31 sats \ 5 replies \ @mallardshead OP 15 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: Fossil Fuels are Fiat Energy. Reorg of the mining space coming ⚒️ bitcoin
Nuclear is renewable but it's exceedingly expensive, exceedingly centralized, will always carry security risks, disposal risks, require lots of labor from guards to operators. I'm no fan. I feel it's mostly a Twitter thing at this point. Even if you take a small SMR reactor, these produce 300MW, take 2 years to fabricate, and probably another 3 years to install after various community lawsuits to keep it away. Oh and the GE version costs $9.3B to build...up from $5.3B a few years ago. $9.3B for 300MW? You could have 300MW of wind and 300MW of solar and battery storage for under $1B built in less than half the time.
Pubco's are going to incentivize the build-out of reliable baseload generation, it's just that the baseload will be energy storage downloaded from renewable energy, not fossil fuel baseload. The input costs of fossil fuels will not be competitive with renewable energy, not even energy storage that discharges only 80% of what it downloads from the renewable assets. We're kind of only scratching the surface of what we can extract with solar materials, are seeing big improvements in geothermal, and great competition with wind designs. Don't expect any to get less efficient.
thank you!
reply
Wind and solar has disposal issues but nobody talks about it.
And nuclear disposal issue is not a big deal anyway. Spent fuel can be stored on site, safely, it takes up little space, and eventually when the plant is retired the spent fuel can be consolidated with a common storage area. By the way spent nuclear fuel is mostly dangerous for the first 5 years or so. Gamma radioactivity drops fast. But what do you do with the vast amount of mercury and other waste from solar? That stuff is permanent. They are also resorting to burying wind turbine blades they have grave yards for them and they are not bio degradable +more
reply
Tl;Dr spent nuclear fuel "recycles" itself within 5 years due to radioactive decay. But due to an abundance of caution it is stored for much longer.
reply
Spentnuclear fuel can also be reprocessed because it contains valuable isotopes and what not. But that is a different story
reply
this is actually my main concern with wind and solar - well, that and the manufacturing/transportation issues. i don't feel that it is intellectually honest to say that wind/solar have such a better emissions profile (or whatever metric) when the considerations of how the systems are built (inputs-wise) are very often absent from the conversation...
reply