With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
Sure it is. The World nuclear status report 2021 for example says it’s five times more expensive than wind energy.
And sure there are other fuels for nuclear. But I think most of them are even more limited?!
The paper doesn’t account account for availability. Nuclear has over 90% availability, which means for 1MW of power installed, you get on average over 0.9MW of power to use. Renewable are far below that, between 40 and 60% iirc. Which means you need to double the cost for a defined output. And that doesn’t consider batteries.
Unless the document talks about that, please point me to the right chapter then.
Damn. I shouldn’t have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? I’m referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.
It’s not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldn’t make any sense.
And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isn’t a close call. With a 5 fold increase in being economical, we have plenty of money to spare to afford some batteries and hydroelectric dams.
I was looking at the building cost. Looking more into the Wikipedia article, it seems to account for availability. But the numbers are very speculative still, there is a crazy variation both for the specific data points and for the studies. Another big factor is the interest rate for investment which can double the cost of nuclear energy depending on the assumption.
Another thing that bother me is the speculative nature of these things. No photovoltaic power plant ever went through its whole lifespan. No significant energy production was made with variable renewable. Whereas nuclear was used for 70 years now. Yet the speculation makes it like nuclear will be expensive and unreliable and renewable will be cheap and reliable when the actual history is the exact opposite. Technology advances obviously, but still. I don’t consider renewable to be a tried and tested technology that scales while nuclear is.
Thorium is one of the most abundant material on earth. Unlike lithium for example.
Yeah. But the technology is - at this point - more sci-fi than anything else. Probably nothing we need to worry about in the next few years.
And you still need to mine some non-renewable resource. It’s still nuclear and produces waste. And it seems super expensive.
There are working thorium reactor for 50 years or something. Hardly sci-fy.
Renewables need batteries to work. Which needs lithium.