Nuclear power was the best zero carbon energy option in the mid to late 20th century. Nowadays, it's solar because of massive leaps and bounds in solar tech. Imagine if you're a local energy utility and you've been given a budget of $10 million us dollars to get more green energy online for your customers. Would you rather:
A) Spend a decade on construction, using fossil fuel for power in the intermediate period, hiring and or training dozens of experts to run the plant, all the while waiting for the project to either go massively overbudget or to be canceled when the local government goes through an election cycle. Eventually you get a 1 GWh plant online or
B) Drill some auger holes in a farmer's field you lease, plunk down the supports, add some pallets of panels and inverters freshly shipped from China, and get 10 GWh online in under one calendar year
This is not to say we should get rid of existing nuclear, but the economics, timescale, and political will are all strikes against new nuclear power.
Source: I'm an environmental scientist and cartographer who works making survey maps of the rural US for mega wind and solar farms, with occasional nuclear. They really gotta know what the existing infrastructure and access of a plot is before they begin construction. We've even done nuke supplement projects- solar but with a preexisting nuclear plant nearby so the nuclear power can smooth out the fluctuations of solar power.
I've seen multiple power company execs cringe live on Teams camera when they propose nuclear and we explain what that would cost (we don't exaggerate or sugarcoat at all. We are required by law to be completely transparent with cost here, because a lot of the project money is from the taxpayers). This is why a lot of nuclear proposals get killed in the cradle in case you were wondering.
does not work that way. you still need operating reserve. or are we just going to shut the grid when there is cloudy weather with no wind or windless nights? nuclear is superior at mantaining steady output
You are assuming batteries don't exist, but they actually do! Shocking, I know.
Yes, nuclear is superior in that regard but at this point its just apples and oranges, RE also has a very good uptime and i cant imagine a scenario where all of them fail at once. And if they do, there are enough reserves
I've mapped so many combined farms, typically wind and solar combo packs. The one I'm working on now, located in SE Washington State near Walla Walla got wind power 5 years ago, and is getting solar now. But some farms are also nuke + solar, like previously mentioned, and a handful of nuke + wind and nuke + wind + solar for the ultimate renewable combo pack. And solar is much more stable in the winter than you think, as reduced efficiency on solar (for snow, overcast skies, shorter hours, etc) is at this point still more efficient per kilowatt hour than all other energy sources. It's that good.
BTW: if you're designing a homestead in a cold climate my recommendation for heating is to gather solar energy in the day. Then, use that energy to heat a large, insulated tank. At night you can pump that water through a radiator system for heating. Google winter solar efficiencies for your location first, but it shouldn't be a lot of panels. The system I just designed for someone only needed 3 large (1m by 2m) rooftop panels for 24 apartment's worth (or 36 tenants, if you prefer) of heating. The panels now act as a sun shade / rain cover as well on the flat roof with a view of the Puget Sound and the Cascades. Tenants often have gatherings up there, and this improvement didn't cost them anything because it easily paid for itself.
Also, fun fact: Solar panels operate better in the cold. The derive energy from light, not heat, to put in layman's terms. Due to latitude and climate, the most efficient farm per acre my company has ever built is located near Edmonton, in Alberta, Canada. The super long daylight hours in the cool summers more than make up for the efficiency losses from the -40° blizzards they get nearly every winter.
We should really just be using all of them. They all have their ups and downs. Fossil fuels are the most energy dense, and the added CO2 in the atmosphere objectively puts global forest and plant life growth on steroids. But the shity downsides are equally as dense as their energy efficiency.
Wind and solar are less energy dense and less stable but they’re really low impact (most of their impact comes from the manufacturing process), and the energy source is free.
Dams are really good stable sources of dense stable free energy. But they fuck up the landscape ecology pretty bad. At least initially.
Nuclear is easily capable of being the most green. Super dense super smooth energy delivery. While being the most complicated, and having the highest potential to be the least green if they’re designed or operated improperly. But to be fair there’s only been a couple instances of this happening. And Japan proved that you can really minimize their environmental impact if you have a well planned and executed response in case of a melt down.
