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1041 points mpweiher | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.002s | source | bottom
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jama211 ◴[] No.45225631[source]
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
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pil0u ◴[] No.45226293[source]
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
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pfdietz ◴[] No.45226350[source]
Even with that, renewables are cheaper.

One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

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johanyc ◴[] No.45227340[source]
The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
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1. mperham ◴[] No.45228641[source]
You should check out these things called batteries.
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2. realusername ◴[] No.45229612[source]
You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose.
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3. thijson ◴[] No.45231220[source]
Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive.
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4. pfdietz ◴[] No.45233593{3}[source]
Using batteries for long term storage is one of the classic bullshit moves of anti-renewable arguments. There are much cheaper options at scale.
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5. realusername ◴[] No.45233641{4}[source]
Cheaper solutions which no-one bothered to implement until now. The proof is in the pudding.
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6. pfdietz ◴[] No.45235009{5}[source]
If fossil fuels are available and cheap, unburdened by the cost of their negative externalities, of course they will be chosen instead of a more expensive CO2-free alternative. That's what killed the nuclear renaissance in the US ~15 years ago.

What this means is there's low hanging fruit to solve these problems in other ways, once fossil fuels are no longer allowed to pollute without cost. There are already good ideas for solving the long term storage problem, with many of the component technologies already existing for other purposes.