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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Because they want an excuse to do it in the eyes of the international community and the less extreme of their own population. So they systematically oppressed the Palestinian population, which of course bred terrorism. They then made it more difficult for a peaceful Palestinian government as well, which made Hamas more powerful.

    They didn’t listen to the warnings from Egypt that this attack was coming. Now they have the excuse they were waiting for to genocide the Palestinians.

    If your country was being systematically dismantled by a much wealthier more powerful neighbour do you really think that you wouldn’t want to lash out? What Hamas did was terrible but it was a result of the long running actions of Israel




  • Because we could use the money spent on nuclear to build more renewables and supporting infra (storage and transmission) than if we also built nuclear. The renewables will snap be finished and replacing the fossil fuels a lot sooner than the 10-15 years for a nuclear reactor.

    If you look up studies into it you need a lot less storage than you’d expect to run a fully renewable grid, as the scale of the grid stabilises it to weather fluctuations. Winter also is a problem that can be overcome. That gencost report is a decent starting point, there are plenty of other studies into it though. The low cost of storage is also especially true if you’re looking at the first 99% of the grid.

    Maybe those studies are wrong and nuclear would be economic for that last 1%. However, if we can get to 99% years earlier by just building renewables then discover that it’s harder than expected to get to 100 (somewhat unlikely, especially as more storage tech is developed), we can build nuclear then. The net carbon from getting off the majority of fossil fuels years earlier will probably make it the better decision anyway.

    Also just noting that my views are based on what I’ve read about Australia so you should also find peoperly researched cost analysis for your country. Also for renewables to work well in smaller countries they’ll need to develop more interconnects their neighbours etc.


  • Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn’t just go to waste.

    We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. “this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen”, even though that’d be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).

    As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that’s not going to flip.

    However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they’d be replaced by rail, but that’s not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.



  • The cost per MWh produced over a year, with grid + storage costs, is the number that matters. Wind and solar combined are much cheaper than nuclear there. For a source look that the most recent csiro gencost report. It’s produced by the Australian national science body and basically says that in the best case if smrs reach large scale adoption and operate at a very high capacity factor… They’re still way too expensive for the power they produce when compared to wind and solar with transmission and storage.

    To get off fossil fuels faster it needs to be economic, and nuclear isn’t economic. Renewables are








  • The lifetime cost of of nuclear (build, running + clean-up) divided by the amount of electricity created is incredibly high. This report from csiro doesn’t include large scale nuclear but does include projected costs for small modular reactors +solar and wind. Generally large reactors come out behind smr especially in future projections.

    https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/energy-data-modelling/gencost

    Note the “wind and solar pv combined” “variable with integration costs” which is the cost accounting for storage, transmission etc. It’s not that high (at least up to the 90% of the grid modelled for 2030). The best end of the nuclear estimate is double the cost of that. The reasons that the storage costs etc. Are not as high as you may intuitively expect are explained in that report.

    Maybe there is a place for nuclear in that last 10%, but not in less than that. Also as far as rolling it out quickly, look at how long this last nuclear plant took to build from planning to construction being complete.

    I think that it is possible to manage the cleanup of nuclear and to make it safe, but it’s all just very expensive. To make everyone happy with the transition off fossil fuels it needs to be cost competitive and renewables are, nuclear isn’t.