I would love to see them fund (and drastically cut back the red tape) for some of the newer reactor designs that are looking very promising, like Nuscale Power. I know they are working on new plant in Idaho, seems like it should be sped up. (currently looking at 2029 and 2030)
Every nuclear reactor on earth could simultaneously go critical and melt down and it would still be a tiny blip on the habitability of the planet as compared to the impact of global warming.
So your argument is that we should remove safety requirements for Nuclear until it kills as many per year as other energy sources?
Crazy requirements like being able to survive a 1-10000 earthquake and etc seem overly cumbersome until it happens. Sure a giant oil spill is not great but you were allowed to go to the Gulf of Mexico post-spill(s) and not so much for Chernobyl. So the DOE should keep its red tape so it can keep its (better than the military, see Spain) record with nuclear power.
at what point did I talk about removing safety requirements?
I said to reduce red tape. Things like peforming multiple regulatory approvals at the same time. (do you really need to wait for the environment review to finish before you start the reactor safety review?) Or pre-approve reactor designs, so they don't all have to be redone from scratch for every new reactor.
There is a TON of ways to speed up approvals in a way that don't comprimise safety.. but that was a great strawman agrument!
Somewhat disingenuous, you should take into account nuclear black swans which could easily make a whole state uninhabitable forever. That said, what I’ve read ( not much, haha ) about newer nuclear thorium tech seems to indicate this argument does not have a future…
I don't think it's disingenuous at all. The reality is more people are dying every day from pollution caused by fossil fuels than all nuclear power plant accidents combined.
The fact that pollution doesn't make a big boom pushes our animal instinct to focus on nuclear as dangerous but it's not even close.
The funniest thing is that climate change is now unavoidable and will make nuclear meltdowns even more likely because of the extreme weather events it will trigger. Now seems like the worst possible moment to remove safety restrictions...
Have you considered that increasing warm temperatures will increase conflict(1) causing people to have road rage? It is quite plausible that a nuclear engineer having a road rage incident is not paying attention and blows up a reactor. Presumably, with increasing temperature, the regulators also have increased chances of road rage causing them to ignore fatal flaws.
Not sure why the awfulness of oil means we have to go for the option that makes the earth uninhabitable if anything goes slightly wrong. False forced choice to satisfy nuke fantasies
Earth uninhabitable? No, every nuclear plant in the world failing at once wouldn't make 1% of the earth uninhabitable, cut the hyperbole.
Nuke fantasies? Vs what, the fantasy that somehow wind and solar are going to be always-on sources of energy? You need a reliable backup, right now it's either fossil fuels or nuclear. The fantasy is thinking that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear - they are not.
Yes but who is going to sign up to be the ones who end up with uninhabitable earth. You're thinking in generalizations, when always it will end up being in someone's backyard who doesn't want to live with the risk of losing their land for hundreds of years.
I'm a big supporter of solar power, but in 60 years most installs will be garbage. Not only will the cells themselves be much lower efficiency, but the conversion electronics is also failure prone over the 20-30 year timespan. I'm waiting for the breathless reporting of the "Solar Garbage Disaster", and other non-News.
Yes, but as I mentioned the high power support electronics won't last that long. Unless you want to use them as shelter, they are unlikely to be functional.
As far as efficiency I roughly agree. There's likely to be a 15-20% drop per 20 years so I think they'll still be 8-10% conversion efficient assuming they are clean and unbroken.
In many places in the US, even in the East, you can buy land for $1000/acre.
An acre is 4046 square meters. A solar module is maybe $75 per square meter. If we cover half the acre with modules, the modules alone cost $150,000/acre. Now add in cost of mounting hardware and inverters.
Land cost is close to negligible for solar, unless you're building it in very expensive places. If land cost ever did become generally significant, PV would be so cheap it would already have driven all other energy sources off the market.
There is an active, open market in used solar panels. Sold panels do not stay in the dark long.
But putting solar on land need not interfere with other uses. Rather, solar increases the value of the land for the other uses; a roof lasts longer with solar on. On a parking lot solar provides shade and stops rain. On pasture or crop land, solar reduces heat and water stress, increasing yield and cutting irrigation demand. On a reservoir or canal, it reduces evaporation loss, and runs cooler, thus more efficiently.
The competition is not just coal and gas but also solar / wind.
Solar and wind is the cheapest energy. Then gas, then coal then nuclear.
Yes, we should (and will, the trend makes it inevitable) replace coal and gas with solar and wind.
We should also replace the most expensive (nuclear) energy with cheap and clean solar and wind.
We're not grading on a curve here. It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it.
Solar and wind are only the cheapest because we have dumped massive amounts of subsidies into them, and continue to do so at greater levels than nuclear.
No matter how much money we throw at them, though, they produce zero when the sun isnt shining or the wind isnt blowing.
Factor in the cost of batteries, and aside from a few exceptional locations, they aren't all that cheap anymore.
>It doesn't matter WHY nuclear is most expensive energy, it matters that it is and we have technology that is both cheaper and cleaner to replace it.
That is a absurd thing to say. If the reason is "because we intentionally made it that way" then of course it matters because we can address that reason with the (nearly free) stroke of a pen.
Corruption turns out to be quite hard to root out, particularly when it has been made wholly legal. Certainly, it takes more than a pen stroke.
And you won't bring down nuke cost without cutting out the corruption. And, even if you did, it would remain uncompetitive with the storage that will have been long since built out by the time you could bring one online.
Unless grid scale storage is free, which it isn't ( and more to the point, it isn't technically possible with what we currently have), your equation is off.
Or when you're stuck running on 1960s technology because nothing new has been built in 60 years.