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The world came tantalizingly close to a deal to phase out fossil fuels
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Then we'd be doing fission. Fossil fuels aren't required to pay for their externalities the way nuclear is, not to mention that the fossil companies have spent decades lobbying and campaigning to keep from having to be responsible for their own bullshit, as well as campaigning to make other forms of energy seem / be less viable (either through PR messaging or regulatory capture).
Nuclear fission is not paying for the biggest externality either, its waste products. That for some reason seems to be the people's problem. And even then there doesn't exist a permanent storage solution for it as of today anywhere on the planet (yes, I know Finland thinks they have it figured out next year, but at a capacity of 5500t it will only hold the waste of the 5 Finnish reactors). It's absolute insanity to me how this gets brushed away so easily.
Should just bury this shit in a subduction rift and let the earth eat it
And that's how you get Godzilla.
The problem with that is that the subduction rifts generally also have volcanoes that spew a bunch of that material back to the surface/atmosphere. It might take a few centuries for it to go through all that, but IMO better to bury it in one place and risk future people not understanding it (they'll figure it out quickly enough if they are human or similar intelligence) than to put it somewhere where the Earth itself will eventually reject it violently and people affected won't have much choice or understanding of what happens as a result.
Usually but not always.
Are you saying that nuclear is cheaper than renewables?
In the alternative universe we'd have been building fission power for decades when it was cheaper than renewables, and it would still be running today.
In this universe we didn't though, I'm not sure why the multiverse is relevant here.
We were talking about power strategies from the 1980s and the person above said it would just be the "cheapest". If countries really were just building the cheapest, it would not have been renewables back then.
We were already talking about a counterfactual.
I guess. If we're in this hypothetical alternative universe then those plants built in the 80's would be at the end of their lives and we'd be looking to spend a fortune to replace them with new nuclear or we'd be saving money by building renewables.
I'm still not sure what this line if discussion is accomplishing though.
Probably nothing - though I do think it's worth remembering that renewables were much more expensive in the past than they are now. It's one reason why government action has been so slow - other reasons apply to nuclear power. I think people who are switched on to the crisis are all too aware that renewables are now easily the best source of power, but forget too easily that it was only through significant investment that we've ended up here.
Maybe cheaper than renewables and grid scale batteries over the lifetime of the reactor. Perhaps you could correct me, but my understanding is that grid scale battery facilities don't even exist yet. Given the current state of battery technology, you'd need to replace the batteries at that facility in, what, seven years? Ten is really pushing it, right? That's not going to be cheap.
Nuclear is 2-4 times more expensive and grid scale batteries (the most costly way of storing power) are already being used.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/?sh=32681a7e5971
Grid scale batteries for solar day/night cycles can work. There is no good solution for seasonal fluctuations. Of course, a very large part of Earth’s population lives in close proximity to the equator with far less seasonal influences. It’s just unfortunate that those that pollute most (per capita) do not.
Wind works great at higher latitudes but what we need to be looking at is high voltage DC lines to transfer power over long distances with minimal loss.
Why DC? The whole advantage of AC was efficient transmission! (And AC motors)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
Or you could take a page from the Soviet energy strategy and build a bunch of pumped storage plants or their equivalents, no batteries required.