this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
359 points (94.8% liked)

World News

38987 readers
1822 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you're assuming an infinite capacity of funds and people to build the things. If that were true, then yes we should be going for both renewables and nuclear. However it isn't, and renewables provide far better value and can be built far more quickly.

We need to build both, but we can't build it all at once. It makes sense to build all or most of the cheap and quick renewables first, in an excess (which before long will become capacity again), to get the fossil fuels switched off as quickly as possible, and then fill out the portfolio with nuclear.

[–] bouh@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wrong. The question is how expensive a determine MWh power is, not a single unit price ; prices for 2MWh of renewable or nuclear are comparable.

Secondly, renewable and nuclear don't mobilise the same resources, both human and material, thus it will always be faster to build both at the same time.

Thirdly, renewable take a lot of space, which means it's easy to build the first farms, but the more you have, the harder it is to find space for it to build ; not all countries are islands or massive continents with large deserts.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. You're not really making sense there. Prices in MWh is what the market charges at, and renewables are FAR cheaper per MWh than nuclear. However there is a disconnect between the generation market and consumer markets - as a consumer, you don't see any difference. Regardless, I haven't been saying that 1MW of renewables is the same as 1MW of nuclear. I've been saying we need to build an excess of renewables everywhere to account for the times it isn't available in some locations.
  2. Yes, they do. There are only so many people in the industry. I say this as an electrical engineer who has worked throughout (renewables, nuclear, factories, basically anything with HV). There is also production capacity, but we haven't reached this yet with renewables and it can be expanded - however when we do get closer to it then it will make more sense to put money into nuclear. Money is also a limiting factor, particularly when it comes to government finance, and is perhaps the biggest limiting factor of all.
  3. Wind farms take up a lot of space, solar can go on roofs, hydro requires bodies of water. Hydro is very location specific, wind somewhat, solar not very much. However the biggest obstuction of all is the NIMBY attitude.
[–] bouh@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

I'm talking prices to build 2MW power gen capacity, also considering the effective uptime, because wind or solar don't have 100% uptime. Construction prices are equivalent for nuclear and solar. And nuclear doesn't take 20 years to build, contrary to what anti-nuclear propaganda pretends.

Finally electrical engineers are not the only people needed for these projects. And if electrical engineers are the limiting factor to build new stuff, we're simply screwed.