‘Limitless’ energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots::New research shows densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa could harvest effectively unlimited energy from solar panels floating on calm tropical seas near the equator.
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That’s interesting you say that because building nuclear plants is also a “bloody nightmare”, see Vogtle, Hinkley Point, Flamanville, etc
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That’s not strictly true at least of Flamanville and by extension HPC. They were refining the design as they were building Flamanville and kept having to rework whole sections which put a delay on HPC. Now granted there was funding issues and government flip flopping involved but the regulatory process is pretty clear in the UK around these kinds of things.
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Building new nuclear capacity takes a lot more time than building wind turbines and solar parks though.
Sure shutting the existing ones off is a bad idea but building new ones isn’t the way
Also the building part consumes a lot of CO2, too, so it takes a bit longer than with renewables until your are break even.
I feel like a lot of those pushing for Nuclear don’t see how France is relying on neighbouring countries in the summer because of the rivers not carrying enough water or not being cold enough for protest cooling and that factor will only get worse - especially with ACs being absolutely essential in summer in the next 50 years.
Sure keeping a good amount of nuclear for base level is good but especially if you’re also doing renewables it’s far too inflexible to be good if you have a sunny day with a lot of wind - so you need huge energy storage anyway if you want to completely remove gas and oil and at that point renewables are better in using those than nuclear
If they perfect this cement battery concept a combination nuclear/solar/wind strategy would be the ideal. Solar/wind as much as possible and nuclear to react to deficit with excess stored into block foundations for all three of the above.
I don’t think anyone arguing for nuclear power is arguing against other forms of renewable energy. But that base power is super important and right now it is primarily created through carbon-producing sources.
You can go fully hydro/wind/solar but if you’re still borrowing from the neighbor’s coal plant at peak times it’s not exactly clean power.
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You’re either uneducated or a bad faith debater, or German.
https://www.reuters.com/world/unsealed-soviet-archives-reveal-cover-ups-chernobyl-plant-before-disaster-2021-04-26/
Chernobyl was a major disaster because it was Soviet crap that wasn’t well regulated or maintained.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361
Same with Fukushima. Wasn’t kept up to international standards for nuclear prevention. The tsunami wall was also considered inadequate at the time it was made.
Nuclear power is incredibly safe when done right, and incredibly powerful. The efficiency of nuclear power is unmatched. If the Jimmy Carter era policy of not reusing nuclear power (which is also safe but less efficient) you have effectively reduced nuclear waste that needs to be removed to an insubstantial amount. We even have an entire MOUNTAIN hollowed out to store nuclear waste.
Overall, when done right, nuclear power is safe and efficient, more efficient than any other renewable out there, and don’t fret, I know nuclear power isn’t technically renewable, just recyclable, but we have do much nuclear energy it’s insane not to use it.
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Not being childish about it, but that line makes me lean towards you being German. I see no sources or anything from your end, which means it’s probably speculative or just untrue.
by what metric? because it certainly isnt cost/mw or how quick they are to deploy
It’s not either/or. We need to roll out everything we can, including solar and nuclear, as well as carbon removal tech.
Nuclear power plants have a massive footprint. For example in Australia they’re planning to setup a new nuclear waste disposal facility with a forecast budget of half a trillion US Dollars and it will be full in 70 years time - they’ll have to build a new one somewhere else after that.
That nuclear waste site will be radioactive for millions of years. The land will never be able to be used for basically anything, ever.
If you covered just that nuclear waste facility with solar panels, it would provide a massive amount of power. Enough to cover the day time power needs of a small country.
Solar panels aren’t a “zany” idea. In fact one of the reasons it’s being explored is because it would reduce evaporation. Power generation is often almost an afterthought. The panels also don’t have to be ugly - in fact there are prototypes that are invisible. They just look like ordinary glass, and don’t cost much more than glass either.
Half a trillion dollars over seventy years is nothing. How large is the waste site compared to the habitable surface? A few square kilometers is nothing.
The power needs of a small country is also essentially nothing over a seventy year span.
Nuclear energy is not ideal but it beats the hell out of coal plants, and it gives us a bridge to something sustainable. Solar has its own drawbacks and no nation is going to maintain a bunch of floating panels out in the ocean.
Putting them on the ocean is certainly a zany idea. Salt. Water. Storms. Electronics. Brilliant.
And no that is not how solar panels work. Solar panels only work when sunlight is directly on them. Their peak electrical output is always when the sun is directly over them. Thats why solar farms are built in massive flat areas and the panels are mounted on rotating motor powered stands so they can angle the panels directly at the sun to get the most out of them. But still, sun goes down and bam youre at 0 electrical output. Leading to the need for very long lasting power storage facilities to adequately store power to be dispensed at night. Also, solar panels and very large capacity batteries capable of holding charges for extended periods use a LOT of precious metals. Of which we have very little. And which have massive environmental impacts when we mine them.
Photovoltaic technology has gotten much better than it used to be, but even then it’s still not as much power as you seem to think. Modern nuclear plants can average outputs around a gigawatt. It depends on the plant. Some gen 4 nuclear reactors are anticipated to produce over a gigawatt per reactor core. Its also safer and much more efficient than it’s ever been. All that nuclear waste will also probably be recycled, and significantly less of it will be produced as our technology continues to advance. Youre also acting as though we just chuck a bunch of uranium in a hole and cover it with some dirt and then just leave it. The entire process is secure and must pass a whole host of safety standards including with regards to the environment. And some of that waste as I said will probably be usable at some point in the future for other things. To say we just throw it in there and it cataclysmically ruins everything is just no true.
We use too much power as is. And solar panels are not that great for the environment when you look at their broader impact. A whole host of other sustainable options exist, each with their own merits and environmental impacts. None of them produces anywhere near as much power as a nuclear plant. None of them meet the same emissions standards as a nuclear plant does when accounting for resource acquisition and fabrication. Nuclear power has had its fair share of major disasters and scandals, but fossil fuels have killed hundreds of millions of people. They kill millions every year. And their impact may even just kill humanity outright. Nuclear energy is the only realistic option if we don’t drastically overhaul how we produce and consume electricity as a society (which we should do either way).
If nuclear was in any way comparable in terms of cost to renewables + storage you might have a point, but it isn’t, so you don’t.
Yes economics is a worthwhile deflection when considering potentially existential climate change brought on by dependence on fossil fuels. Renewable energy is not and never will be able to supply the power demands we currently have. Nothing short of totally rewriting the way our current societies function would change that.
Not to mention at the current cost in precious metals that renewables, especially solar panels, require we would not have enough of them to entirely eliminate fossil fuel usage.
Nuclear can more than replace fossil fuel usage. Money is irrelevant. The US goes into debt trillions every year for their military. When it matters the most, money is irrelevant. The ruling class has just decided that climate change doesn’t matter enough.
This happens to solve another problem though, which is that decreasing cloud coverage in the Pacific is leading to increasing surface water temperatures
In fact, hot take: Why don’t we deploy a solar power belt around the equator… AND nuclear power wherever we can put it? And while at it, let’s make reprocessing of nuclear waste a must-do. It gives you more kWh/kg uranium, and the inevitable waste you do end up having is a cup instead of a cask, and far less dangerous for far shorter.