[AtlasBarfed]

...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind?

I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.

And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.

I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.

I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.

I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....

I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.

Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale

[tribaal]

Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.

We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)

[cogman10]

Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.

[tribaal]

Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.

The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).

Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.

[palata]

> Mine is a net producer for example.

All year? And do you mean you "inject" more than you "pull", or do you mean that you can live without ever pulling anything from the grid?

Because "being a net producer overall" doesn't say that it would work in practice if everyone was doing the same, right?

[tribaal]

Almost the latter - I can almost live without pulling anything from the grid. The huge caveat being that my system is way oversized for a normal house, since my building is multi-use (including commercial tenants who obviously only need power during the day). I am definitely injecting more during the summer though, of course.

I have a 40kWp system and a 20kWh battery.

[calvinmorrison]

It's not in the EU. It is part of the Schengen Agreement.

[jsnell]

It's not an EU nation.

[cogman10]

Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.

[Arodex]

Switzerland unilaterally got out of negotiations with the EU, which also dealt with energy grid coordination.

As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.

[estebank]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

[palata]

> I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.

We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.

Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?

[AtlasBarfed]

Build a solar plant in the Sahara desert and ship the energy long range,

Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.

I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.

In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.

But admittedly I haven't not done the exact math

[Moldoteck]

lol you think power from Africa is strategically safer dependency? And no, nuclear will be miles cheaper considering infra cost of sending power from Africa