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ceraexx t1_j1ghqbi wrote

Reply to comment by SpanishMarsupial in All I want for Christmas is 400 GW of solar installed in 2023 by manual_tranny

It's more a supplemental when it comes to utility. It produces during the day which more power is consumed. If anything I think it would help fossil fuels keep running at a normal load. Solar and battery can fix some stability issues in the grid, but it's not meant to replace fossil, but does reduce some fossil fuel use.

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EzGame_EzLife t1_j1h7gnk wrote

This is the exact right answer, if we really want to be transforming energy production we should heralding the building of nuclear plants.

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PM-ME-SOFTSMALLBOOBS t1_j1hswc3 wrote

Goddamn can there be one article on energy on reddit without a nuclear nutjob chiming in with irrelevant (and incorrect) opinions??

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UniversalMomentum t1_j1hp2k9 wrote

Energy storage is dropping in price too fast to make nuclear viable really. The LCOE costs for nuclear are too high so either the cost of nuclear needs to go way down or it's doomed like any generation method that's just too expensive.

Supposedly they are opening grid storage in the US that's 1/10 the cost of lithium ion, soo even if that's only half true you are still looking at costs lower than nuclear to use wind/solar and storage and you can make that in a factory mostly and distribute to the entire world vs custom site specific builds of nuclear power plants as slow as molasses in a polar vortex! More important is just the costs, but realistically the build time, major disasters risk, water use issues, uranium mining nastiness and total lack of engineerings to really build enough highly custom nuclear plants. There isn't much economics of scale working for nuclear unless it's like modular reactors you can build in factories and ship around the world.. but who the hell really wants mass produced nuclear reactors desperately trying to get compete with the ever falling price of solar and energy storage mass proliferated all over the world. That would be a huge mess and solar and energy storage would still zoom right by the overly complex solution that is nuclear.

If I was wrong the LCOE of nuclear would be much lower, but that price reflects most of the problems with nuclear and still leaves out long term pollution and disaster potential or that uranium could become hard to source OR that nations that can't build nuclear would become 100% reliant on ones that can.

At best it's just an ok stop gap solution while grid storage drops in price and then you just have a lot of clean-up and decommissions to do.

You'd have nuclear power plants that in 10-20 years would start to be 30 and then 50% and then 100% more expensive to run than solar and energy storage and limited time to get a payback for the build/investment cost.

It just doesn't make sense to invest in such an expensive way to make power when you don't really need to.

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