[ThomPete]

The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.

Furthermore, the price of uranium is so cheap that it's financially feasible right now. It will be over time but that should also show you just how abundant and available it is as a resource.

If we actually got politicians to sit down and go through the requirements with engineers and scientists they would realize how cheap and still safe it can be.

[PavlovsCat]

> The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.

Well, if that "counts", then solar power will become totally free and have a net positive environmental impact, we'll just plant some nanobots that grow and repair solar panels inside a marked area, and can be scooped up should we need them elsewhere, hence "100% free once we perfected them". They'll smell like vanilla, and change color according to the moods of people using the energy.

Latter on we make nanobots and send them to the sun to hang out there for a few thousand years and grow a scaffolding from, uhh, space dust or something, and then we shoot nanobots at it that grow solar panels on it, and we have our Dyson sphere. Add some nanostuff that creates material from energy and flings that at Earth, then convert material back to energy.

This didn't even take me 5 minutes, so I really don't get what the problem is :P

[ThomPete]

You can say the same about solar which needs fuelcell technology we dont have. Nuclear waste is not problems that we have no idea to solve.

[pfdietz]

Solar doesn't need fuel cells.

Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.

[ThomPete]

And if they cant get that then they will never be a baseline energy source as you cant count on them, so keep dreaming.

[ben_w]

On the contrary, current efficiency of even cheap-and-dumb electrolysis is 70% {1}, which means that cheap solar like the 2.155¢/kWh plant from 6 montgs ago {2} can easily provide baseline load.

This is pretty much entirely because PV keep getting cheaper faster than everyone expected — even as recently as five years ago, pessimism like yours wouldn’t have been unreasonable, and yet the problem is now essentially solved and all we need to do is build the stuff at the prices we can already afford.

{1} https://web.archive.org/web/20120322204531/http://www.grid-s...

{2} https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/14/new-us-solar-record-2-1...

[ThomPete]

Of course they can't and of course it doesn't get cheaper unless you decide to frame it in a way that not at all realistic.

Solar is less then 1% and that's with 300% increase it's not even close to being able to deliver baseline anything regardless of how cheap it gets. It's a dream that's not even close to be realistic and frankly highly naive.

Again 47w per m2 vs. 1000w per m2 and with solar panels needing continous repeairs and no grid or fuel cells in sight plus reliance on coal, nuclear and oil for when the sun doesn't shine.

Good luck.

[pfdietz]

They can, when teamed with dispatchable sources, destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources.

This is why you're not seeing new nuclear plants much in the west. The decision makers know they face huge risk from future cost declines of renewables which, combined with gas, would leave those reactors unable to amortize their construction, financing, and fixed operating costs.

There are other solutions for long term storage of renewable energy to make it dispatchable. For example, making hydrogen, then burn it in turbines. The efficiency of this is lousy, but the capital cost can be quite low.

[ThomPete]

I don't see nuclear plants much in the west because of political opposition and public ignorance nothing else.