[rudolph9]

It seems like this thread has sparked a lot nuclear vs solar debate, but both have the potential to be net zero energy sources and most fault tolerant grids are powered by a multitude of sources. We should be aggressively building solar, wind, battery, and nuclear along with anything else that can reasonably be part of a net zero supply chain that produces electricity in the not too distant. They all have different tradeoffs and we shouldn’t be debating which is better than the other. Rather we should focus on what percent of each fit best balancing safety/resiliency/cost of adoption/long term operating costs. And this varies widely from region and changing over time. What’s need are formulas and frameworks for helping make these wildly complex decisions more straightforward.

[hef19898]

We are building solar and wind aggressively. The problem with nuclear power is, nobody manages to build it aggressively or even at enough scale to make a meaningfull impact.

What we should do, is keeping existing nuclear plants running as long as economically and safely possible. Emphasis on economically and safely, because those two points meant that the German reactors did run as long as possible, they even got an extension granted from a Green minister.

[einpoklum]

> We are building solar and wind aggressively

That's absolutely not true. 68 GW nameplate capacity, or, say, 30 GW effective capacity, is a very small amount. The US consumed 4 Trillion kWH in 2022 [1], which, if assuming a peak consumption of twice the average, means up to, say 2.2 10^12 W. 68 GW is 6810^9 W, or 3% of the peak consumption.

Even if my cocktail-napkin math is off by a factor of 2, that's still not much more than offsetting demand increases. And even if there were no demand increase - "aggressive" would mean 4x that amount, to be able to phase out fossil fuel power by 2030 or so.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

[MagnumOpus]

> nobody manages to build it aggressively or even at enough scale to make a meaningfull impact

China does. They will be completing 60-70 GW worth of reactors in the next decade, planning to take nuclear power from 2% of their electricity production to over 10% eventually. (While also building crazy amounts of solar, wind etc.)

[hef19898]

You do know that 6-7 GW per year are close to nothing compared to new wind and solar, not to mention other plants, China is installing? Nor is it in the general picture.