[vlovich123]

An electric car is also more efficient and grid fossil fuels are better than a small ICE.

Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels.

We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).

[matthewdgreen]

Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...

TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.

[suoduandao3]

That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.

[vlovich123]

The cognitive dissonance involved to say that nuclear needs public subsidies to pay for themselves when wind and solar need the same is pretty wild. And again - wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid because the costs continue to ignore the batteries required to supplant baseload (or argue that baseload is an archaic concept with the alternative being a completely different grid which would require a massive replacement). By comparison, France which went all nuclear in the 60s is completely off fossil fuels for their grid whereas companies that continue to go the renewables-only approach continue to see fossil fuel usage continue to grow even if the percentages remain flat.

[matthewdgreen]

> wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid

You are offering this as a fact, but the fact is incorrect.

"Analysis: UK electricity from fossil fuels drops to lowest level since 1957": https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-from-fos...

"The CO2 footprint of the EU electricity grid was cut in half, from 501 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour in 1990 to 251 grams in 2022." https://eu.boell.org/en/2024/04/03/100-renewables-way-forwar...

"China’s Carbon Emissions Are Set to Decline Years Earlier Than Expected" https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-carbon-emissions-are-...

China in particular deployed about 217GW of (just) solar PV last year, and they're on track to meet or exceed that this year. https://www.pv-tech.org/chinas-installed-solar-capacity-660g...

Right now everything looks set for continued exponentially-shaped curves on renewables deployment, which will drive coal and eventually the majority of fossil generation out of the grid. None of that is happening in nuclear, unfortunately.

[vlovich123]

UK is a misleading example since they’re also using 20% less electricity since the 1960s (https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom), probably due to their struggling economy. By comparison the US has increased its consumption by 1.6x. And even UKs data will turn out to be worse if they actually switch to EVs because that’s going to increase demand on the grid.

Yes, solar can supply a lot of daytime power as China has demonstrated. But all that daytime power generation is wasted for nighttime power needs. So overbuilding solar in that way will mean super cheap clean energy during the day and super expensive dirty energy at night (because that dirty energy will no longer have daytime demands). And the dirty power will be dirtier since it’s going to be plants that can spin up quickly instead of the baseload ones that are always on. Think about it logically - if solar was solving all their needs, why is China investing in turbocharging their nuclear industry? Answer: because baseload and a reliable backstop to the grid is super important and valuable and batteries won’t cut it to completely decarbonize the grid.

Renewables are popular because fossil fuel companies don’t find them objectionable - it’s a much gradual off ramp from fossil fuel dependence in the grid than with nuclear. And unlike nuclear, fossil fuels remain in use to handle low energy cases from renewables until batteries magically get good enough for the grid.

[suoduandao3]

Then why are you here? If nuclear doesn't need subsidies, why aren't you just investing in the next great nuclear project and proving me wrong that way?

[vlovich123]

Because regulatory burdens have killed the US nuclear industry. That’s why China is 15 years ahead of us and pumping out fission stations at half the time.

Nuclear power needs a serious overhaul of the regulatory framework in the US and that starts with a broader swelling of support to overcome all the misinformed propaganda.

[matthewdgreen]

China installed more solar PV and wind generation in the first 9 months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear power stations under construction will provide (already adjusted for capacity factor.)

It's true that China is beating the rest of the world on nuclear construction. It is also unfortunately true that current-gen (non SMR) nuclear doesn't scale the way factory-built solar PV and wind tech does. Again reposting this very illustrative chart: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...

[vlovich123]

The point of fission is that all that installed capacity is available 24/7. That isn’t true of wind and solar. So for baseload, fission is the only solution and that’s why China is building them. China fission prices have gone down by the way and it’s likely the world will soon start using their reactors because we let the coal industry kill our nuclear industry.