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1041 points mpweiher | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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nilslindemann ◴[] No.45227782[source]
No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you.

Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?

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1. chickenbig ◴[] No.45229745[source]
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?

Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?

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2. nilslindemann ◴[] No.45235644[source]
Oil and gas and other fossils are finite resources, and we need to replace them anyway sooner or later with pure electrical solutions, better sooner, as we know. And then what I said applies. And, as the only "infinite" resources we have, are the sunlight and the gravity of the moon, it is obvious that we should base global electricity generation on them.
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3. chickenbig ◴[] No.45248299[source]
"Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years" https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
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4. pfdietz ◴[] No.45274557{3}[source]
That's with breeding, not with existing commercial reactor designs.