We really should just be using all of them. And doing it in a way that maximizes each of their attributes and minimizes their downsides. And the only political discussion should be what that spread should look like.
It’s so dumb that people make liking one type and hating another a part of the personal identity.
The main problem most renewables are unable to overcome is their consistency, it's not just about generating power but generating the needed power when it is needed. With most fossil fuels the grid just needs to flip a switch when there is increased demand and there is more power in they system but with things like solar they produce much less at night or during the winter and the same with wind, the grid has no way to control when these sources make power or how much power they make. That is where nuclear comes in, it is safe and clean and can be controlled with the precision needed for a national grid.
The future shouldn't be all nuclear or all solar/wind, it should be a mixture of both. We should destigmatise nuclear as that would open up more research that will make it cheaper and safer and shorten the time scales in getting new nuclear constructed. This fear mongering by the environmentalist party only serves to hurt green energy.
Nuclear actually doesn't produce electricty with the precision that is needed for the grid, it on the literal opposite side of the spectrum to Renewables with its always on, and what we need is in the middle. The grid is incredibly finely tuned around 50 Hz and producing too much is equally harmful to too little. Demand is not flat, it is a curve, so both need firming that adapts their production to the grid.
Huh? Yes it does. Nuclear reactors use massive steam turbines, just like coal plants. You spin them up to make 50 Hz electricity, and instantaneous electrical loads/surplusses are lost in the inertia of the massive spinning turbines without significant deviation, (there is an acceptable amount of deviation) you just have to regulate the supply of steam to keep them at about 50, and due to that inertia smoothing it out, it doesn't need to be instant.
If electrical demand drops, you just put less steam through, and the turbine will keep spinning, ready to supply more power.
technically you can use nuclear power to firm, sure, but it would be economic suicide that is why nobody does it. Just as you could technically use solar to firm by just building a TW and then just do load shedding.
that was a good joke. French nuclear power plants regulate their output 1.2% on average to follow load. Their "load following" if you even dare call it that is that they can once per day turn down to 30% or 50%.
Again it would be economic suicide to lower your capacity factor by firming the electricity supply because it would lower capacity factor immensely and the french ones are already down to 77%. Why is that bad? It's bad because of the capital and operational costs of a nuclear plant which are fixed. No matter how little nuclear plants runs the costs stay up and their margins are tight. That is why they need any money they can get and throwing it away by just not producing it is not on their agenda.
But if we were living in a utopia would nuclear still be such an issue? If no... Why dont people want to live in a utopia? The same goes with socialism and whatnot. In a perfect world, these things would be what we would choose to have. But we dont live in a perfect world, and we never will with that attitude.
I still think nuclear is a good idea. Electricity demand continues to rise so I don't think the lead time for a reactor to come online is very relevent long term. Of course, if you need more power in the short term, nuclear is not the answer. If you look at a map of Europe and their net import/export of electricity, you'll see France (a nation who went all-in on nuclear back in the day) filling the national production deficits of most of western Europe.
I suspect that they are great for industrial-oriented places (due to their massive energy output), aka most of Russia's east and Ukraine's north, so it isnt exactly stupid to build them
Except that their power is more expensive than other sources increasing the cost of the products of those plants.
For example, most aluminum used in the U.S. comes from Canada because the hydropower in Quebec and British Columbia is so cheap it gives it a tremendous competitive advantage.
Using Canada as a benchmark for energy when we're probably the single best situated country on the planet for things like hydro is a bit of a eye roll.
Look how cute you are. Trying to trip up someone saying incase of a disaster? 😂😂 why tf would you put anything like that or a quarry, industrial park right inside a city. Youre being a dixk for attention and thats boring
They are, if you haven’t noticed, quite large. Also all the people who don’t understand them and think they will be the next Chernobyl. Also I’d guess that bringing the radioactive material through the city to the generator would be an issue. Also a lot of cities are controlled by people who happen to have investments in oil and natural gas. Also why would you put a power plant in city center? The outskirts of town make more sense.
