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Anon questions our energy sector
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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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Anon is dumb. Anon forgets the nuclear waste. Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive. So much that energy won by these rocks is more expensive than wind energy and any other renewable.
Anon isn't dumb, just simple. Nuclear energy can be the best solution for certain situations. While renewables are the better choice in every way, they're effectiveness isn't equally distributed. There are places where there just isn't enough available renewable energy sources year round to supply the people living there. When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer. It shouldn't be the first answer people look to but it is an answer. An expensive answer but sometimes the best one.
Also nuclear waste doesn't have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it's expensive.
But it is a problem. Finding a place that can contain radioactive waste for millions of years is incredible difficult. If you read up on it, you get disillusioned pretty fast.
Obviously, the best answer is to improve energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Why would we waste hundreds of millions on a stupid toy power plant when we could spend 10% of that money on just running decent underground cables.
You do realize that all that is also expensive, and limited? We haven't invented room temperature superconductors yet, and battery technology is far from perfect. There is only so much lithium and cobalt in the entire world. Yes we can now use things like sodium, but that's a technology that's still young and needs more research before it's full potential is realized. There is also a reason we have overground cables and not underground. Digging up all that earth is hella expensive.
You really don't understand how expensive underground cables are. You know those big, huge steel transmission towers that you see lined up, hundreds in a row?
Those towers costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each. And the reason they're used is because that's way cheaper than underground.
Shit - just the cable is a couple million per mile per cable.
Are you fucking serious? Nuclear power plants cost way fucking more than some cables. You people are fundamentally so unserious. Pull your head out of a reactor for ten seconds and take reality as it exists
Yes. They cost more than some cables. But we aren't talking about wiring a stereo.
A new nuclear unit (4 billion-ish) costs about as much as 2,000 miles of transmission-grade cable (about 2 million per mile). Considering that there's about 30 cables on a tower run, you're looking at around 65 miles' worth of cable for the cost of a nuclear unit.
And that's just the cost of the wire. No towers, no conduit, no substations, no land acquisition (aerial easement and underground are very different things), no labor.
In the USA the most recent two reactors (2 added to a plant that already had 2 existing) cost $34 billion just for the two new ones. source
Maybe take a break from the doomscolling/doomposting and try to relax.
I think you need to touch grass. You sound very angry about some cables.
Because superconductors are even more expensive than breeder reactors.
and breeder reactors are more expensive than faerie magic, I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real
Wake up, 80-ies were 40 years ago!
USSR figured it out long time ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor
Nuclear waste is pretty tame. Compare gloves that were used once to turn valve on pipe in reactor room to shit from coal in your lungs. Even most active kind of waste everyone thinks of - spent fuel - consists from about 90% of useful material.
EDIT: 95-98% of useful material.
Actually not. Especially cost of energy compared to one of coal.
What nonsense is this?
No shit, Sherlock... The reactor room is shielded by the water. Something you had in there once shouldn't be overly radioactive and the fact that it isn't doesn't say anything about the dangers of radioactive waste.
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the dangers of radioactive waste?
Actually yes.
It still counts as radioactive waste. It was example of something regular people don't associate radioactive waste with, but still counts as one.
"This waste shouldn't be overly dangerous and the fact that it isn't doesn't say how dangerous it is". Wow. How did you do this?
Did you read what I write?
I will rephrase you:
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the amount of radioactive waste?
Here I thought you're just slow and didn't read what I wrote so I was already preparing to just explain what I said.
This is where I realised you're just trolling.
The costs used for wind/solar energy never included the cost of the required buffer storage, and even the rare few people who include that never factor in frequency stability which to this day is maintained by the giant steam turbines everyone wants to get rid of. It will not be trivial to solve the frequency stability problem; it will likely require massive investment in pumped water storage, flywheel storage, or nuclear energy, and these costs once finally included in the real cost of wind/solar will hurt its value prospect considerably.
As for nuclear waste: the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste generated over the lifetime of a reactor is stored onsite. Only the smallest amount of material is what will actually remain dangerous for a long time, and many countries have already solved this problem. It's a seriously overstated problem repeated by renewable-purists who usually haven't even considered how much frequency stability and grid-level storage have and will add to the cost of renewables, meaning they have not given a full accounting of the situation.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost
And even if we just buried all of it, all nuclear waste ever produced could easily be buried in one square mile.
We need a fitting location to safely bury it in. Otherwise it can pollute the ground and water. In Germany for example we dont have such a location. That and the issue of cost, no one wanting to build it, no one wanting to insure it, no state wanting to offer the space and no energy company wanting this energy led to us making the correct decision in moving away from it
We don't add that level of scrutiny to coal ash which there is much more of and equally dangerous forever. Nuclear is the the only power source expected to address 100% of problems at any point in the future before it can even start construction.
We are phasing out coal. I am not arguing against further researching nuclear energy. Current plants are not worth it to build though.