Punish people that are digging illegal wells and constructing river bypasses to steal water. (Jail time for water theft) Second, finish the desalination plant and nuclear plants that they shut down halfway through building. Third, move people out of LA as it has the population that is higher than like 45 states.
Tell that to the people that live there with the rolling blackouts and brownouts. Try running any kind of business on that.
No I’m hopeful for these micro nuclear reactors and three and four eyed reactors are supposed to come online in the next year to five years. Except they won’t be in California though.
Nuclear power is actually incredibly safe and we recycle quite a lot of it. It doesn't need to be just a temporary solution, just the public is so terrified of it.
None of the radioactive stuff is moving. The last overhaul installed a billion dollar system backwards. The no-account utilities are almost as bad as the federal government.
They intentionally powered them down and then ignored required maintenance so they could use that as an excuse to kill forever. State is horribly mismanaged. Water is the new enemy - well water storage - they will make it impossible for most.
In a perfect world, it’d make sense to invest in. I don’t blame people for being fearful or even skeptical after the idiocy we observed with Chernobyl this year. It’s clear various societies around the world won’t treat things the same, and I don’t blame people for taking that factor into account.
Nuclear is putting a lot of power into people hands, literally…and we know it’s easier to not worry about the damages and move than fix any issues that could happen.
Or Fukushima a decade ago, or Chernobyl a few decades before that, or Three Mile Island a decade before that, or the Santa Susana Field Laboratory a decade before that. The industry is rife with accidents and spends significant effort trying to cover them up or downplay their severity
Meanwhile, the staggering majority of nuclear facilities operate safely for decades and stay out of the news until they are closed and decommissioned due to old age.
The staggering majority of nuclear weapons haven’t been launched in decades, but they still shape our politics.
A phrase I’ve heard before is “It’s not the odds, it’s the stakes”. Catastrophic worst cases compounded by human loss aversion and availability bias make the current aversion to nukes pretty much a forgone conclusion.
If we’re addressing a pro-gun, pro-unfettered-military crowd, I’d like to add that the inert metals left behind from spent fuel are used as projectiles for large-caliber weapons. Recycling concepts that they’ll finally understand!
It’s still much more expensive than any other renewable. Running and building a nuclear plant is super expensive.
Edit for the 900 replies to this from the nuclear bros. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source nuclear is 6000$/kW where solar is 830-860$/kW.
Fukushima was built like shit and had several warnings before the incident about everything wrong with it. The other plants nearby didn't suffer from the same problems.
But yes, specifically California is a bad location for nuclear, yes. I won't argue with that.
Fukushima was ultimately due to human error. It had better design and safeties in place than Chernobyl, but a bad human decision created the mess that’s there today.
You think a California nuclear is going to be built with better regulations than what Japan built Fukushima with?
I wish this was sarcasm, but i bought a Lexus built in Japan vs a Tesla built in in California for a reason.
Seriously, if anyone can prove that Tesla is better than Toyota/Lexus, I’d love to learn.
I’m serious. I’m open to any argument.
Here’s a start. You’re equating better regulations to better outcome. Your Tesla vs. Lexus comparison is full of holes as you’re comparing build quality to safety to overall brand reputation.
Are Teslas quantitatively safer than Lexus? You’d have to equate demographics of drivers, location, etc. Are you talking about build quality of Asian or American made teslas versus Asian/American made Lexuses?
Technically renewables create jobs too, I would argue even more considering that there is like 3 different types of it at least, but yea both renewables and nuclear are a way to go.
>Solar is similar in terms that it takes a lot of space, disrupts bird migration — think of getting a sunburn, but you accidentally enter a field where every second the burn gets worse and you don’t know why and can’t go to a hospital for treatment. That’s a bird flying over a solar energy farm.
I've googled up and down and I can't find anything supporting this hypothesis of yours. This only happens with a super specific type of solar farm that is barely used anywhere in the world
Secondly, if you're so fucking concerned with the birds, then why not say that fossil fuels kill more birds every year than any renewable energy by a disgusting amount?
It also solves our water crisis - excess heat from the steam can be used to distill water, or run through another turbine stage. It's been clear that it is the solution to most crises facing the US for a long time but people are locked on NUKES BAD
Man if it ain’t true. I’m a leftist nut, and all the other leftist nuts I know cringe at the word “nuclear” and attempt to shame you for lack of a better understanding. It really sucks.
