cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/tech@piefed.world/p/2036230/solar-surpasses-nuclear-power-globally-for-first-time
Damn, that is very cool.
Though Nuclear power is still needed to cover base load during the winter season in northen Europe.
And I am still pissed at how environmentalists killed nuclear power just as energy demand surged during the 90s, 00s and 10s.
Nuclear power is so cool. After SneakerNet (Sandworm) and Chernobyl Is think a lot of people would be scared of it. I used to think wind power was an awesome source until you look at life expectancy and cost for replacement parts. You can get like 10-15years but a solar farm lasts 25+ before degrading.
Nuclear is still the most expensive power source, while wind turbines are one of the cheapest per MWH produced.
Half a decade ago I was fully pro nuclear, but battery technology have developed to a point we’re almost capable of using it as a base loader; There’s an added power grid capacity requirement for battery farm baseloading, but there’s ideas of how to solve this. By having batteries sitting locally at the largest power generating sites, with a switch to determine whether batteries should be filled or power should be pushed to the grid
Praising nuclear and deploring the cost of wind? That’s funny, considering the still-unsolved problem of securely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years. It’s almost like we have left the factor with the largest potential cost out of our calculation…
20 years of nuclear waste vs less than 10 years (2017-2023) of wind turbine blades (dumped illegally no less)
Which one is the unsolved problem again?
To help answer your question, could you first
a) provide information on the total energy generated by the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2, just so we can be sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison and we can be sure that we’re looking at roughly the same amount in both pictures?
b) assess the capacity of the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2 for 1) further damages to the environment and human health, as well as 2) their potential for being recycled?
c) fast-forward these images about 250-500 years and then reasses which one depicts the greater environmental problem and cost factor?The Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, produced approximately 119 billion kilowatt-hours (119 terawatt-hours) of electricity during its operation from 1972 to 1996.The Sweetwater Wind Farm is a 585.3-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Nolan County, Texas. Annual production estimates are 1,700,000 MWh, or approx 1.7 terrawatt hours per year on averageSo giving the Wind farm the most generous output figures, in a ten year span it produces less than 20 Terrawatt hours, almost 1/6th (one sixth) of the power the single reactor nuclear plant produced in it’s life time.
So yeah, balls in your court.
That’s fair.
Now let’s see which of these waste materials I can recycle, and which of them I could, theoretically, leave untouched in their current state for 250-500 years without investing a single Dollar. (The illegal Sweetwater dump was cleaned up, btw. Picture 1 is supposed to be the clean-up.)
Unresolved?
It’s a super simple problem.
You dig a hole, put the waste in the hole and backfill with clay.
Done.
As a Swede, I would love it if we built a huge underground storage site and sold space to other countries needing space for waste. We have a solid bedrock and a generally stable political situation, we also have the skills to build a facility like it and could make bank off of it.
Yeah, that is why almost 80 years after the start of the nuclear age nearly no country has such a storage. It’s so easy to build!
Or your know, the amount of waste produced by nuclear reactors produced global is so low relative to output that the majority of it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Oh yeah. These issues are so mild that after your “half a century”, we need to dig everything back up, reseal it and find a new place. Playing a thousand years’ worth of musical chairs with radioactive waste may sound fun to you - until one day, the music stops and you can’t find a chair.
Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts ‘thousands and thousands of years’ is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives.
So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.
Yeah, it is quite startling to see the difference in physical fuel use between a coal plant and a nuclear plant.
And the really funny thing is that a coal plant releases far more radiation than a nuke plant.
100%, there is natural rock formations that emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, hell the US Capitol building was rezoned as a nuclear power plant half of DC would need to be evacuated an exclusion zone setup without any change to the building or fuel brought to the site. The granite used in it’s construction exceeds the legal limit that nuclear power plants are allowed.
Meanwhile self professed environmentalists are anti-nuclear energy despite it having the least impact environmentally per kw produced.
It is easy to build, but as noted, it is also expensive to build.
Then you also need the right kind of bedrock and geology.
Sweden has everything needed to build such a facility, I could even see a large benefit of a permanent storage facility here.
We could get “boosted geothermal”, nuclear waste still produce heat for a long time, why not put in pipes in place in the storage facility and use the extra heat energy to heat houses or other useful things, we are already doing geothermal heating here, so much so that there has been noted issues with depleating the geothermal boreholes, with a boosted system you would get a much longer life time of using it.
This kicks ass. I hate that my country is ruining itself and parts of the world with pointless weapons and war… but I am glad that the United States’ self-defeating idiocy has the whole world turning away from oil.
Environmentalists have been in a pretty happy mood about energy generation in recent years. The orange turd clogging up global oil and gas supply only accelerates what was already inevitable: Complete renewable victory. It cannot be stopped anymore. Not with all the Lobbying and bribing money in the world. Renewables are too cheap, too reliable to ever switch back. That fight is basically won. At least long term.
Indeed. Even in Germany, we have the second Minister of Economic Affairs who trying to hinder PV by several actions. It’s still unstoppable.
I bet you guys in US will get this balcony solar boost as we had in Germany. This will kick ass the energy companies badly by the pure mass. Deserved.
