when it would be done, not which batteries are available now. In 10 years I’d expect something like molten metal or iron batteries that don’t have any even slightly problematic elements.
Loosely about 0.1% of current agricultural land. Even if you don’t want to build some solar farms in place of existing farms for various reasons, it’s not that much compared to other large infrastructure like cities, roads, agriculture, so you can find mixed use situations where they fit well.
For example over parking spaces providing shade, on top of roofs where you don’t usually see them, or on top of crops that benefit from the shade.
If you look at countries that have a few tens of percent of their grid on solar at present (often with gas turbines instead of batteries), there will of course be a few panels visible when you get around, but it isn’t omnipresent.
Overprovisioning. If you naively assume you build exactly as many solar panels as you need to average to the demand over the year, you get some very large numbers for storage. But given that solar is very cheap and batteries are expensive and problematic, there is no reason to do that. What you do in practice with both solar and wind, is you build more than you would need, enough so that under suboptimal production you still don’t need to draw from storage. Wind turbines don’t always spin when it’s windy, especially very windy, since then they produce so much power all demands are fulfilled and the rest would overload the grid. For solar it’s increasingly the same, you just can’t tell.
Private micro-solar often has a maximum power it can send to the grid, and home solar installations are over-specced for that and can send the maximum for far more of the day. Simply because overspeccing is minor increase if cost compared to everything else so financially the best decision.
In short: The sun shines every few hours, you don’t have to store seasonal power.