Comments by "jeppen" (@jesan733) on "Switzerland's Energy Transition Plans (Without Nuclear!)" video.

The most detrimental and ingrained science rejection, I would say, is the insistance that nuclear power is too dangerous to work with.
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@FJStraußinger is it somehow strange to believe one knows the truth? Had you been humble yourself, you wouldn't have written that.
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@beatreuteler what are you talking about? My perception is the complete opposite. The accidents so far have been incredibly mild, and the fuel mining and processing causes negligible damage in the grand scheme of things. But the benefits to displacing fossil fuels and e.g. renewable biomass is enormous. Are you sure you have read serious assessments and not just media dramatizations?
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With all due respect, that account was wildly misleading. All German civilian nuclear plants that has ever operated is a combined 26 GW. Of this capacity, this is the breakdown of closure times: 19% closed up until 1994, most of it as a result of reunification 4% closed between 1995 and 2010. (2 small reactors) 32% closed in 2011 due to immediate Fukushima scare. 46% closed in 2015-2023 due to delayed Fukushima scare. So German nuclear capacity held steady with very little change between reunification and Fukushima! We should remember that Russia, as an influence operation, long flooded Germany with artificially cheap natgas as preparation for war, and that Germany has on top of that has used hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies to flood itself with intermittent power. Had it used a fraction of these subsidies for nuclear construction, it would be rid of coal by now and have lower electricity prices. Germany's fleet of 9 huge reactors in the last tranche above was in no way too small to maintain. It's clearly larger than most active countries' fleets, e.g. my own Sweden's or our neighbor Finland's. There is currently 60 reactors under construction in the world, and so far this year, four new grid connections have been made in the US, India, China and UAE respectively. Nuclear still makes great economic sense and are cash cows for countries that have built them.
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@christianvanderstap6257 we can scale up nuclear fast if we believe global warming is urgent, but sadly greens don't care about it and do everything to sow fear and doubt, like you do here. In Sweden in 1974 we had one reactor under construction per million people, and construction time was around 5 years on average. Imagine China doing that - half the world's coal combustion could go offline within 10 years.
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@zen1647 that's the thing, it's not expensive to make it safe! We have made it expensive, but the extreme bureaucracy is not necessary to make it safe. Cheaper renewables and storage can only be deployed sufficiently in really hydro-rich areas.
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@christianvanderstap6257 although Sweden's effort wasn't war-like. We hardly broke a sweat, yet we did it quickly and well. We can't make solar and storage cheaper either. Try doing a napkin calc. How much solar, storage vs nuclear would we need, and what would that cost over time?
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@christianvanderstap6257 it's a pity that you won't do the napkin calc. Perhaps you're not used to checking stuff like that, but it's quite useful. As for me, I know from history, actual reports, first principles reasoning and also napkin calcs that nuclear is very cheap, and cheaper than solar+batteries. It's a bit sad that you call it a lie, and even call its uptime a lie. That's pretty harsh, both antagonistic and dogmatic. Regarding the strike price for Hinkley Point C vs solar, that's: 1. Based on a notoriously hard-to-build monster reactor model. 2. A completely artificial price. 3. Compares 24/7 power source with a natgas fuel extender that only works when the time of day, weather and season is just right.
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@beatreuteler serious academic work is pretty clear that nuclear power including its accidents is one of the techs with the lowest health consequences. Can you please give some indication of what works you've read that indicate otherwise, and who the authors were? Please be aware that there are a number of junk scientists who have been active in this topic. The Kyshtym accident was one of these Soviet things that isn't really relevant to what Western operations are doing, especially not in this day and age. Still, the Kyshtym accident afaik didn't harm that many either. It's nothing like the everyday meat grinder of particle pollution from biomass and fossil combustion, for instance. Regarding the frequency of accidents, well, humans learn and when an accident happen, we plug the identified weaknesses and thus the frequency and severities rapidly drops, usually by orders of magnitude. What "lies" are you talking about, that the industry is "spreading everywhere". Please be specific.
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@christianvanderstap6257 solar, batteries and nuclear all have their input labor during construction and O&M, and they all have their lifetimes. So if we have a lifetime of N years for a tech, we at steady-state need to rebuild 1/N of the fleet every year. Based on that, we can make a napkin calc and see what's cheapest. If you tried it, you'd find nuclear is cheaper for 24/7 power.
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@DaveDave-e4t I have a birds-eye view on this, and my honest assessment is that nuclear is the lowest-footprint source by far. So as someone who really cares about the environment (and not just cares about what other environmentalists think) I demand more nuclear power.
