Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet?
anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days agoWith the same amount of money you can build so much more renewable generation and storage than nuclear.
The worlds production of storage isn’t even sufficient to power germany for a week. Hence why germany is, till date, heavily dependent on gas. Mostly US liquified natural gas, and russian pipeline gas.
To me, it’s a surprising statement that, for the same amount of money, one can buy something that doesn’t exist. 🤔
I am not arguing that nuclear should have been phased when it was, as that resulted in more coal and gas, but that clinging to it now is a mistake.
Building a new nuclear power plant in Germany would take a decade if things went well.
Until then grid battery storage can mature and demand adjustment projects can be rolled out. It’s probably also easier to convince germans to accept pumped hydro where they live over nuclear.
Sadly, others have argued so and still are. Here in Belgium they’re still trying to close existing, running nuclear power generation. In favour of subsidised “emergency” gas generation 🙄
Until then grid battery storage can mature and demand adjustment projects can be rolled out.
In my experience, people tend to severily under estimate the size of the storage problem. After 20 years of energy transition, we’re worse of then we started. We’ll see more and more blackouts. The latter being good for the environment ofcourse.
Why would we need to store energy for more than an day? We only need to smooth out the difference between supply and demand.
The mayor advantage of the European grid is the disconnectedness over long distances. There are always enough places where the sun shines or the wind blows.
astropenguin5@lemmy.world 5 days ago
This also assumes the same pot of money is being used for all kinds of energy generation, which is not always the case because bureaucracy. Also also pretty much all renewables are intermittent besides hydro which is not available everywhere. It might be more expensive, but both having diverse energy sources and baseline power is good for the grid. Wind and solar also do not provide any grid Inertia,, which is important for maintain frequency. I wanna say it was Ireland (feel free to check where) that actually had too few conventional generators and too much wind, and they had to build basically just a massive flywheel to regulate their grid