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 @kravietz
>New solar deployment is up within a year.
Indeed, it is quicker to build the plant, but the plant also takes up more space (with exceptions -- those towers outside Vegas are wonderfully compact, idk how much power they put out though), and you have to build it somewhere where you get sunlight/wind reliably enough that the plant is worth building. For a lot of cities that means the plant has to be far away, which leads to high line loss.

OTOH solar and wind are eminently the best strategy for power in rural and low-density urban areas, where the cost of land is cheaper and also it makes more sense to spread out power production. A small town would probably be better served by nearby solar and wind farms than a faraway nuclear plant.

The article you linked seems to be making an argument that *nothing* besides wind, solar, and waves should be invested in. That just seems shortsighted to me, especially when so many proposed power sources are still in their infancy.
>Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper.
Huh? You mean that it's easy to mass produce them, right? There is not an infinite supply of silicon, and the fixed marginal cost of the production process remains the same until you change the production process.

@mithrandir @kravietz
1. "Naive" economies of scale, bigger more efficient factories, better processes.
2. R&D-based economies of scale: more people buy PV, more competition, more R&D investment --> higher efficiency, longer lasting PV made with cheaper materials and processes.

Same story as batteries. It's not govt research that's driving these curves, it's competition.

@cjd @mithrandir @kravietz this looks pretty good and should solve a lot of energy issues simply by being the most cost effective option. do you know how to the energy storage problem will be tackled? I.e. the sun doesn't shine at night?

@lain @mithrandir @kravietz
Batteries. Buy a phone, buy a Tesla, push dat curve.

@cjd @mithrandir @kravietz so nothing new really. But yeah, with more PV there'll be more demand for batteries, and with such a fortune to be made there'll be solutions.

@lain @cjd @mithrandir

Because PV is actually made mostly of mined resources, as this friendly ad from Australian Mining (!) demonstrates

@kravietz @lain @mithrandir
A PV cell is mined and then runs 10 years. A cm3 of gas is mined and then burned within a couple of hours.

Also I prefer the Australians, they don't try to invade Europe every chance they get.

@cjd @lain @mithrandir

I don't think anybody supports fossil fuels in this thread, so this argument is irrelevant.

The problem with PV is specifically what you described - it runs 10 years, and then you need a new one.

Per 1 W of energy mining requirements are much higher for PV than other sources.

Then you need a whole lot of them due to low surface power density.

Then you need even more due to low capacity factor.

And then you need storage.

@kravietz @cjd @lain This graph is not very useful -- mining uranium is much more difficult and has many more nasty byproducts than mining anything in a solar cell, for instance, plus there's just less uranium (and it needs extensive processing, depending on the reactor type)

@mithrandir @lain @kravietz
Love how they have this little black sliver "Geological repository". Cost of storing the waste 100,000 years is way higher than that, but I guess that's close to the cost of giving it to the Mafia to dump off the coast of Somalia.

@cjd @mithrandir @kravietz I thought the nuclear waste will just be burned off in newer type reactors

@lain @cjd @kravietz generally newer reactors are more efficient, leading to less fuel included in waste, ideally none. Most of the reason why nuclear waste needs to be stored so long is that there is *a lot* of it, so even though the half-life is short (half-life is inversely proportional to radioactivity), it remains dangerous for a long period.

Most true fission products are either extremely radioactive and degrade in a few hours or days, or are not very radioactive and are in low enough quantities that they become benign within a couple hundred years. Most nuclear waste is actually just fuel that didn't get converted into fission products.

@mithrandir @lain @cjd

> nuclear waste needs to be stored so long is that there is *a lot*

Quite the opposite. These containers on photo are the whole nuclear waste from Switzerland for the last ~50 years.

And whole UK's nuclear waste for the last 60 years is ~2200 m3 which is about the amount a coal plant outputs in a few days of operations.

So no, nuclear waste is absolutely tiny amounts.

@kravietz @lain @cjd "a lot" of nuclear waste is very different from "a lot" of smoke. If that leaked into the surrounding environment 500 years from now, it would still be plenty enough to be devastating.

@mithrandir @kravietz @cjd still, one room is not what people would generally consider a lot. I can see storing this for at least a foreseeable future.