BussyCat
@BussyCat@lemmy.world
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 1 week ago:
The U.S. has an increase in energy demand, and if we consider phasing out fossil fuels then the demand for new power plants is huge.
Arkansas nuclear one which started construction in 1968 and finished in 1974 had a total construction cost of 2.522B (2007 dollars) and produces 13555 GWh a year with a 66 year license giving it a $2.81//MWh in general initial construction represents 60-80% of total nuclear power costs so if we use the conservative value that’s still under $5/MWh using 2007 dollars and if we scale to today that’s $8/MWh. So not sure what you mean by it didn’t drop costs.
It was expensive compared to fossil fuels that had little to no safety systems
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 1 week ago:
France actually also has had cost overuns and projects extended as well. The biggest problem hurting nuclear is we do each project as a one off design which increases the cost and time immensely. Solar had gotten much cheaper and able to be installed quickly largely because of manufacturing standards and continued development which encourages companies to develop specialized equipment, construction teams to be familiar with standards, and costs to be lowered due to mass production.
That’s why I mentioned the NOAK study on nuclear power which shows a lifecycle cost of 66/MWh compared to solar plus storage which even with only 17 hours of storage is sitting at $104/MWh then if you factor in the additional losses from transmission, cost of installing UHV transmission lines, and trying to use solar to power places that end up with high energy costs for heating at night and 24hr manufacturing, solar doesn’t make as much sense.
Vogtle is everyone’s example of why nuclear power is bad in the U.S. but it was also the exact lesson on why nuclear power can work as the cost overruns had to do with their original contractor filing for bankruptcy, having to return 3 core baskets because they didn’t have a reliable manufacturer, and the fact that they had to come up with the R&D cost for 2 nuclear reactor designs. Now that the project is complete though the AP1000 is approved to be built so designs costs will be a fraction, numerous designs are being built around the world so manufacturers should be able to handle the project parts, and we have construction crews who have built the exact reactor before
As I said before solar and wind should defenitely be considered before nuclear but nuclear can still be a viable option
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 1 week ago:
There are still losses in those lines that can be around 10%, high voltage transmission lines use a lot of copper and can have high cost, they can be a point of failure, they can start forest fires, and if we actually build full scale nuclear system their price will drop down extensively. An MIT study estimated $66/MWh is achievable with a full build out which is already cheaper than solar plus storage, So when you factor in the additional cost of transmission lines nuclear just makes more sense.
But for places like LA that see huge electricity transients during the day as peak sun correlates to peak AC nothing is better than solar and while I haven’t done extensive research on off shore wind everything I have heard about it is incredible where it works.
Nuclear is for places like Seattle that for large chunks of the year gets negligible sun so the amount of storage you need to maintain full power is impracticable and the losses for sending electricity there from sunny places is unsustainable
I definitely don’t think nuclear should be our first or even second choice but it should be an option that fits its niche because our number one priority needs to be reducing our fossil fuel usage and wasting a bunch of material in places that aren’t a good fit is irresponsible
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 1 week ago:
Renewables get cheaper because we are building them… if we built nuclear at the same frequency as renewables their price would plummet as well.
Personally see the best option as a combination, in places like LA, Las Vegas, Phoenix solar should be the number 1 power source. Build wind power in places like Wyoming, and off shore wind where it’s possible. But when you have a place that needs huge amounts of batteries to try and compensate for inconsistent wind/solar that’s where you should build nuclear.
Nuclear is not renewable and has a lot of issues but we also shouldn’t ignore the negatives of lithium, nickel, cadmium, and cobalt mining. At the end of the day all of them are better than fossil fuels
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
And people could not purchase non biodegradable products
- Comment on How does AI use so much power? 2 weeks ago:
It is also a very large data set it has to go through the average English speaker knows 40kish words and it has to pull from a large data set and attempt to predict what’s the most likely word to come next and do that a hundred or so times per response. Then most people want the result in a very short period of time and with very high accuracy (smaller tolerances on the convergence and divergence criteria) so sure there is some hardware optimization that can be done but it will always be at least somewhat taxing.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
Yes a single blip where there was a 1% decrease in beef without a corresponding drop in GhG that in that same year they had a bunch of cows that were grown to maturity and then slaughtered.