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@DaveDave-e4t just the fact that you can be so dismissive without having the slightest idea about the depth of my knowledge shows how difficult it is for people to handle this subject matter in a rational way. Your vague reference to biological and medical impacts (both of which are negligible for the nuclear cycle) indicates that you've ingested junk science and your wild ideas about costs reinforces the evidence of strong bias. Considering age and those displays of arrogance, I doubt that I can help. Sometimes, science does advance one funeral at a time, so the world will have to wait for better things.
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@christianvanderstap6257 I have some difficulties getting a comment past automoderation, so I'll divide in two or more comments.
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@christianvanderstap6257 if nuclear has never been cheap, how come Sweden had 8 reactors under construction with a population of 8 million in 1974, finishing each within 4-6 years, essentially doing an energiewende in 10 years, which is 1/8 of the reactors' lifetime or something like that? If it was expensive, how could we compress that timeline so much? And there was no complaints in Sweden at the time that the construction projects made big holes in people's pockets. Solar and storage reduces in price 17-20% per annum and apparently this is expected to continue indefinitely? Well, why? Because at some point there's a cost of materials and some cost of transforming the materials to the finished goods, right?. We won't go to zero cost.
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@christianvanderstap6257 see Lazard. With absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs: Rooftop residential, twelve to twentythree cents Community solar, five to nineteen cents tilityscale solar + storage, five to ten cents Nuclear, fourteen to twentytwo cents So it seems nuclear is worse. But wait...
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@christianvanderstap6257 if we stop and think for just a bit, what are the parameters behind this? The solar is in a world class area in southwestern USA. In most of the world, it's quite a bit worse. Only in the last solar example, batteries was included, and only 4h worth. Is that enough? No. At page 8, there are some additional costs of "firming intermittency". Rooftop residential is as costly as nuclear, and that's without residential batteries. What's the nuclear cost based on? First-of-a-kind botched US projects, basically. What's the Nth of a kind nuclear cost if each doubling from 2 reactors will reduce costs by twenty percent? (It's less costly to double nuclear construction than solar.) High discount rates disfavor long-lived assets like nuclear. That's why the napkin calc is useful. It's also the reason there's substantial interest in nuclear across the world still.
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@jimbobarooney2861 nuclear has saved around 2 million lives through improved air quality. It's funny how we ignore the numbers and act on whatever newspapers can easily dramatize.
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It's actually fairly hard to find suitable geography. And I have no idea why we Swedes would go for that when we have a huge nuclear success story to build on.
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@Aendavenau Sweden has built cheaply before. Why not do it again? It's not really correct that fuel is dominated by France and Russia. Russia has a considerable share of world enrichment capacity, yes. But others can build out enrichment capacity arguably faster than they can build reactors, so it's not really a hindrance to nuclear expansion.
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@Aendavenau Sweden installed 1.6 GW solar and 2.0 GW wind in 2023, and we're gearing up to start nuclear new builds. We still have huge solar and home battery subsidies on the books. Also huge grid investments as usual. So I'm not sure why you say we aren't investing. I would actually prefer to completely de-subsidise solar and wind and just incentivize nuclear, but I might not feel the urgency, really, and is more annoyed about wasted resources in subpar intermittent energy sources.
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The plans look nice at first glance, but they seem quite unrealistic to me. Increased electrification coupled with decommissioning nuclear and substituting with solar power will make it harder, not easier, for Switzerland to help Europe with dispatchable hydro. The rational thing to do would be to simply skip most of the Swiss plans in the electricity area and build a bit more nuclear capacity instead.
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Come on, please take the environment seriously. This is not a game.
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@Romerso1 part of the madness is jumping on the "nuclear is the most expensive option" bandwagon. But good luck.
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As a Physics PhD, wouldn't you say more nuclear would be a far better option?