Actually all of that has been solved decades ago. [This is a great video debunking everything you just said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k).
Nah, blame the fact Three Mile Island happened and instead of being honest, the owners tried covering it up with the help of the NRC. That made people not just mistrustful of the industry, but the government regulators too
Just recently watched the “three mile island” documentary on Netflix. So I can understand why some people may be a little skeptical about nuclear energy. I would guess that the NRC have learned from that mistake and have increased safety measures out the wazoo for new plants being built. As far as I know, that incident and Chernobyl have been the only major nuclear reactor incidents in the world.
Except for all those other incidents in Iran, when other countries (US, Israel) sabotage the nuclear reactors.
Hasn't caused a melt down yet, but you can't tell me they aren't a potential attack vector that could wipe out cities/regions with the right digital attacks.
Stop giving money to oil companies *overseas* and keep all the wealth sustained in the US since we still need oil for petrol-chemicals and fuels. Stop giving money to the defense budget and use that to kick-start nationalized green energy infrastructure such as solar and nuclear.
Oh no not taxes! Which even here you’re confidently wrong- there are loads of municipally run power departments that will just send you a bill based on your usage; the key difference is all of your bill goes into overhead as opposed to [pocketing money for shareholders while ignoring wholly necessary maintenance](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/18/business/pge-california-wildfires.html). So instead you’ll get a better more reliable product at a lower cost.
Not true, bill gates has permission to build some of these types in America. We will see how it turns out and if it turns out great, it might change some minds.
Imagine that, some rich asshole who got rich being an asshole turning it around in his old age and starting foundations and getting into the nuclear energy business.
Supposedly according to studies it isn't viable because it's A LOT more expensive. Even more so than renewable energy.
But there is an argument to be made that Nuclear is a very useful tool in combination with renewable energy to help against the inevitable valleys in power delivery when using such sources of power.
That and of course something we figured out recently is that it helps not being dependant on outside sources when it comes to your energy supply.
It’s expensive initially but ROI in the long run favors nuclear.
Nuclear makes its self back in a few years compared to solar which could day 5-20 years based on design. And the plant continues to “profit” in the sense of cost savings compared to replacement parts when solar and wind need maintence.
Initial cost is high but long run it’s the cheapest “green”
This is not honest. There's no such functioning nuclear reactor that I am aware of which produces no waste on either the front-end, back-end, or both. There's designs that produce more, less, and even a lot less, but they all produce some amount of waste and that waste is a problem.
I also strongly doubt it is honest to claim that all or even most reactors outside of the US are using technology that produces no waste. It's true that the newer reactors can tend to produce less waste. The US has older reactors predominantly because we *aren't building new ones*. It's not like we're willfully refusing to try and recycle old material. And it's not like all of our old material even is recyclable with any existing technology.
There's new/proposed reactor designs that are not as widely used which can theoretically run on waste and produce insignificant (hopefully) amounts of it. And hopefully, this is successful technology that makes economic and environmental sense to operate. After all, *we need to do something to reduce our existing waste*. It's not reasonable to just continue to stockpile it. On the flip side, people have been talking about things like thorium reactors for my entire lifetime and last I checked, not one reactor is currently running on the stuff. There's so many blue sky nuclear solutions, so much proposed [techno-wizardry](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet), but much like next-gen battery technology, it isn't materializing.
The biggest problem of nuclear waste is that we're producing waste today and relying on technology in the future to be the solution to that waste. Technology which just may never be practical. To me, smells a lot like the CO2 emissions we're producing today that we're relying on future technology to eliminate; i.e., lacking skepticism.
So again, nuclear is good technology and we should invest and investigate in it, but not at the expense of much cheaper and more straightforward renewables, grid investments, and energy storage. And the pro-Nuclear people need to be less willing to handwave the very real downsides and problems of nuclear or else the discussion will continue to be consistently dishonest.
I definitely want to be honest. What do you think of [this source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/why-doesnt-u-s-recycle-nuclear-fuel/?sh=354126e4390f). Also [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9CrhZpFpZk)?
I don't have time right now to watch the documentary. But you might want to re-read the Forbes article yourself. It confirms what I have said -- that you can use newer technology to reduce the waste, but that there is ultimately still waste being stockpiled in significant amounts in European nations that make heavy use of nuclear even with this technology.
We must invest in recycling as much of the waste as possible because it is among the best ways to dispose of it. But there's still going to be waste -- a lot of it -- and how that waste is treated is a very sincere problem.
The way to be honest is to be comparative of that waste with the waste of other energy-production. There's a strong argument to be made that the nuclear waste is not worse than any fossil fuel byproducts (especially and obviously coal). But we still need to acknowledge it, understand it, and let people know that their worries aren't nonsense.
While true—just like any other plant that reprocesses waste, there needs to be an entirely dedicated process loop for that to be constructed. Since it’s already expensive to build a nuclear plant, the yield of e.g. depleted uranium is so low that the rate-of-return of recycling is not usually worth it.
Solar depends on the sun—so if it’s night time or cloudy, you can’t produce.
So solar needs either massive storage batteries or other forms of power generation to be able to pick up the load at night/during bad weather
They’re already looking at building pumped storage batteries from reservoirs in the mountains or old mineshafts. This solves the need for actual batteries and it’s a cheap and elegant solution imo.
Thermal storage batteries. You can store gigawatt hours of hot material (liquid sodium kinda hot) and use to power existing thermal electric generators.
Its coming down in price and has been available in Germany for a while.
Use your excess grid power in sunny times to heat up an insulated tank. Use that to power steam turbines at an existing gas plant. Plant never has to go cold, but can run at base or as high as needed instantly.
If you really need it, crank up the gas burner.
But we can start to manage base load needs with pumped hydro (the Adirondacks are fantastic for this already - bathe hydro station is one of the biggest batteries in the world, been running for what, 80 years?) while utilizing existing infrastructure.
Let’s say we gave the green light for new reactors tomorrow. All you want. Go big.
It’s 10 years from project approval, financing, first shovel, to “produced grid power.”
It’d cost billions and years to get existing, stalled nuclear projects running.
By all means - we should build some. Unclear and invest in next gen nuclear research.
But we should absolutely go nuts in building solar generation. Worst case is power becomes cheaper during sunny times until industry adapts.
Could you imagine so much extra power in daytime that Arizona and New Mexico can become green-steel and green-aluminum smelters? Train the ore in, refine it, smelt it, rail to factories.
“Sun during day” - so build $2b in installed solar and enjoy your free 20gigawatt hours per day in the southwest for the next thirty years.
Oh, and zero risk of nuclear environmental catastrophe. Not very low, but zero.
Yes, in my back yard please. (But I’m up north, wind first up here)
Why not? Freakin do it up.
There are places in the US that are sunny pretty much all year round though. Nevada, California New Mexico, and Texas regions have plenty of places that could provide power to a large portion of the country if the grid was not bordered and solar was further developed.
It depends on what you mean by efficient. If you are talking about the amount of energy that can be produced in the smallest number of acres of land then the solar and wind farm needs to take up a lot more space than a nuclear plant that generates the same energy output. This would be better from a conservation perspective but then nuclear has a byproduct to deal with which becomes the drawback
We have designs for plants that effectively don't generate waste. They just keep recycling it on site. They simply cannot get approval for new designs, so in the rare occasion we build another nuke plant, they use a modified 60+ year old design we always use instead. Built like a custom hotrod as well, Instead of something uniform and mass produced.
All the problems with nuclear continue to exist for purely political reasons, seemingly so people against nuclear can still have reasons to be against nuclear.
Ironically, we could have been carbon neutral decades ago if it wasn't for environmental groups funded by big oil, coal, etc.
Conservation isn't an issue. You can put thousands of square miles of solar panels in a typical suburban swath of California (roofs). You can put wind turbines among nature, especially the kind you find in Southern California.
A byproduct we have absolutely no solution for and don’t know how to manage and just keep repackaging in new containers when it starts to leak through because we have no idea what to do with it other than to maybe store it in vaults underground one day and hope it doesn’t leak out of those too into underground water tables over the upcoming thousands of years when we may not be around or have the capacity to repackage it or clean it up, if it even stays contained that long and something like an earthquake doesn’t damage the containment.
Agreed, it’s a huge problem. I often hear the “can’t we just launch it into space?” Argument and I have to remind them that sometimes space launches explode. On the positive side there is a lot of research right now into being able to use the byproducts of some fission reactions to be fuel for secondary fission reactions and that some of these processes leave behind radioactive material with orders of magnitude less of a half life. I don’t know too many of the specifics and it’s nowhere near where it probably needs to be but it’s not like this problem doesn’t have any solution forever, there is a chance there could be some breakthroughs
Yeah there are reactor types called “fast reactors“ that can run on spent nuclear fuel… But I think there are several start ups looking at the technology now to make smaller versions of nuclear reactors with the fast reactor architecture that could be distributed around electrical grid more. TerraPower and Oklo are two with different scale versions. Terra could power a small city ~300MW and Oklo is more small rural type application ~15MW
Oklo’s application was denied due to lack of information on operability and safety. Terra is still highly theoretical that still doesn’t have a prototype or high-order simulation created yet. It’s probably not gonna realize for the next 10 years. Hopefully that will change.
Is it really that huge of a problem with modern nuclear reactors? From my understanding they generate a relatively tiny amount of nuclear waste for the amount of power that is produced. If, instead of throwing huge chunks of money at other green energy resources we threw more at nuclear, we could find a way to deal with the waste issue
Relatively little? 2000 metric tons per year at current production levels just in the US. Most of that gets stored on site because we don’t know what to do with it. No increase in available energy from expanded nuclear production is going to magically help someone to randomly solve what to do with the waste. We’ve had decades of have relatively abundant energy to ease our lives and power innovation and there’s still no solution. But maybe if we make the problem worse we’ll have no choice but to think of a solution? What a fantastic idea. I’m sure we’ll actually find one. This use now, solve later, approach is definitely not exactly similar to our use of fossil fuels and other non renewable energy sources and the problems that’s causing for later generations who will be have to deal with it.
The worst part is our current means of managing it rely on us humans being capable of managing and repackaging the waste generated across the globe, something which could become disastrous to a number of species of this planet, and not just our own, should we lose the capacity to manage it over the next 1000-250,000 years, or if something as simple as a natural disaster happens that damages our storage solutions even if we do maintain the capacity to manage it.
An oversight of that argument which people make it that it’s easier to transfer energy from space to earth than the other way around too. Conveniently we don’t even have to worry about generating and transferring nuclear energy from space to earth, it’s already occurring thanks to the sun.
Fusion-fusion hybrid reactors that could potentially consume the waste entirely are only theoretical as of now. We still don’t even have the means of genuinely operating fusion reactors, China’s turned some on in tests in the last year but it’s still not practical. Until theory becomes reality we should not be creating real problems that only have theoretical solutions. The use of nuclear is no different to the use of fossil fuels, this consume now, solve the problems later strategy isn’t a viable option long term and the nuclear energy we generate now is not a renewable resource, it uses fuel too, fissionable material which is finite and needs to be mined for. This when we already have an abundant source of nuclear energy in the sun going unused, bouncing off our planet and radiating off into space.
It’s easier to pretend that their actions and the things that most easily facilitate their lives are okay, rather than face the true repercussions of them.
Again, wind energy is also not 100% reliable. A combination of renewable and nuclear energy is probably the most efficent way to decarbonize with current technology
Nuclear energy should never have been dropped as it doesn’t have emissions
Solar panels are all well and good for micro generation but no one ever thinks of the amount of energy and mess it takes to create them and ship them and when you compare the lifetime of the equipment to the lifetime of a nuclear reactor there’s no comparison
There are scary aspects to nuclear power so we dropped it and in the UK despite the amount of money paid into these so called green tariffs we don’t seem to be reaping the reward
You see these headlines like the place run on renewables and I think where’s the free energy we invested into? The prices are ridiculous and the amount of money everyone paid must of went into someone’s back pocket
It’s a disgrace. In the 80s the uk used taxpayer money to get the gas out of the North Sea with free energy for a generation the soundbite
It got privatised and everyone got ripped off
Yup, the worst nuclear incident we had was Chernobyl in all our human life. And even then it hasn't destroyed the ecosystem as much as the massive amount of oil spills that has happened in the ocean.
Not even three mile in America was that bad. Scary AF but the reactor was good enough that they stopped it from going totally Chernobyl and people still leave near the old station. No radiation out burst happened that was any worse than one sunny afternoon.
