ephemeral_gibbon @ ephemeral_gibbon @aussie.zone

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Except worse because they mix inventory so it's easier for sellers to get away with scams

Because we could use the money spent on nuclear to build more renewables and supporting infra (storage and transmission) than if we also built nuclear. The renewables will snap be finished and replacing the fossil fuels a lot sooner than the 10-15 years for a nuclear reactor.

If you look up studies into it you need a lot less storage than you'd expect to run a fully renewable grid, as the scale of the grid stabilises it to weather fluctuations. Winter also is a problem that can be overcome. That gencost report is a decent starting point, there are plenty of other studies into it though. The low cost of storage is also especially true if you're looking at the first 99% of the grid.

Maybe those studies are wrong and nuclear would be economic for that last 1%. However, if we can get to 99% years earlier by just building renewables then discover that it's harder than expected to get to 100 (somewhat unlikely, especially as more storage tech is developed), we can build nuclear then. The net carbon from getting off the majority of fossil fuels years earlier will probably make it the better decision anyway.

Also just noting that my views are based on what I've read about Australia so you should also find peoperly researched cost analysis for your country. Also for renewables to work well in smaller countries they'll need to develop more interconnects their neighbours etc.

Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn't just go to waste.

We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. "this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen", even though that'd be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).

As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that's not going to flip.

However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they'd be replaced by rail, but that's not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.

For processes like that though, nuclear would make the electricity too expensive to be economic, renewables wouldn't.

The cost per MWh produced over a year, with grid + storage costs, is the number that matters. Wind and solar combined are much cheaper than nuclear there. For a source look that the most recent csiro gencost report. It's produced by the Australian national science body and basically says that in the best case if smrs reach large scale adoption and operate at a very high capacity factor... They're still way too expensive for the power they produce when compared to wind and solar with transmission and storage.

To get off fossil fuels faster it needs to be economic, and nuclear isn't economic. Renewables are

And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there's an excess of energy

No I was referring to autopilot, just look at the name of it. It's I know it's not capable of self driving (and neither is the even more absurd name of "full self driving") but to your average person it intentionally sounds as if the car is driving itself instead of it being a driving assist.

That'd be the fsd stats, not autopilot

The way musk marketed it was as a "self driving" feature, not a driving assist. Yes with all current smart assists you need to be carefully watching what it's doing, but that's not what it was made out to be. Because of that I'd still say tesla is responsible.

Probably because there have been a lot more make chess players in general historically. It's still a long way from an even split today and was probably even more imbalanced.

But the same applies for the other workarounds mentioned doesn't it?

There has been a bit shared on that. From memory it would be a body made up of a few aboriginal people from different areas, that would exist to consult with parliament on issues that concerned aboriginal people.

That could well be a poor translation of shady

For transmission (at least in NSW) there's a fair bit of bad blood because transgrid has a history of building unnecessary powerlines. They get paid on their asset base and were building a lot of powerlines that had no use in any reasonable projections, only in bullshit projections from transgrid.

That's now made it very hard for these projects to be done as there's a history of the bad projects that's pretty recent.

I'm not saying that these aren't necessary now, but it's no surprise people are opposing them with the history transgrid has.

For example they dumped a proposed Stroud to landsdowne powerline around 2012 after it was shown to be just the trying to increase their regulated asset base

The lifetime cost of of nuclear (build, running + clean-up) divided by the amount of electricity created is incredibly high. This report from csiro doesn't include large scale nuclear but does include projected costs for small modular reactors +solar and wind. Generally large reactors come out behind smr especially in future projections.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/energy-data-modelling/gencost

Note the "wind and solar pv combined" "variable with integration costs" which is the cost accounting for storage, transmission etc. It's not that high (at least up to the 90% of the grid modelled for 2030). The best end of the nuclear estimate is double the cost of that. The reasons that the storage costs etc. Are not as high as you may intuitively expect are explained in that report.

Maybe there is a place for nuclear in that last 10%, but not in less than that. Also as far as rolling it out quickly, look at how long this last nuclear plant took to build from planning to construction being complete.

I think that it is possible to manage the cleanup of nuclear and to make it safe, but it's all just very expensive. To make everyone happy with the transition off fossil fuels it needs to be cost competitive and renewables are, nuclear isn't.

But what I'm saying is that the land used by solar isn't all that significant, and it's also costed into the price of solar farms. To power the US purely off solar would require significantly less land than is currently used for ethanol production alone. I'd say the environmental good of solar (cheap, renewable power) significantly outweighs the cost of it.

For the transition off fossil fuels to happen quickly it needs to be economic, and solar is a big part of making it economic. Nuclear is just too expensive

Ah sorry, my mistake on that one. Despite how many wind turbines working at once it may take, the power from the is cheaper by a long shot than nuclear.

The reason I don't think nuclear is the main solution is just cost + build time. It's horrendously expensive. Much more so than the cost of renewables with proper grid integration (transmission, storage etc.) that has been modelled.

Maybe in a while the small nuclear reactors may come close, but currently the full sized reactors are too expensive and smr's aren't really a thing yet because of cost.

If power prices can come down instead of go up it's going to be a lot easier to convince everyone to transition away from fossil fuels, and from modelling that's been done (e.g. by csiro) that can be the reality

Ah sorry, my mistake. I messed up there.

The battery in SA is really just for grid stabilisation, not long term storage. Batteries are not really a good soln for longer duration storage. You need surprisingly little storage though when they've modelled fully renewable grids which is why the projected costs aren't stupidly expensive.

Oh I think we should shut down coal as soon as possible. But if energy prices can go down by having the cheaper energy production of renewables instead of up because of nuclear the transition can happen faster.

Eh, I am a little over caring about reddit and it's slightly annoying when that comes over here.