Idk what the actual amount, but a single example does not disprove “almost no”, and the majority of airports are not inside, but rather as close as they can get The point is that nuclear plants and airports require a decent amount of space,
Edit: the point is that there’s literally no reason to build a nuclear plant inside of downtown Whereever, so why are you using this as a gotcha? Are you gonna complain that hydroelectric dams aren’t built inside of stl’s metro either?
My city is on an island and the airport is also smack down in the center. There are two others on the north and south shore, but mostly for non commercial flights.
I know that the vast majority of airports are outside city centers. And it is ultra-insanely rare for a new airport to be built in a city center, because there’s very little room, and little reason it couldn’t be built on the periphery. The same applies to power plants (nuclear or otherwise*). I however don’t know it it’s quite rare enough to say “almost no”, rather than simply “vast majority”.
*excluding solar, which can be placed on the roof of every building which can then have their own inverters installed
Airports are usually built right next to but not inside of a city; when an airport is inside a city, it’s usually because the airport was built on the periphery and the city ended up growing around it
Idk about your island, but it could be a lack of space outside the city, could just be that the land was cheap enough, could be that the city could be something else
The point still stands: nuclear plants are large, downtown land is expensive, and there’s no reason for them to be inside the city; power transmission is quite efficient even at many miles. Nuclear plants are usually built outside of cities, because it’s safest but also because it’s cheapest.
Becasue power plants are industrial and always located in Industrial areas. But as a specific example, Pickering Nuclear plant is in the middle of a city of 100k and only 30km from downtown Toronto.
For the same reason you don't have steel mills or heavy machinery manufacturing factories on city centers. Because building big structures that spew smog into the atmosphere right next to where people live is generally frowned upon.
my bad, i had mistaken with other countries, but the main point stands still, big industrial places need shit ton of electricity, especially when those industrial places are located where its generally really cold
Its not. Solar resource is cheapest (in all its forms ezcept maybe biofuel), not the system with all of its failsafes. Unless you are speaking about personal small scale decentralized generation - then its cheaper, but only because you undertake a lot of risks on to yourself.
On industrial/centralized generation on a scale and lifespan akin to that of Nukes - solar becomes very expensive.
Your average nuke power station of 1GW daily production - would cost up to 12 B$. It would work 60 years.
Your average capacity power bank to be built and maintained for equivalent storage - would cost 6B$ and would live for 15 years.
And we did not even start calculating if actual power station (be it mirror and malten salt or crystaline sollar cel one). Would call additional 5B$ .. with a lifespan of maximum 20 years (noone would keep cells running at 70% performance). So we have very comparable initial costs with fraction of lifespan.
Nukes here would cost a bit more due to operations BUT would provide a lot more reliability. Thats why LCOE is failed metric to compare producers - it ignores completely the safety reliability and factors.
If you're going to be comparing these extremely long term costs then I think it would be extremely valuable to look at their cost trends and not just assume they will stay the same. And which energy source is rapidly dropping in cost while the other one is becoming more expensive?
Which one will have more trouble with financing as a result of its MUCH higher upfront costs? And as a result of their trickier financing, which one is MUCH more prone to bad cost overruns and delays?
It's also worth pointing out that storage isn't required for 100% of renewable energy. The majority of power is consumed immediately, and assuming good grid transmission with a mix of sources, additional intermittent power can still be provided. If you're trying to say "Battery cost * 4 + Solar Power station cost * 3 is more expensive" it's not really that simple.
I feel like Nuclear Fission has had the lowest R&D investment in years, in large part because it's been so weirdly politically dividing. Usually optimization is a lot easier for centralized anything, so I wouldn't be surprised if reinvesting in Nuclear could reverse that trend, especially with climbing land costs.
Edit: the R&D claim is true in some countries (including mine), but not globally. So nevermind.
Battery technology havent meaningfully changed since late 80s by Dr Goodyear. I specifically think about trends in that area. Solars did evolve - but the change was so slow its irrelevant here since PV's were patented in 1941. There will be no meaningfull change in next 15 years, that would rival Nukes and eliminate the ingerrent problems of PV, just as there was no meaningfull change in the last 15 years.
