Well, who would have thunk? Expensive nuclear energy is not viable, if holding a blue sheet of sand towards the sky produces power for like half the price.
Unfortunately we still need tunable baseline power in order to keep current, voltage, and frequency within the grid’s margin of error. Our options for that are: situationally available (and often environmentally problematic) hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, and/or giant toxic/fire-prone battery banks.
You forgot hydrogen, saltwater batteries, proper grids, biogas, etc.
If you’d use nuclear power like that, you’d drive up the costs even more, because it’s just not very viable to compete with solar and wind during the day. Better to just invest in proper storage solutions.
Would geothermal work? I can’t think of any particular reason that the heat of the earth should vary much with time (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in this assumption), and energy production should be more controllable because to my understanding it generally just makes steam for a turbine like more traditional power sources.
If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.
Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.
Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.
Well, who would have thunk? Expensive nuclear energy is not viable, if holding a blue sheet of sand towards the sky produces power for like half the price.
Unfortunately we still need tunable baseline power in order to keep current, voltage, and frequency within the grid’s margin of error. Our options for that are: situationally available (and often environmentally problematic) hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, and/or giant toxic/fire-prone battery banks.
You forgot hydrogen, saltwater batteries, proper grids, biogas, etc.
If you’d use nuclear power like that, you’d drive up the costs even more, because it’s just not very viable to compete with solar and wind during the day. Better to just invest in proper storage solutions.
Would geothermal work? I can’t think of any particular reason that the heat of the earth should vary much with time (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in this assumption), and energy production should be more controllable because to my understanding it generally just makes steam for a turbine like more traditional power sources.
If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.
Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.
Yeah the poster above you is wrong. Solar is WAY less than half the price.
Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.