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@SwissPGO the reason a wide array of solutions to intermittency is often presented, like pumped hydro, batteries, V2G, super-long range grids and so on, is the fact that there's no good solution. If there was a good solution, that solution would be presented stand-alone. The array of solutions is effectively a gish gallop. I'm not saying this is a conscious tactic, of course, but rather a reasoning errror that's easy to make when we want something to work. Do think about whether many not-good-enough solutions really combines to something that is good enough. I think it doesn't. I doubt the car2house solution. I'm into my third Leaf EV now but it still has kindof small battery, 40 kWh, and I would like it to be fully charged when I start my day. Also I live in Sweden, so we basically have negligible solar for four months of the year, and wind varies hugely over 14-day timespans. The seemingly high cost of nuclear power plants is a function of dismantled and immature supply chains combined with too-high interest rates applied (strongly devaluing the nuclear reactors' long lifespans). Also it's usually compared to unbuffered intermittent RE costs. Nuclear as single point of failure, well, the solution is to have a larger fleet, typically, so that one plant going offline is a small part of the fleet. Comparing output of a ten-reactor fleet with a similar amount of intermittent RE shows an extreme advantage to nuclear. Regarding reduction in research, I think the solar market and the BEV market are strong enough to sustain lots of research. The problem is rather the opposite, that the allure of RE as a solution has reduced research into nuclear. And finally regarding subsidies to home solar: I think that in places like Sweden, France and Switzerland, this is actually reducing environmental performance of these countries' energy production.
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Doesn't matter, let's just pretend we do, or could get it, to delay any thoughts about new nuclear.
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I don't think we should. Also, 2/3s of emissions are in non-western economies.
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@stevejagger8602 I don't think so. We'll clean up energy production and reduce footprint instead by e.g. employing more nuclear.
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@stevejagger8602 it always comes down to us all. We'll take the costs and reap the benefits.
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@stevejagger8602 building nuclear is exactly taking responsibility. It's a major investment that's taken over 10 years and cleans up energy while providing an abundant source for at least a generation after I've passed. It's the greatest gift to coming generations that I can think of.
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@stevejagger8602 does it matter what the lifetime is if you bury it and seal the repository? I think not. Also, lots of industrial waste is forever. That nuclear waste decays is a bonus.
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@stevejagger8602 isn't 8 million annual air pollution deaths, ocean acidification and climate change enough to set well-meaning dogma aside and start looking at actual footprint?
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@zen1647 those statements seems idealized to the point of being panglossian. It's not the case that if we have a rule, it's there for a good reason; very often it's not. It's not the case that people need to be particularly educated and reassured, if anything they need a better culture. It's not the case that we're governed by public support; we're governed by representatives and bureaucrats who need to take responsibility for good governance. Almost everything they decide go under the radar of the people. I intensely dislike Trump, but just as an example of what's possible with culture and representative democracy, he handwaved e.g. "beautiful clean coal" and then the rest is history (can be read this article: "The Trump Administration Rolled Back More Than 100 Environmental Rules."). I could go on and on about the unreasonableness of current nuclear regulations, let me know if you want some examples. I'll just mention one, the concept of ALARA, As Low As Reasonably Achievable. This creates limits on emissions suitable for everyday operation, but as soon as a minor incident occurs with an insignificant release, costly unnecessary mitigations need to undertaken or the limits need to be loosened (with a predictable public outcry) in response to the incident. It makes no sense.
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Can you present a napkin calc on RE installations to support 2% per month? I looked at current installations and found perhaps 4% additional market share per year.
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@bartroberts1514 those nine nations are hydro nations, right, and they were hydro nations even 5 years ago. If you have examples of grids fully decarbonized mainly by intermittent RE sources, then please list them! The pandemic spurred draconian measures. This is pretty much irrelevant to what we can do in terms of deep decarbonization. For the last 10 years, global electricity consumption has increased by on average 2.5% per annum.
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@SwissPGO agree that we could have an interesting discussion. Not sure it's a disadvantage that France has lower adoption of heat pumps and solar. I mean, Germany has spent extreme amounts of money on solar but in a way doesn't have much to show for it, and the environmental costs in the supply chain is probably substantial. Less isolation in buildings, that may be disadvantageous though, but should be achievable through regulatory means, perhaps. Also if RE advocates are right about costs (or governments simply decide to solve a lot of the intermittency issues by overbuilding) then RE may depress isolation and heat pumps as well. Of course in some situations car2house can make sense, perhaps it'll work better than I think. If some pioneer region or country has or will show the way and prove me wrong, I'm interested to hear about it.
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@manup1931 nuclear can load follow, and it does so in France when needed. Also of course you schedule maintenance and fuel replacement to low-demand seasons.