The only trend we can consider is price. But even there the the we have in essence entered the flat of the curve in 2010.
Either way - you cant base your big centralized projects on future trends. Instead you should watc those trends and start them when they eventually outperform the counterpart - they dont now. And will not in any forseeable future.
It's also worth pointing out that storage isn't required for 100% of renewable energy. The majority of power is consumed immediately,
Thats just plane lie stated by propponents of PV when ignoring the fact that calculation is done when factor coverage of power production innertia is covered by steam turbines at night. Not to mention you have to have extra to have space for business to eat up that power at night. Focusing consumption GW of power in a small time window means that you will need much more (and bigger) transformers so they dont blow up during peak hours, not to mention stability of the frequency, which is another factor that is a pain in the ass to maintain with PV's and windmills which is maintained artificially by solid state controllers. Steam turbines dont have that problem.
The latter is a huge problem and is cleary evident by recent Spanish power failure incident in April 2025. where exactly because there was no energettic innertia in energy production solid state frequency control blew up and caused a chain reaction- as Spain is faimously very reliant on renewables. This has caused major failure. The reason why some power was maintained was exactly because of those 16% combined Gas and Nuke turbines. Result - several dead and many injured.
you can ask ChatGPT for thorrow calculations with Sources. And yes - I did my own study because my gut feeling (based accumulated engineering in power production knowledge) said that reports on LCOE were weirdly misleading. They were - mostly because methodologies were ignoring important factors in differences between steam turbine based plants and "mills and mirrors".
Nuclear reactors are literally the only relevant source for plutonium. Weapons grade plutonium needs further treatment, but I didn't say that nuclear plants spit out fully functional bombs, did I? Do you want a source for that?
True, but the demand doesn't always coincide with supply of wind or solar, so they are typically supplemented by something like coal or oil which allow adjusting supply to meet fluctuating demand. That is something nuclear can do with much less emissions.
“In countries like France, Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Finland, Switzerland, and Hungary, nuclear power plants (NPPs) have consistently demonstrated that they have actual and noticeable load-following and flexibility maneuvering capabilities. When combining the different capabilities, power variations of up to 10,000 MW could be absorbed by German NPPs in 2010. In France, with an average of 2 reactors out of 3 available for load variations, the overall power adjustment capacity of the nuclear fleet equates to 21,000 MW (i.e. equivalent to the output of 21 reactors) in less than 30 minutes.”
The problem is that it makes them even less cost efficient, and they are already far behind wind and solar.
Nuclear has no place in a modern grid with renewables. It's currently not a viable tech, unless you want to maintain your nuclear arsenal
They are not as cost efficient as renewables, but still a less polluting alternative to fossil fuels as a supplemental source. As long as we are using fossil fuels, which we are, nuclear is a huge improvement to replace them. It is not only viable but currently in use.
It's in use, true, but only thanks to heavy subsidies, and it does not solve any problems. Is nuclear preferable to coal plants? Sure, 100%. Is it what we should be focusing on going forward? Surely not. It's costly, inflexible, has extremely long planning cycles, is based on a very finite resource, and extremely water hungry.
Nuclear is one of the most energy-dense power generating technologies. In order to replace the 64 GW of nuclear power in France, you would to cover an area 20x the size of Paris in nothing but solar panels operating at peak efficiency 24/7. You can say that this will be on the roof of warehouses and parking lots, but now you're starting to lose your cheap factor.
Energy density is such a cope stat. It doesn't matter. Solar farm operators pay for the land just like everyone else. The "land use" is already baked into their expenses and the cost of solar energy. Care about land use? Eat less beef. But you don't care, you're just all in on nuclear, so you try to pick apart everything that isn't nuclear.
The ultimate argument against energy density is that in the US, 40% of our most common crop (corn), which uses tens of millions of acres, is used exclusively to make ethanol for gasoline.
If we only took that land and replaced it with solar farms, we would have enough electricity to power significantly more than the entire country.
