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by samatman
655 days ago
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When I was a child, we would play a game called "the floor is lava". It's a simple game: you have to get around, but not touch the floor. Jumping on the furniture and such. Fine for a pastime, when you're small, but to get places, you use the floor. A certain faction of the project to decarbonize the electrical grid likes to play a similar childish game: "nuclear power is lava". It causes them to come up with whimsical and absurd epicycles, which make no sense at all unless you're playing that game. Seasonal storage of 2GWh? Please. A 2GW plant produces 2GWh every hour, with 90% uptime. And it doesn't involve losing more than 90% of the photovoltaic energy, I will eat my whole hat if the ray-to-electricity pipeline for this boondoggle exceeds 10% efficiency. Can we please stop wasting time and effort, and invest in the buildout of a substantial nuclear fleet to provide baseline power? |
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Go ahead and look at the lazard lcoe numbers, and this year was an odd increase for solar wind that will basically be the best that nuclear can hope for.
If nuclear could provide a cheap scalable easily approved rapidly deployed safe and low waste reactor that could be price competitive with solar and wind, then they be in the game.
That is not happening without probably 10 to 20 years of research and development with billions of dollars of funding.
Old nuclear was solid rods and gigantic domes and all of that stuff simply is not price competitive, and even if you dropped everything and started attempting to get approvals and construction for hundreds of nuclear plants, they won't come online for 10 to 20 years themselves.
When's going to get cheaper solar? Certainly going to get cheaper with perovskites. Stores will get cheaper with lfp and sodium ion improvements, solid state and hopefully someday sulfur chemistries.
The nuclear industry needed to get its act together decades ago. In my opinion, it made a huge error in abandoning msr in the 70s (which has all the features of a competitive nuclear plant if they could figure out the materials science) and other breeder reactors.
A solid fuel rods reactor is simply not reliably safe in all disaster scenarios (Fukushima).