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@christianvanderstap6257 if nuclear has never been cheap, how come Sweden had 8 reactors under construction with a population of 8 million in 1974, finishing each within 4-6 years, essentially doing an energiewende in 10 years, which is 1/8 of the reactors' lifetime or something like that? If it was expensive, how could we compress that timeline so much? And there was no complaints in Sweden at the time that the construction projects made big holes in people's pockets. Solar and storage reduces in price 17-20% per annum and apparently this is expected to continue indefinitely? Well, why? Because at some point there's a cost of materials and some cost of transforming the materials to the finished goods, right?. We won't go to zero cost. If you take Lazard 16.0, you'll see that with absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs: 117-228 USD Rooftop residential 49-185 USD Community 46-102 USD Utilityscale solar + storage 141-221 USD Nuclear But if you stop and think for just a bit, what is behind this? 1. Only in the last solar example, batteries were included. How much batteries? 4h. In a world-class solar environment. Is that enough? No. And if you look at page 8, you have additional costs of "firming intermittency" on top of those 4h. 2. What's the nuclear cost based on? First-of-a-kind botched US projects, basically. What's the Nth of a kind cost if each doubling from 2 reactors will reduce costs by 20%? 3. What about other parameters? High discount rates disfavor long-lived assets like nuclear. 4. How much Chinese input for solar+PV vs nuclear? But again, napkin calcs are useful. Calculate the steady-state investment and O&M cost. What are you afraid of?
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@christianvanderstap6257 if nuclear has never been cheap, how come Sweden had 8 reactors under construction with a population of 8 million in 1974, finishing each within 4-6 years, essentially doing an energiewende in 10 years, which is 1/8 of the reactors' lifetime or something like that? If it was expensive, how could we compress that timeline so much? And there was no complaints in Sweden at the time that the construction projects made big holes in people's pockets. Solar and storage reduces in price 17-20% per annum and apparently this is expected to continue indefinitely? Well, why? Because at some point there's a cost of materials and some cost of transforming the materials to the finished goods, right?. We won't go to zero cost. If you take Lazard 16.0, you'll see that with absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs: 117-228 USD Rooftop residential 49-185 Community 46-102 Utilityscale solar + storage 141-221 Nuclear But if you stop and think for just a bit, what are the parameters behind this? 1. Where's the solar? In a world class area in southwestern USA. 2. Only in the last solar example, batteries was included, and only 4h worth. Is that enough? No. At page 8, there are some additional costs of "firming intermittency". 3. What's the nuclear cost based on? First-of-a-kind botched US projects, basically. 4. What's the Nth of a kind nuclear cost if each doubling from 2 reactors will reduce costs by 20%? (It's less costly to double nuclear construction than solar.) 5. High discount rates disfavor long-lived assets like nuclear. That's why the napkin calc is useful. It's also the reason there's substantial interest in nuclear across the world still. It's not a conspiracy, I promise.
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@christianvanderstap6257 if nuclear has never been cheap, how come Sweden had 8 reactors under construction with a population of 8 million in 1974, finishing each within 4-6 years, essentially doing an energiewende in 10 years, which is 1/8 of the reactors' lifetime or something like that? If it was expensive, how could we compress that timeline so much? And there was no complaints in Sweden at the time that the construction projects made big holes in people's pockets. Solar and storage reduces in price 17-20% per annum and apparently this is expected to continue indefinitely? Well, why? Because at some point there's a cost of materials and some cost of transforming the materials to the finished goods, right?. We won't go to zero cost. See Lazard, with absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs (in US currency): 117-228 Rooftop residential 49-185 Community 46-102 Utilityscale solar + storage 141-221 Nuclear But if you stop and think for just a bit, what are the parameters behind this? 1. Where's the solar? In a world class area in southwestern USA. 2. Only in the last solar example, batteries was included, and only 4h worth. Is that enough? No. At page 8, there are some additional costs of "firming intermittency". 3. Rooftop residential is as costly as nuclear, and that's without residential batteries. 4. What's the nuclear cost based on? First-of-a-kind botched US projects, basically. 5. What's the Nth of a kind nuclear cost if each doubling from 2 reactors will reduce costs by 20%? (It's less costly to double nuclear construction than solar.) 6. High discount rates disfavor long-lived assets like nuclear. That's why the napkin calc is useful. It's also the reason there's substantial interest in nuclear across the world still. It's not a conspiracy, I promise.