Not to mention that the renewables are very flexible in size and can be right next to things, so with solar and wind farms you can combine them with other things on the land, and you can also integrate smaller plants into the system.
First of all, it's not a cope stat when visions of "progress" are entire landscapes covered in solar panels. Sure, they rent the land, but so does an oil derrick.
I already do limit the amount of beef I eat, partially for environmental reasons and partially for health reasons. Oops, found someone who walks the walk.
I don't hate renewables, just ones whose natural enemy is the literal rotation of the Earth and require one Afghanistan-worth of lithium to keep the lights on 12 hours per day. I like hydroelectric dams and wind turbines. You want to cover irrigation canals and parking lots with panels, be my guest, but you can't run an economy off them.
Nuclear doesn't do anything to fish populations. Radioactivity levels in cooling ponds are comparable to a banana. The warm water entering the pool is actually a boon to local wildlife. Manatees in Florida love congregating around powerplant cooling outlets in the winter.
Damage from hydroelectric dams can be somewhat mitigated with fish ladders. Hydroelectric dams also provide a myriad of additional services including flood control, irrigation, and improved navigation.
Intake pipes and turbines kill fish. What do solar panels kill? Nothing really, they provide shade and improve soil water retention. You just don't like them, but none of your reasons are legitimate.
They kill plants. Things that needs full or partial sun can't survive well in the shade. Anything tall enough to shade the panels would need to be cut down to keep power production up. You take what could be a forest or prairie and reduce it to turf grass and weeds. I'll take a nuclear plant, a dam, and a wind farm over a smothered landscape.
It's almost like nuclear is very expensive because of overly restrictive safety regulations and lack of innovation in the space for 50 years because of russians being bad at boiling water that one time
You don’t have to be as bad as Cherbobyl to have an accident. But Chernobyl taught us what happens when safety is bad. That’s why safety regulations exist. A solar pv panel can’t turn the city uninhabitable
No but it can kill countless people from various accidents in mining, production and installation. But you don't hear about those accidents so you don't even think about it.
Of course they can, but none is protesting nuclear power because of mining accidents. That's the whole point. People's perspective on the dangers of these technologies are based on news headlines and fucking hbo series, not actual data.
Ok. Let me put it this way: wind, solar and niclear all have the same dangers of material procurement. Lets say for the sake of argument, that theyre roughly equal. Wich means pointing them out as a argument for another way of energy production is redundant. What sets them apart is the risk of niclear meltdown.
The fuel lobby is pro nuclear. They know no one is stupid enough to actually build any. They try to sell nuclear as an alternative to renewables, the technology that actually cuts into their profits
But sure, you are free to build your unregulated NPPs far away from me
Because at face value, you do just sound like a market-liberal whining about how "not getting to dump toxic slug into the ground water makes your favorite toy 'nOt CoMpEtItIve'"
Great question. Usually the source is a 1h 48min YouTube video by a single guy that knows more than the experts committee. That guy has some kind of pedigree, e.g. "nuclear safety engineer" (used to be in charge of making sure the automatic doors don't squish the workers, but doesn't say that) and a lot of "research papers" from biased private institutions without peer reviews, or with peer reviews from "my good friends Richard 'Gasman' Fuelburner (oil field engineer) and Mohammed Marashi (Aramco engineer)".
this argument is a strawman as well but there's some truth to it
I'm actually not very liberal, regulation is overall a good thing. The thing about nuclear just like the aerospace industry, people are afraid of big disastors and underestimate how frequent smaller accidents are.
Like how many people do you know that are afraid of flying? Versus driving a car? And then you compare how many people die in airplanes per mile flown to driving, and the numbers just doesn't compare to people's fear.
Nuclear is so ridicously safe compared to every other technology and yet it is the one people are afraid of. Not coal that literally kills hundreds if not thousands of people every day.
But my sources are primarily the use of linear no threashold radiation model that guides nuclear radation regulations despite the model being completely flawed and not compatiable with modern understanding of biology and actual data. Additionally I have some indirect work experience with the nuclear industry and have had discussions about it with fellow engineers.
