most personal trips can be done safely and easily using an E-bike (much smaller batteries that can be produced en mass with existing supply chains) and cars should be reduced in usage outside of particularly rural areas where they truly are a necessity (which is a tiny portion of the overall population).
E-bikes are often not an option for many reasons. Needing to bring cargo, bad weather, danger from other traffic. If they were actually such an amazing option everyone would be using them because they are hella cheaper than cars.
BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 7 months ago
It’s not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn’t make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.
megopie@beehaw.org 7 months ago
It is cheaper when you’re just talking about the actual construction, operation, and externalized elements of the fuel cycle. The reason they are so expensive is the massive difficulties and delays that come from getting the projects approved and the constant legal challenges to shut down construction once approved.
Solar is only particularly cheap if the power goes directly in to the grid and doesn’t need to stored. Including the cost of grid scale storage bloats the price to be uncompetitive with natural gas.
BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I’ve seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).
And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.
The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.
Nuclear doesn’t make financial sense anymore. Let’s keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.