Wind and solar exceeding Coal in 2023

Damn good news for our environment.

Now let’s get those fancy new nuke reactors lit up.

 

Never been a fan of the anti solar anti wind people. It just seems like stupidity writ large. I am a let’s add as much new supply that is very low carbon as we can. I wonder if the anti green energy people are the same people who believed the tobacco companies.

 

Somewhat ironic that while solar essentially saved the grid in Texas during the recent heat wave the Republican majority in the Texas state legislature is still enacting legislation intended to disadvantage renewables while promoting fossil fuels.

 

While I acknowledge that this is very likely part of our future, as one of the few on this board who worked at not one, but two nuclear reactor sites, I am going to still vote NO on any plant build within 500 miles of my home (or really, any at all).

Meanwhile, I continue to be disappointed that we are spending all of this money on windmills and solar farms, but no where near enough on remaking our nations power grid with lower loss transmission lines and/or driving for extremely large, commercial storage capacity. Seems like we could be doing much, much more on those fronts while continuing to transition off of fossil fuel generated power.

 

Everyone loves these "modern nuke plants" but you would think seeing what is happening in Ukraine would make people think twice about building nuclear bombs all over the country for enemies to try and blow up.

Distributed energy production is becoming more and more important.

 

the new plants are smaller and meant to be widespread for distributed energy.and you can cut the electricity to them and they will not melt down. This isn't your parents nuclear plant. Uniform, reproducible facilities that could be located everywhere a coal or nat gas plant is located now

 

DeSantis will take a check from big coal soon and ban solar and wind power in Florida.

 

What a ridiculous post.

 

Must have gotten locked out from his previous account.

 

he already took a big phosphorus check. He’ll take any check that comes his way on the sly, being the corrupt, fascist, bigoted and probably closeted homosexual that he is (IMO). To say something nice about him he’s tall for a midget.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/article276893848.html

 

Something to keep in mind, none of these new technologies have been licensed anywhere because they all come with major technological problems that must be overcome. Some are extremely dangerous. For example, people are touting Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. When, the "salt" part of that, which is used to moderate the reaction temperature contains more than half of the periodic table. The extreme corrosion of all of the metal parts of the reactor is an extremely dangerous problem and a major road block.

Also, people always worry about proliferation of spent fission fuel and its use in dirty bombs. Well, what about Thorium? Most proposed molten salt reactors capture Protactinium-233 (Pa-233) as part of the reaction. Pa is normally bound onto a zirconium (Zr) surface. Those are easily separated and the Pa-233 then decays into Weapons Grade pure U-233. In other words, put molten salt reactors in places like Iran or N Korea, you need not worry about then taking U-232 and modifying it at great costs to make weapons grade material, your MSR directly produces for you non-stop, so you have an endless supply of weapons grade uranium.

Finally, I was reading in Asian times that S Korea, China and multiple pacific island nations may go so far as threatening Japan to stop the release of contaminated radioactive water into the Pacific. Tepco is reporting that the water has been "purified" leaving on Tritium and C-14. However, it turns out they are only testing for 7 radioactive elements per tank as opposed to the 40+ that they originally signed up for.

How many centuries can our oceans continue to absorb the radioactive spew from Fukushima? Latest estimates from world wide experts says it will take 200-300 years to decommision the 3 destroyed reactors. That means endlessly pouring millions of gallons of water into those reactors for 200-300 years.

The damage from Fukushima was not over estimated, we all just moved on to something else and stopped caring about it.

 

So you double down with the ridiculousness.

Even your link has its for a study to look at using it. This was discussed here and many experts agreed the fear tactic was rather over blown.

 

I don’t think radioactive waste should be dumped but a controlled continuous release would dilute the radioactive waste to background levels. How many trillions of gallons of water are in the pacific?

 

Enemies that can blow up our nuclear reactors can just nuke us.

The corrosion issue with MSRs is a technical problem, my understanding is that we've made a lot of progress in this regard since we shuttered our last one in the 70's. U-233 is a poor choice for making nuclear bombs. It's probably more effective for Iran or NK to use LEU in your typical nuclear reactor to make dirty bombs than to use U-233 to make a bomb. There's a reason why none of the nuclear powers use U-233 to make bombs.

Yes, the Fukushima disaster is underestimated as its radioactive water is still being poured into the ocean, but overall even with Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear reactors have been much safer for humanity than fossil fuels for the amount of energy they've generated.

It's true that wind and solar are even safer, but you have to consider the security aspect as well. Solar and increasingly wind's supply chain is being controlled by China, and batteries as well. We have by far the most nuclear reactors for both civil and military applications in the world. This is something we can be independent in, lest we let the lead slip again to a foreign country through neglect.

In addition, while I agree with your lamentation re: our lack of investment in our grid infrastructure, nuclear power can alleviate that concern. It can be used as one-to-one replacements for fossil fuel plants, it can even use their generators.

The main issue with nuclear plants really is as @I_boy said, its dangers are highly localized in both space and time (i.e. a meltdown is immediately dangerous to a plant's immediate neighborhood), as opposed to being widespread in both space and time for fossil fuel plants. This makes it much more likely for each individual community to say no to nuclear, even though the aggregate danger is so small that the safety advantage of wind and solar is really quite negligible.

 

Well, he banned direct car sales after taking money from the dealers. He has a track record of putting his thumb on the scales for his donors so there is nothing ridiculous about it at all.

 

And when moron's go around blowing them up, then what? Remember we had folks attacking just normal power stations here in the US.

 

15% from solar is awesome. 100%+ from nuclear would be even awesomer!!! Then we can stop destroying the earth with mining, in trying to save the earth with the sun, while simultaneously bitching at the sun for warming and killing polar bears.