Spot the difference 🤔

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

@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)

@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.

@cjd @kravietz I think they would be useful in different situations -- solar and wind can provide surge power, nuclear can provide a baseline.

@cjd @kravietz (helps also to reduce the storage problem for renewable energy)

@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.

@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.

@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)