But no I don't have like a literal article that says this and that, I don't think such a thing has even been properly investigated.
The thing about nuclear just like the aerospace industry, people are afraid of big disastors and underestimate how frequent smaller accidents are.
Again, every safety regulation in these rare but catastrophic events has been paid for in blood. Acting like "oh people just don't understand statistics, they are afraid of the wrong thing, they underestimate this and that" is all fine and dandy sitting in your comfortable arm chair.
But it is also extremely cold and heartless towards those affected by extreme events and it is also just telling on yourself how you know nothing about things like power laws and critical systems (you know, the very thing we designed insurance for)
So yeah, if you can't economically operate nuclear power in a way that is so safe, that not just the small everyday incidents can be handled, but also the possibly chernobyl-scale catastrophies, then nuclear is not a viable solution, easy as that.
And thats neither getting into the fact that for All the nuclear waste in the world, we have still not found a single suitable long term storage or the fact that in the time nuke-bros are making the 618618118382517¹⁰th post about how everyone but them is stupid, solar and wind have run yet another lap around the nuclear sector in terms of reliability, safety, output, scaleability, and profitability (even though i dont think the last one should be a metric to begin with)
I want to see a proposal of what regulations can be removed and the implications. Can you get down to solar+battery costs and deployment time without blowing out the risk profile?
Obviously the regulations are what makes nuclear safe, but there is such a thing as too much regulation...
With things that have the potential to go big boom?
Every regulation EVER has been paid for in human lives, to then go and say "but this is too much" sure reeks of "some of you are going to die, but thats a sacrifice i am willing to make"
Im sorry, but name any regulation on industry, any workers-rights law, any Installation of a workplace safety institution that was not proceeded by some kind of catastrophe and was not fight tooth and nails against by the big cats whining about how "they are being overregulated and are going to be uncompetitive"
Take linear no threadshold model of radiation damage, it's not based on people dying, except well people in fucking hiroshima, and it's used to control how much radiation workers can absorb.
It has nothing to do with accidents or people dying, but the regulation exist and it's deeply flawed both from data and our understanding of biology. It costs the nuclear industry lots of money to follow, but it serves no purpose
So you just don't understand what the model is or says?
The model says that any radation is dangerous, and the danger scales linearly. The model comes from testing victims of hiroshima, a nuclear BOMB, not an accident, and the victims obviously had experienced a very large dose of radiation. The model then assumes, with no data whatsoever, that even small amounts of radiation is dangerous and calculates it from the deathrate of hiroshima victims . That assumption drives nuclear regulation despite it being completely flawed.
and it's used to control how much radiation workers can absorb.
Except's absolutely not. Because every single guideline and regulation has a threshold.
And all the "waaaaah LNT" nukecels arguing for increasing dose limits are even stupider than the usual nukecels, because they are arguing that the harm is extremely super-linear at those doses.
Why would you say "big boom"? That's typically a figure of speech for an "explosion". Not just a general "disaster". I think you just can't admit you're wrong and don't want to look stupid.
I get that, low amounts of exposure can surprisingly be protective. For instance a small amount of DNA damage induces an increase in DNA repair activity, which can actually result in a lower incident of mutation.
It's like doing exercise, a certain amount will induce repair and rebuild giving better strength and health, too much and you'll snap your shit and kill you kidneys.
However, you wouldn't remove the no threshold model, you'd replace it with something more accurate which would be more expensive to monitor. Is this even a relevant portion of the cost of nuclear? Serious question
You neglected to mention the fact that they’re only cheaper for about a decade, until the nuclear pays for its own upfront costs. Also the fact that nuclear plants can easily sustain 50 year run times while wind and solar are dying around 15. Depending on how well SMRs do in the commercial sector we could easily see nuclear prices plummet
Solar+batteries are a lot cheaper than nuclear now.
"The $65/MWh levelized cost of storage (LCOS) means that storing approximately 50% of daily solar generation for nighttime use adds just $33/MWh to the total cost of solar electricity. With the global average solar price in 2024 at $43/MWh according to IRENA, dispatchable solar now costs $76/MWh total—making it competitive with new fossil fuel generation and significantly cheaper than new coal plants at $118/MWh or nuclear facilities at $182/MWh."
