When I think of the time, money and institutional bandwidth dedicated to promoting this sunset technology in #wales - compared to renewables - it's maddening.
Hitachi to pull plug on north Wales #nuclear power station | Business | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/15/hitachi-to-pull-plug-on-north-wales-nuclear-power-station
But then RE also has low capacity factor, so only gives power 30% of the time on average, which means you need energy storage of the capacity of the whole system (doesn't exist), or build... a nuclear or fossil gas plant to provide baseload.
The more I learn about these technologies, the more I feel we've been scammed by the fossil industry once again, as they tricked us to replace low-emission, clean nuclear power with fossil gas using FUD...
@kravietz @davidoclubb For nuclear you also need storage or some method to bring supply and demand together (markets, grid, ...). That is why the Guardian article is talking about producing H2 with the expensive nuclear power.
You can use the land between wind mills, you do not have to protect it against terrorism.
"Storage" is just a distraction really. This is precisely why we invented metrics such as surface power density or lifecycle CO2 emissions to account for respectively land use and emissions during the *whole* lifecycle of a technology.
Because, can you imagine, PV and wind mills are also made of steel, concrete and rare earth metals, that need to be mined, and then decommissioned.
Accounting for that, nuclear still has way lower emissions and land usage than RE.