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@christianvanderstap6257 if nuclear has never been cheap, how come Sweden had 8 reactors under construction with a population of 8 million in 1974, finishing each within 4-6 years, essentially doing an energiewende in 10 years, which is 1/8 of the reactors' lifetime or something like that? If it was expensive, how could we compress that timeline so much? And there was no complaints in Sweden at the time that the construction projects made big holes in people's pockets. Solar and storage reduces in price 17-20% per annum and apparently this is expected to continue indefinitely? Well, why? Because at some point there's a cost of materials and some cost of transforming the materials to the finished goods, right?. We won't go to zero cost. See Lazard, with absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs (in US currency): 117-228 Rooftop residential 49-185 Community 46-102 Utilityscale solar + storage 141-221 Nuclear
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@christianvanderstap6257 See Lazard: With absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs (in US currency): Rooftop residential 117-228 per MWh Community 49-185 per MWh Utilityscale solar + storage 46-102 per MWh Nuclear 141-221 per MWh So it seems nuclear is as expensive as rooftop residential solar and more expensive than utilityscale + storage. But if we stop and think for just a bit, what are the parameters behind this? 1. Where's the solar? In a world class area in southwestern USA. 2. Only in the last solar example, batteries was included, and only 4h worth. Is that enough? No. At page 8, there are some additional costs of "firming intermittency". 3. Rooftop residential is as costly as nuclear, and that's without residential batteries. 4. What's the nuclear cost based on? First-of-a-kind botched US projects, basically. 5. What's the Nth of a kind nuclear cost if each doubling from 2 reactors will reduce costs by 20%? (It's less costly to double nuclear construction than solar.) 6. High discount rates disfavor long-lived assets like nuclear. That's why the napkin calc is useful. It's also the reason there's substantial interest in nuclear across the world still. It's not a conspiracy, I promise.
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@christianvanderstap6257 See Lazard: With absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs (in US currency): Rooftop residential 117-228 per MWh Community 49-185 per MWh Utilityscale solar + storage 46-102 per MWh Nuclear 141-221 per MWh So it seems nuclear is as expensive as rooftop residential solar and more expensive than utilityscale + storage.
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@christianvanderstap6257 See Lazard. With absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs (in USD): Rooftop residential 117-228 per MWh Community 49-185 per MWh Utilityscale solar + storage 46-102 per MWh Nuclear 141-221 per MWh So it seems nuclear is as expensive as rooftop residential solar and more expensive than utilityscale + storage.
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@christianvanderstap6257 See Lazard: With absolutely world-class solar resources, we have these costs (per kWh): Rooftop residential, twelve to twentythree cents Community solar, five to nineteen cents tilityscale solar + storage, five to ten cents Nuclear, fourteen to twentytwo cents So it seems nuclear is as expensive as rooftop residential solar and more expensive than utilityscale + storage. But if we stop and think for just a bit, what are the parameters behind this? 1. Where's the solar? In a world class area in southwestern USA. 2. Only in the last solar example, batteries was included, and only 4h worth. Is that enough? No. At page 8, there are some additional costs of "firming intermittency". 3. Rooftop residential is as costly as nuclear, and that's without residential batteries. 4. What's the nuclear cost based on? First-of-a-kind botched US projects, basically. 5. What's the Nth of a kind nuclear cost if each doubling from 2 reactors will reduce costs by 20%? (It's less costly to double nuclear construction than solar.) 6. High discount rates disfavor long-lived assets like nuclear. That's why the napkin calc is useful. It's also the reason there's substantial interest in nuclear across the world still. It's not a conspiracy, I promise.
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@christianvanderstap6257 But if we stop and think for just a bit, what are the parameters behind this? 1. Where's the solar? In a world class area in southwestern USA. 2. Only in the last solar example, batteries was included, and only 4h worth. Is that enough? No. At page 8, there are some additional costs of "firming intermittency". 3. Rooftop residential is as costly as nuclear, and that's without residential batteries. 4. What's the nuclear cost based on? First-of-a-kind botched US projects, basically. 5. What's the Nth of a kind nuclear cost if each doubling from 2 reactors will reduce costs by 20%? (It's less costly to double nuclear construction than solar.) 6. High discount rates disfavor long-lived assets like nuclear. That's why the napkin calc is useful. It's also the reason there's substantial interest in nuclear across the world still. It's not a conspiracy, I promise.
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@bartroberts1514 nine nations with essentially 100% RE? Yes, sure, but that's not new, that's hydro nations. If you have any countries that have done complete energy transitions using intermittent RE, please list them. "No grid has taken more than five years to transition off fossil, yet, from the time they actually put shovels in the ground." Which grids are you talking about? List them. The pandemic spurred draconian measures that won't be repeated any time soon, and the general trend is that humanity wants and needs more energy due to industrialization and population increases. World electricity generation has increased 2.5% per annum the last 10 years.
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I can see where you're coming from, I had to play this at 1.5x speed compared to the normal 2x I use for videos like these.
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