Comments by "David Elliott" (@davidelliott5843) on "California's Renewable Energy Problem" video.

The British Company Moltex is building a nuclear plant (shock horror) in Canada which will burn the high level waste fuel from an old nuclear plant next door. It's zero CO2 with a very low waste profile. The cost built on site is cheaper than a gas fired plant. When they go to factory modules it will be cheaper than coal - the cheapest (dirty) source there is. Moltex plants are cheap and safe because they have designed out the hazardous components which need expensive engineering to make them safe. They also use a thermal store to iron out the daily load fluctuations but that wont give months of energy storage.
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Like it or not the solution is nuclear. Molten salts are safe and cheap and they can burn used fuel from existing nuke plants. Look at what Kirk Sorensen and Ian Scott are doing. The nuclear regulators need to wake up and allow new tech to progress.
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Nuclear power using irradiated waste fuel is even more sensible. It exctracts the 96% unused energy in the fuel and solves the waste storage issues.
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The Moltex Energy power plant being built in Canada has a 1000MW molten salt nuclear reactor feeding heat into huge thermal stores. The heat drives 3000MW of steam turbines that ramp up and down during the day to fill the gaps left by renewables. There is no new new resource needed to make all this power, because the Moltex reactor will be fueled with the stored spent fuel removed from a nearby legacy nuclear plant. The huge snag with batteries is the mined resources needed to build them. The Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, etc are all finite resources every much as coal and oil are finite resources. High level nuclear waste is a long term storage problem, but only about 4% of the energy has been used. The Moltex will extract the remaining 96% leaving a short life waste. No mining is needed A (very) long term nuclear waste storage problem is solved. Renewable power is backed by a carbon free power source. Cost is low because the plant is intrinsically safe.
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@ne2526 UK has removed almost all of it's coal fired power plants Guess who bought the Didcot turbo-generator plant - Germany of course.
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@spoonikle USA cannot get molten salt reactors until it sorts out its safety regulatory process. Currently its a tick box system designed for PWRs. It wont work for reactors that dont have the hazards found in a PWR. UK is no better with it's regulators wanting everything done from first principles but expecting the new plant designers to guess what will be required.
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@nimistar01 That really is down to the nuclear industry surrounding everything with razor wire and making a huge fuss about all their Oh so great safety systems that cost $mega. Not surprisingly, people get concerned when you need all of that to be safe. The molten salt reactor was ignored in favour of PWR which back then was cheap. Three Mile Island changed all that but molten salt was still ignored. Who knows why, because they are intrinsically safe and therefore cheap to build. They cannot overheat and cannot melt down. The most recent design goes even further because all safety systems are entirely passive. They can lose the cooling at full power and still not overheat. That drastically cuts build and operational costs and removes the need for expensive engineers to monitor the plant 24/7. They all burn the fuel many times more efficiently creating a small fraction of the waste.
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@ne2526 Germany went into virtue signalling mode, closed it's perfectly good nuclear power plants then built coal fired power plants to replace them. Even worse they burn brown coal which is dirty and inefficient. Worse still, cleaning the sulphur-laden exhaust gas releases even more CO2.
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@nimistar01 Nuclear power has killed (or made ill) fewer people than any other power source we have. It is carbon neutral and over time the lowest cost energy we have.
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