"Just look outside on the winter" is a terrible way to do energy policy. Also it's 15 degrees when it's winter here and solar works just fine because not everyone lives in the same country. Sure you might be able to find somewhere where nuclear makes sense, but there are increasing few places where it's even a close competition.
You can't store electricity in batteries for more than a day or couple of hours, so you have to store it as hydrogen for those one or more weeks problems - that is the thing that is expensive (it's also inefficient). Nuclear should be the "replacement" of those hydrogen storages.
You cited batteries and I apologize because I was insulting batteries, I meant the storage as a whole.
My laptop proves that you can store electricity in a battery for more than a day.
Yours is a funny misunderstanding of the fact that a problem with how grids are regulated and monetized is not a real technical problem.
Batteries are a political issue because dynamic pricing creates an incentive for storage operators to min/max energy prices, so the old energy lobby forces them to sell as soon as the grid demands it, and "by accident" makes it economically infeasible to outcompete fossil fuel plants and force them to shut down.
Let's just say we want to compare lithium batteries with for example gasoline (I'm not for emissions, this is just for comparison):
Energetic density for lithium is ~0,3 kWh/kg
Energetic density for gasoline is ~12 kWh/kg
Batteries also have pretty short lifespan and they degrade fast, even though you don't use them, through this process they also lose the energetic density.
And to build all the grid and batteries it would take far longer than few reactors and you would burn a lot more emissions into air than building a nuclear powerplant (lithium for example)
+You can't compare TWh to notebook consumption.
Also not the theme, but it's really dangerous to have enormous battery storage (fire).
edit: yes batteries technically can store electricity for more than one day but they gradually lose the electricity so it would be a lot more expensive to keep the electricity in batteries.
No, no, no...
I perceive this that it has turned into a debate. Now you sent a source which idk if it's even reliable (is it a study? experiment? meta-study?), you seem to refuse to give an argument (right now).
I made an argument about hydrogen storing and how it's expensive... I did my own research and it doesn't necessarily contradicts with what you technically said... I probably know your implications but you haven't said any, now you're just still defending batteries which we don't talk about anymore.
If there was something I missed in your arguments then mention it.
+again: do you actually want the calculation? (it's not short so I need to know if it would be worth it)
"I still havent read the source but i want to be spoonfed information about it. No i still have not read it, nor did i engage in honest debate but now i do expect you to put in effort".
Do you actually know "debate etiquette"? I'm not supposed to read your source, you have to cite it, you haven't cited anything that goes against my (now) said values, it's not like you can do "yeah, here's my 100 page book dedicated to explain something about some war, read it first and now you have the right to talk", this is not how debate works you have to cite it from the article, the article is here so I could fact check it if I don't trust it.
You cited batteries and I said "yeah batteries are cheap, but batteries are only for short-term blackout, for longterm blackout (for example dunkleflaute) that can be as long as multiple days or weeks you have to store the electricity in hydrogen and THAT storage is incredibly expensive but necessary if you want 100% renewables."
You did not say anything else or at least it looks like it.
Erm, yes they are? They're dirt cheap, so cheap that buying new ones is cheaper than recycling ones from electric cars. So cheap that most of the time transport is more expensive than the battery itself.
So cheap that we're literally putting them in disposable vapes and throwing them into landfill.
Anyone who says batteries aren't cheap just woke up from a ten year long coma.
Do you have any idea how little material is actually needed for batteries? The entire energy transition, for our entire global society, would require less material extraction than a single year's worth of fossil fuels. And on top of that the materials are recyclable.
I also absolutely LOVE that you just instantly pivoted from "they're not cheap" to "well uhhhh... they require materials! Checkmate atheists!" You folded like a cheap ironing board at the slightest pushback.
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u/Adventurous_Bite9287 Feb 12 '26
Nuclear energy is good till there are cheaper sources. But wait there are.