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0 pointsmrep4y ago0 comments

Nuclear looks to be about 3x as expensive as wind/solar [0] and that is assuming you use it at 100% of its capacity due to the high building cost and low marginal costs. Just looking at California, winter nights drop to about half of electric demand as summer days [1] so you'd have to pay even more for spare capacity.

I think it would far cheaper to just build like 2x the wind/solar you need and use the surpluses to make methane [2] which is easily stored and already used for 40% of the US electrical grid [3].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

[1]: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

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panick21_4y ago

Based on first principle I simply believe nuclear is the better long term play. In terms of total resources and land required modern nuclear beat anything by order of magnitude. Current prices based on 40 year old technology are not my main concern.

Nuclear is proven and proven at massive scale, its proven massive industrial nation can transition to almost 100% nuclear and can do so within a few decades.

The method that you advocate where you overbuild massive amounts of unsolved issues and it not even proven on a medium scale. And in the cost calculation sited don't account for the problem all in from production to distribution.

Methane produced in the way you advocate would still be transported in leaky pipelines. Massive power grids would need to be build to connect the regions optimal for collection with where it is most used. Massive batteries would still be required in such a system.

I am 100% sure that if a government today said, lets build 100 nuclear reactors in the next 30 years and put them next to each operating coal plant. I am 99% sure they could do it and that it would be a robust system for the next 50-100 years. For that certainty I would be worth paying a premium for.

Again, look at German, had they spent 2 decades on a green transformation on nuclear, they would now already be nearly CO2 free by now.

mrepOP4y ago

> Nuclear is proven and proven at massive scale, its proven massive industrial nation can transition to almost 100% nuclear and can do so within a few decades.

France is part of the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe and thus can run their nuclear generators at 100% capacity all the time because the other countries around them use lower fixed cost/higher marginal cost energy sources. An entire electrical grid powered by nuclear energy would be far more expensive to run.

> The method that you advocate where you overbuild massive amounts of unsolved issues and it not even proven on a medium scale. And in the cost calculation sited don't account for the problem all in from production to distribution.

What is unproven about it? Wind/solar/methane power/storage is all done on a massive scale already. The only unproven part is the methane production but when you consider nuclear is 3x expensive for base and likely 6x expensive for peak, nuclear makes no sense.

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