Comment on Anon questions our energy sector
areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 6 days agoYou don’t actually need to mine more uranium though. You can run certain nuclear designs on Thorium, Plutonium from weapon stocks, or even waste from other reactors. Current generation nuclear designs are laughably inefficient at using the nuclear fuels we have available, and I fully understand why people don’t support them.
Realistically though I don’t ever expect nuclear fission to be as cheap as renewables in most areas. In some places nuclear or another power source is always going to be needed though just because renewables are not practical in certain conditions.
In the long term the answer is almost certainly going to be nuclear fusion or another future power source like neutrino voltaic. Solar and wind power are ultimately just offshoots of fusion, and so is fission if you think about where uranium, thorium and so on come from. In fact all power we know of seems to come from either gravity or some kind of nuclear reaction (inc. geothermal and fossil fuels).
drake@lemmy.sdf.org 6 days ago
Notice how pro-nuclear people always point towards a bunch of fictional technology as the solution? Oh, we just need fusion, or breeder reactors, or a bunch of other shit that doesn’t exist. No, bro, we just need to build renewables and proper energy grids. It’s really not that complicated. If it’s not sunny where you live, then you just get electricity from where it is sunny. It’s really really simple
Nuclear energy is a solution looking for a problem. Total tech bro bullshit. Like crypto.
areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Renewables folks are also always looking for things that don’t exist. Like magical energy storage and transmission solutions that don’t cost the earth or have huge losses. Or wave power which still hasn’t materialized after decades of research.
areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Breeder reactors already exist??? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_rea…
Moving electricity around is a hard problem. Even just moving energy from one end of Britain to the other looses us 10 or 20%, and we are a small nation. If you need to start moving energy in from somewhere actually sunny like Spain you are going to have a big problem.
Crypto isn’t looking for a problem, fiat has plenty of problems, it’s just not an optimal solution. Probably the real answer is not using money at all.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Yeah, really, really simple. Wait, what are transmission losses?