[invalidname]

Regulation also slows down green projects. There are reasons for these regulations and some of them will be around for thousands of years...

Green energy is cheaper, less risky and regulation (while also painful) is easier in most cases. As a result a project can be built much faster. Land usage is bigger but mixed usage is OK (e.g. solar over crops, parking lots etc.). Wind can reside in the sea and geothermal can be in the middle of the city.

I think the discussion over nuclear is based on data from a decade ago. The world changed. It isn't Greenpeace that should object, its the business interests. It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate.

[sokoloff]

From both an engineering sense and an aesthetic sense, I would much rather have 2 nuclear plants serving as base load (not total load) for 10M people, supplemented by solar/wind, than relying solely on solar/wind/storage. (In part because that requires an incredible amount of storage to preserve the current uptime in my part of the US, but also because it's a much better match to the load profile [engineering] and a smaller footprint near people [aesthetics].)

[RetroTechie]

> It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate.

Yes renewables are growing at an amazing rate. But they don't cover countries' energy needs entirely, all the time. Which you need for a power grid.

The storage problem is by no means solved. And eg. hydro is only an option in a few places.

So you need other power generation to fill in the (big!) gaps.

Right now, that's a choice between a) let power grid go down, b) fossil, or c) nuclear. Note this is temporary! Only needed until sufficient storage comes online to let renewables do the job.

Given the urgency of the situation we're in, I see nuclear as the lesser evil here. And it's very annoying that NGOs like Greenpeace are actively blocking that escape hatch with their outdated stance. They should NOT get in the way of those working to reduce CO2 emissions. Even if nuclear.

[invalidname]

At scale they do cover countries energy needs. Storage at grid scale is pretty great, are there enough batteries to replace all the current energy requirement?

No. But they can be manufactured much faster than setting up a nuclear plant.

If you have a combination of wind, solar, hydro and geo over enough of a distance then you can get continuous energy with very little reliance on storage. The main problem is that this only works at scale and some countries are smaller. For this we need marketplaces that sell energy between countries automatically. That isn't a hard problem on the technical level, but might be a political issue and a logistic issue (grid connections, security etc.).

Because of the urgency nuclear isn't viable. The same capacity *with storage* can be setup in less time than it takes to build a nuclear plant. It will be cheaper to boot. The economics of nuclear made sense a decade ago, not now.

[barney54]

Renewables industrialize much more land than nuclear and nuclear solve the challenge of renewables being dependent on the weather. Renewables are far more expensive than nuclear when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

[invalidname]

Not accurate. Renewables can be multi-used. You can put them on agriculture lands, on buildings, on parking lots. You can put a wind turbines in the deep sea (where you have constant wind). Geothermal works all the time and you can put it in the middle of a city without disturbing anything.

When you have a large enough territory then you always have power from one or the other. Storage is enough to cover the rest and still keep the costs down.

[ttfkam]

Look at this map.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325

Now tell me where you think the entire southeastern quarter of the US should deploy its wind farms, bearing in mind its periodic susceptibility to hurricanes along the coasts and offshore.

Geothermal? The largest geothermal plant in the world is the Geysers Geothermal Complex with a capacity of 900 megawatts. It is made up of 22 power plants and spread over several kilometers, located north of San Francisco. This is hardly something where "you can put it in the middle of a city without disturbing anything." Additionally, it sits on top of a deep magma chamber that spans over 30 square miles. If you don't have a thermal source quite as abundant and close to the surface, costs and losses rise dramatically. (For reference, Diablo Canyon in California has two 1,100MW reactors on a single plant that has already been producing CO2-free power for decades, and folks are still trying to take it down.)

Don't believe the hype. I'm firmly in the camp that global climate change is an existential crisis that we may already be too late to properly mitigate. This also means we're far too late to be discussing hypothetical solutions to the problem like geothermal and wind options that simply don't exist in large swaths of the US let alone the world.

[tcfhgj]

> Renewables are far more expensive than nuclear when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

Which fortunately doesn't happen too often in Europe.

[KptMarchewa]

It happens _all the damn time_ in winter and late fall. Anyone who doubts that is conjuring their own reality. Poland had 2x larger share of renewables in July than in November.

There's barely any sun, wind increase isn't that significant to cover lack of it, and energy demand is very very high.

[hathchip]

A reduction of only 2x between July and November is actually super positive for renewables. Wind and solar energy is almost free on an ongoing basis and installation of new capacity isn't expensive. Your number suggests that simply installing 2x the capacity needed in favorable weather would be sufficient for unfavorable weather. Actually it's more like 3x but that's still often very doable.

[tcfhgj]

No, statistics say otherwise [0]

Poland is still part of the European electricity grid. It is not the European electricity grid

[0]: https://www.tga-fachplaner.de/meldungen/energiewende-kalte-d...

[RetroTechie]

Link covers a hypothetical 2045 scenario. Researchers have shown that... in future... could..

Parent refers to current situation I think?

[tcfhgj]

No, the link shows data related to weather without sun and wind for significant time periods ranging from 1995 to 2015.

[pydry]

It's ridiculously uneconomic of course but a limited number will continue to be built in spite of this because of the overpowering military imperative.

If you have nuclear weapons/submarines/carriers/etc. like Russia or the United States or France it shares some of the gargantuan cost of building and maintaining them. I expect North Korea will get into it in the next few years too for precisely this reason.

Countries like Iran, Sweden and Korea, on the other hand, want to be able to manufacture a weapon on a tight deadline because of extremely self evident geopolitical fears.

Nobody else builds nuclear power plants. The vast power of the global hippy-industrial complex apparently prevented it :/

Of course, the western nuclear military industrial complex, who always HATED environmentalists with a seething passion, are aware of just how massively uneconomic it is but that doesn't stop them from trying to dress up as "young climate activists" to sell a form of power that is 5x more expensive as a green gamechanger. Consent for enormous subsidies needs to be manufactured somehow if nuclear power is to remain competitive with solar and wind.

[pyrale]

Commercial reactors and military/medical isotope reactors are usually completely separated. The reason for that is that BWR/PWR reactors don't let you manipulate the fuel while the reactor is working, which makes it considerably harder to get plutonium.

[pyrale]

The issue isn't regulation so much as litigation. PV is safe, but wind turbines tend to suffer from this to a lesser extent.