I went a step further though I downloaded the CSV files and ran a correlation on them using excels CORREL function and they had a 0.98911 correlation
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
If you look at the two charts you listed they correlate very heavily with eachother
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
So ignoring the fact that English speaking is still not part of eugenics, do you think the only way it can be non eugenics based is if they shared those same sentiments to every country in every language in equal proportion? Or how else could they share the belief that having children is bad for the planet without it being eugenics based on your opinion?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
So you are comparing a single year which had a 1% decrease in global beef consumption (1995 to 1996) and using that information to claim that beef doesn’t cause ghg?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
That was not my question. Do you think the OP meant that only people who speak English should not have kids?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
So are you interpreting the comment as only people who speak English should not have kids?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
What was the reduction in beef consumption world wide compared to the reduction in ghg?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
That is the classic problem of a correlation. If you are sitting in a room that is warm and you notice that when you are using your laptop the room is slightly warmer and when your laptop is off the room is slightly cooler would you say that the driving force for the temperature of the room is your laptop? Or could it also be the oven, the outside temperature, the heating/air conditioning, the number of people in the room, etc. we do have enough evidence that global air travel is a significant contributor to ghg and therefore climate change but it’s estimated to be 2.5% compared to agriculture which is 10%
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
It’s a manner of perspective, Coca Cola is considered one of the largest polluters on the planet but that’s not because corporate Coca Cola is out there polluting for funsies it’s because they make a product that individuals purchase and then individuals improperly dispose of. Sure no one person can stop Coca Cola from polluting but isn’t the pollution caused by your individual purchase your own responsibility?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
Are you comparing that to a time that everyone stopped eating beef or how are you using that information to make the claim that meat isn’t the problem?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 weeks ago:
How is it eugenics if it has nothing to do with a parent’s genetic make up? Like if they said “meat eaters shouldn’t have kids” you could try and make an argument for eugenics but for nobody to have a kid or for everyone equally to have less children how is that eugenics?
- Comment on Ever think of the inconsistency of airlines weighing luggage? 2 weeks ago:
It’s both, weight starts to become a bigger deal when you factor in that you have to keep it in the air for thousands of km. If airlines could charge people by weight they would in a heartbeat
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 2 weeks ago:
Except there is also inflation that in the U.S. for the past 75 years has been 3.8% so the cost of $66 per MWh would be the equivalent purchasing power cost of about $4.85 by the end of the plant life. The long lifecycle is good for environmental purposes as well as you don’t need to do constant construction and constantly dispose of rare earth metals and concrete
- Comment on If corporations are the GOP and the GOP are corporations why isn't it assumed that corporations will stem inflation due to tarrifs while the GOP is in power even if its at loss? 2 weeks ago:
You would need all the companies to work together which is unlikely since they are all individually financially motivated. Then public companies also need to report their revenue and profits and if a bunch of companies started showing losses people would take money out of the stock market causing a recession
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 2 weeks ago:
China has been doing them in around 7 years from groundbreaking to grid connection and is trying to get that down to 5 years with their bailong power plant as they are developing an experienced work force and actually have experience making the parts
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 2 weeks ago:
According to the link you listed an AP1000 costs $66/MWh where as from the ember report that’s linked in this article solar plus storage for 97% uptime cost $104/MWh in a sunny city. In Washington DC it would cost $124 and only be able to maintain 81%. I still stand by even with the higher cost that solar + storage is a better option in places like Arizona, Nevada, Southern California ,etc. but nuclear is not as much of the high cost boogeyman as you are making it out to be
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
Next two? After you mentioned it I tried googling and can’t find anything about current projections for new AP1000s at vogtle.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
Yes, what I am saying is that cost is being shown for nuclear and not shown for solar due to using an intentionally small window of time. It’s like comparing an ICE to an EV and talking about the refueling costs of gas and treating electricity like it’s free.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
Batteries and panels degrade over time. So if you are trying to maintain a specific amount of power you would need to keep investing in order to maintain the same amount of power generation
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
They had to switch halfway through which is what added the cost that’s not a realistic cost per reactor
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
Vogtle’s numbers are incredibly biased considering they made an entire design and then had to redo it halfway through that’s not a realistic cost that can be expected for future projects. We also have vogtles design be approved now so that new plants can be built for a fraction of the cost. Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
My understanding of that graph is how do you flatten peak energy demands, Birmingham is flat and throughout the year because you have some parts of the year where you need very little battery capacity and other parts where you need a lot. Las Vegas basically always needs a lot because of how hot it gets they end up with huge amounts of peak energy usage
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
That is the main criticism of nuclear, it should hopefully get better with Westinghouse’s AP1000 receiving full approval and being built all across China so as long as we continue to use the same design it can start to be mass produced instead of making all the parts as one offs that are much more expensive and time consuming
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 3 weeks ago:
As others have said this is for Las Vegas which receives wayyy more sun than the average place. But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear