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425 points nixass | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.408s | source
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kragen ◴[] No.26674832[source]
Nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources.

Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that at least they weren't unthinkingly siding with those masses. (And they're right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for terribly unfair reasons, other, scrappier technologies like the i386 and UMG-Si grew from being worthless boondoggles (except in special circumstances, like spaceflight) to being actually far better and cheaper. But the Amiga advocates keep the faith, sharing their suffering and resentment. They inevitably try the alternatives a little and perhaps even start to like them. Gradually their denial recedes, decade by decade.

But they know that however much fab costs go down and leave their beloved Amiga behind in the dust, you'll never be able to run nuclear submarines and Antarctic research stations on solar panels.

— ⁂ —

Wind, where available, undercut the cost of steam power (including nuclear and coal) a decade ago, and PV undercut it in equatorial parts of the world about four years ago, or in even more of the world if you don't include storage. As a result, last year, China, whose electrical consumption has doubled in the last decade, built 48.2 gigawatts† of new photovoltaic capacity last year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang... but only has, I think, something like 10 GW of nuclear plants under construction, scheduled to come online over the next several years. PV installed capacity in China is growing by 23% per year, the same rate it has been growing worldwide for the last few years; with some luck that will return to the 39%-yearly-worldwide-growth trend that has been the fairly consistent average over the last 28 years.‡

(A previous version was posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218673.)

______

† China's PV capacity factor seems to be only about 13%, so those 48 GWp probably work out to only about 6 GW average. It would be nice if China managed to site its new PV plants in places that could provide a capacity factor like California's 28%.

‡ Why 28? Because I haven't found figures yet on what worldwide installed capacity was in 01992 or earlier.

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1. finiteseries ◴[] No.26677760[source]
To put the realities of PV capacity from your first footnote into perspective: Germany with 53GW of solar capacity and 8GW nuclear only produced 50.4 TWh of electricity in 2020 from solar to nuclear’s 64.3 TWh.

Their wind power generation is far more impressive though.

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2. kragen ◴[] No.26677899[source]
Yes, absolutely!

I think it helps a lot to restate quantities of the same dimension in the same units—if you measure steel beams in meters and a bridge in feet, it becomes needlessly difficult to understand the relationship between them. It's unfortunately common practice) to report peak capacities in GW and actual yield in TWh/year. A TWh/year is about 114'079'550 watts, which seems like a terrible unit to me. If we do the unit conversion, Germany's 53GWp of solar capacity produced 5.75 GW in 02020, and its 8GWp of nuclear produced 7.34 GW. This works out to capacity factors of 10.8% for solar and 91.7% for nuclear, which are not terribly surprising.

Wind typically has a higher capacity factor, but I calculate China's wind capacity factor as only 22% (405 TWh/year = 46 GW on nameplate capacity of 209 GWp for 02019), well below the typical 40%. I think solar is more interesting because the total available resource is orders of magnitude larger and the hardware lasts many decades, but wind is certainly cheaper.