Comments by "Neolithic Transit Revolution" (@neolithictransitrevolution427) on "Ziroth" channel.

  1. Efficiency isn't really important when you're using nuclear fuel.
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  2. There is no advantage to Thorium over Uranium. What the Nuclear Bros are to renewables, Thorium bros are to Nuclear.
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  3. We hear a lot about China building coal plants, but what isn't diacussed is the actual plants, which are very large and very efficient critical fluid designs. I think the plant is to hook up SMRs to the boilers in the future, amd turn the expensive capital investment into genertation and transmission equipment into nuclear power stations.
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  4. I agree with the idea Solar will become the primary power source, but nuclear can certainly have a roll; industrial heat with co-generation being the main one. I don't think wind will see any significant declines in price and honestly by 2050 I think wind power will be declining globally.
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  5. ​ @Jimmeh_B I have to point out that it's obvious recycling could only have recently become a possibility, until recently there wasn't an Industry to recycle. The same is true of storage. There was never going to be commercial storage until Solar was over capacity during the day. And there won't be 12-16 hour over night storage until 2-4 hour evening/frequently modulation services are built out for the same reason. There just is no market.
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  6. @FischerNilsA  you could say the same thing about solar ten years ago. And yet it's now the cheapest source of electricity in certain situations and posed for growth into a dominate position globally. just look at how much of the LCOE is from capital investment vs from fuel costs. Highly efficient is not highly important when your fuel is cheap. SMRs offer lower capital costs per MWh, which is the real constraint. Also, LCOE for heat and for electricity are different numbers, and while the LCOE for thermal energy is lower than electricity from nuclear energy, it's higher for solar. I maintain fission, in an appropriate regulatory and policy environment, could be the least expensive source of energy for large industrial parks or oil sands extraction that need process steam, contributing to the power mix in high density and population metropolises, powering cargo shipping, and off grid locations. That doesn't mean it will. We don't have very supportive regulation/policy now. But one of solar's key advantages is its incremental nature, it's very rare a 1GW power plant is needed or can be accommodated by the grid. SMRs fix this issue as well.
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  7.  @CraftyF0X  No I don't agree. Breeder and burner reactors and reprocessing greatly reduce any waste. The issue is a lack of scale to support investment, similar to how we had to have enough solar to hear about curtailment being an issue before any storage or solar panels recycling was commercialized. Nuclear fuel repossessing is banned in the US. That's a policy issue not a matter of economic.
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  8. @withnail That was really more a statement about how quickly technical and mass production development can alter economics. But obviously I disagree, I would say you are just looking at it to narrowly. Solar and/or wind always had to grow into a problem for the grid before storage could be developed. That's how markets work. We're now seeing 2h storage operating competitively at frequency control and evening. We won't see any king of over night storage until all sites have about 2h in storage for the same reason. But solar is just so incredibly inexpensive. And it is far more reliable than most people give it credit for, cloud cover being very seasonal and well predicted, and demand like A/C correlating well with production. Add 2h storage and you have no unexpected shut downs or sudden up ramping. And 2h storage is well commercialized and rapidly expanding, so I would say any issues are well addressed, but we won't see over night storage until Solar is covering the majority of day time demand with short term storage, that's relatively easily met with natural gas or coal.
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  9. @withnail, That would only make sense if the owners were losing money, which they are not, or else there wouldn't be hundreds of billions of investment annually in the US. Intermittent isn't the same as unreliable. Knowing you'll have cheap energy all day is very useful, even if more expensive conventional power is needed in the night or on well predicted cloudy days.
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  10. No, because uranium is not toxic without very high diesel, isn't a liquid that leaks, or a gas that leaks, and the amount of fracking would be like a percent of what we do now.
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  11. But the cost of nuclear scales with MWhs generated?
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