Comment on US slows plans to retire coal plants because of AI power usage
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 month agoThe problem is cost and time. Its all fine and dandy to say we just need to make it modular, but the required R&D for that will take many years and the you need to build up production capacity and actually install them.
If this were the 1990ties, I would agree, but it isn’t, so let’s please be realistic and focus on what can be done now, which isn’t modular nuclear reactors.
All you achieve by focussing on nuclear is letting the coal plants run at least a decade longer, while we do have better and cheaper alternatives right now that just need to be installed.
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I am not blind to the issues with developing nuclear power, but nothing good will come from just standing still.
Start small scale development of nuclear power today, we will never get rid of baseload, and solar/wind can’t deal with it well enough, sure we could deply batteries and have solar/wind charge them up ahead of a still night, but batteries degrade, so you’ll soon need to rebuild them.
The environmental movement psycosis around nuclear power has caused immesurable harm to the planet, and I am quite distrustful of their evaluations of nuclear energy.
Here is a very interesting documentary from BBC Horizon from 2006, it concerns our fear of radiation: www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
I don’t think it will be easy to restart nuclear energy construction, no, I know it will be dificult, but I don’t think it will be as dificult as the environmental movement claims.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Battery technology is an extremely well developed field with already existing and currently under construction large production facilities. Battery degradation is also much less on an issue with stationary installations, both due to how they can distribute the load to avoid deep discharging and due to the fact that some drop in total capacity is less relevant. Furthermore, redox-flow batteries basically do not have this issue.
Its pointless to argue what-ifs, when renewables combined with grid level battery storage is the cheaper and more easily scalable solution. Nuclear is an outdated relic of the past, just let it die.
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Untill I am satisfied that the new grid can deal with baseload I will not stop talking about nuclear power.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Nuclear power in its current form is actively detrimental to grid stability, as it is produced in a few central locations and can not be realistically up and down regulated.
The newly installed decentralised grid batteries in California have just proven that this model works much better.