kravietz 🦇  

Spot the difference 🤔

1+
Caleb James DeLisle  

@kravietz
Even if someone cut down the trees in their yard, PV is still one of the best sources of energy:
cleantechnica.com/2020/12/16/m

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Mathemagician  
@cjd @kravietz I'm not convinced that it is bad to invest in nuclear power research. We're getting to the point now where thorium-based liquid salt reactors will be commercially available in 5-10 years. Many new thorium-based MSR designs would obviate concerns about traditional uranium-based nuclear power, in particular the risk of explosion from a meltdown would be nearly nil since they can be operated at 1 atmosphere of pressure, and their fuel would mostly be stuff that is considered a hazardus byproduct of rare-earth mining (which, coincidentally, is necessary to construct high-efficiency rechargable batteries)
1
Caleb James DeLisle  

@mithrandir @kravietz
Definitely worth investigating to some extent. Scaling properties on solar are hard to beat, but small self-contained nuclear batteries could be competitive.

1
Mathemagician  
@cjd @kravietz I think they would be useful in different situations -- solar and wind can provide surge power, nuclear can provide a baseline.
1
Mathemagician  
@cjd @kravietz (helps also to reduce the storage problem for renewable energy)
1
Caleb James DeLisle  

@mithrandir @kravietz
Per the link I dropped, problem with NEW nuclear is it takes like 15 years to bring it to completion. So shutting down nuclear prematurely is probably a bad plan, but spinning it up right now is kind of a case of too-little-too-late. New solar deployment is up within a year.

Also scaling properties. Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper. True too of reactors but not many of them are (ever) made so scale doesn't happen.

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kravietz 🦇
Follow

@cjd @mithrandir

> NEW nuclear is it takes like 15 years

Not true. A few nuclear power plants in EU were delayed significantly due to political shitstorm after Chernobyl and Fukushima. Today on average it takes 5 years to complete *any* large infrastructure project, be it off-shore wind farm or nuclear power plant.

· · 2 · 0 · 0
Caleb James DeLisle  

@kravietz @mithrandir
Ok so new nuclear plants are going up really quick these days because the only countries building them are Korea and China. Got it.

1
kravietz 🦇  

@cjd @mithrandir

Yes, and while most of the world's countries including "renewable" Germany are beating around the bush on decarbonisation, but not really decarbonising, China actually *is* adding GWs of low-carbon nuclear power *and* renewables each year.

1
Caleb James DeLisle  

@kravietz @mithrandir
Yeah, I'll give them credit, the Chinese are serious. Helps that their government isn't controlled by Gazprom.

0
Mathemagician  
@kravietz @cjd interesting graph, but from what I've seen with gen IV nuclear reactors, there are still some kinks in the designs that need to be worked out. Most of the difficulty of building them comes from getting funding and then doing the R&D work. The only country I know of that has been doing this on any significant scale is China (India's working a lot on thorium power but they're going for solid fuel, which has big limitations)
1
Caleb James DeLisle  

@mithrandir @kravietz
China's industrial safety record does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about that fact.

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Mathemagician  
@cjd @kravietz China likes to buy reactors from Canada and the US, actually.

I guess because they're aware of how sketchy their own supply lines are and don't want to rely on them for something that could hypothetically go Chernobyl :P
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kravietz 🦇  

@mithrandir @cjd

No VVR reactor can "go Chernobyl" regardless of how hard you try.

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chernobog priest  
@mithrandir @cjd @kravietz last time a chinese power plant went south, there was something like 75k casualties. So yeah, I kinda wish this was true.
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kravietz 🦇  

@newt @cjd @mithrandir

That was a hydro power plant in Banquiao by the way, considered green by today's standards :)

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chernobog priest  
@kravietz @cjd @mithrandir ah yes. Very green.
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kravietz 🦇  

@cjd @mithrandir

You may want to reevaluate your safety records:

electricityforum.com/news-arch

theguardian.com/world/video/20

ourmidland.com/news/article/Mi

cbc.ca/news/canada/british-col

0
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