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

Interesting that the second graph you're referencing is not energy price - it's LCOE, or levelized cost of energy. It's an more of an estimation of profitability that very strongly depends on discount rate which is chosen more or less arbitrarily. Lazard for example chooses it at around 10% which basically means each year the energy from given facility is 10% worth less - which makes no sense for an power plant that can work for 50 years... but makes sense for investors.