Comment on Reactor goes brrr
areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 2 weeks agoBelieve it or not you can turn a reactor off if necessary, or up and down. Crazy I know.
Biomass isn’t practical as it releases far too much emissions to be worth it, you almost might as well use gas. Actually thinking about how much land use it would take, it might actually be worse than gas overall. Biomass is only really sensible when talking about material we would waste anyway like food waste and other waste that can be burned, but that would barely make a dent in our energy needs.
Not everything is about economics, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be talking about renewables at all.
As for “free energy”, no energy is free. Solar panels and wind turbines still have a finite life span. Nuclear fuel is cheap enough to the point where it too might as well be free if we are willing to call wind turbines free. This is especially true for Thorium technology or actinide burners. Actinide burners literally reuse nuclear waste.
Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Taking the long term impact of coal, gas and oil on our climate and nature into account, renewables are cheaper. The cost of destroyed infrastructure through (ever more likely) extreme weather events alone is immense and often not taken into account, not to mention the impact on food.
The amount of money countries have is limited. If the goal is to replace coal, gas and oil as quickly as possible it’s more efficient to use cheaper technology.
Yes, my point was about already built solar and wind turbines, that lose money the moment they are not running. The same is true for a powered down nuclear reactor, as the fuel isn’t the expensive part of the operation.
My point is that technology that is expensive even if not curently in use, does not make for good backup power. This makes renewables and nuclear not a good combination, as it’s quite expensive.
Yes, biogass is only an option as an addition and shouldn’t be used continuously (for backup power it should be fine).