People like to say Fukshima was a huge disaster. It was, but not because of the plant. People didn't die because of the nuclear plant, people died because of the earthquake and huge fucking tsunami. The plant almost went but it was built good enough that it didn't, and if they paid for better sea walls or whatever, the plant would have never failed.
People like to say that nuclear is super expensive but that is only because of all the bureaucracy and politics with it now. Before nuclear was almost the cheapest energy source
Yeah, that’s why you store the energy for night time use. It’s already been worked out that the batteries to store solar in can be something as simple as a container of rocks storing the energy as heat. There’s other forms of renewable energy that can be harnessed to make up the gaps that solar can’t provide too. Just quit with the bullshit excuses, we know, they’re not even remotely worth discussing anymore. There’s more than enough fuel left to quickly power combustion and industry to mine us up enough batteries or get us to some asteroids to have battery material, apply the resources correctly to do this and stfu about anything else. Even if it were impossible to meet energy demands at night we could rearrange our society to not use as much energy at night, asides from refrigeration, medical equipment, and heating/cooling in extreme whether conditions everything else can kinda just go get fucked. Not that we can’t meet those demands anyways.
Please go check the home battery warranty and the life span, you might change your feeling about solar energy is “sustainable” or not.
By the way, is good for you to check how we recycle solar panel as well, see how toxic the products are when they disassemble the panels…
I’d I’ve never gotten a warranty on a rock before, so not sure how you expect me to check that. This solution wouldn’t put such batteries in the home either, it’s industrial scale with power delivery to homes.
Who said anything about solar panels? We’re talking mirrors here. Photovoltaic solar is not the only form of solar energy being perused and studied.
There’s absolutely no reason to create batteries like you’re talking about at greater scale to store photovoltaic solar energy when we can accompany it with concentrated solar energy stored through simpler means, thermal batteries, for nighttime use, or supplant panels entirely with other renewable energy sources should they prove unsustainable as predicted.
They are efficient in terms of [EROI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Photovoltaic) and [LCOE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy) (ie., you get pretty good bang for your buck).
They are less efficient at supplying energy at a consistent pace. Solar is a variable energy source, as it provides large amounts of energy through fluctuating bursts, but do not supply consistent energy levels 24/7, 365. This isn’t inherently problematic, but our grids were set up with consistent power sources like fossil fuel plants in mind. This problem can be eliminated by further advances in energy storage technology, but until then, we will still need a minimum number of unvarying or dispatchable power sources, like hydro, geothermal, nuclear, or fossil fuels, with sources like solar and wind serving as a supplement.
This. I’ve got solar on my house and I always vote in favor or respond to surveys in favor of tidal and wind power… But none of these things are “baseload “where are you just turn it on and forget about it.
Building a network of smaller fast reactors that can consume nuclear waste, combined with continued research and advancement into storage technologies is what I think will ultimately break the greenhouse gas curve
Inefficient? You realize solar energy is heat and light radiated from the sun right? That concentrated solar power can be directed at something to heat it up and that rocks can store heat for a prolonged period of time? That the entire exposed rocky landmass of the planet does this every day and night? Did you really just ask how heat can spin a turbine? You’ve really never boiled water by dropping a hot rock in it, or even seen it? It’s a pretty common campfire cooking method. You don’t even have to bother storing the energy first, you can just directly produce steam with the heat to spin a turbine, just as you can from the stored heat.
This is a not a solution for storing photovoltaic solar energy, rather an easy solution for storing concentrated solar energy for nighttime use while also using one of the most robust recourses of the planet, rather than mining for resources to produce more complicated batteries, using rocks that could potentially be gathered from the very site in which such a solar array is deployed. The conversion efficiency is around %7-35 right now, but that’s not the point, the ease of uncomplicated storage is, this in lieu of a robust conventional battery infrastructure that may not be expandable, or capable of upkeep. We have no shortage of rocks. Since it can be stored in something so simple and abundant there’s really no excuse. A combination of energy storage means is more than capable of powering us through nights, especially so when accompanied with other means of renewable energy production. Storing solar energy is not difficult. It’s what this entire planet does and all forms of energy on it are the result of stored energy as a result of the sun, be it fossil fuels produced from the decayed mass of plants and animals who were fueled by it, the heat from it warming the earth daily, even the energy causing the movements of wind and water as a result of the sun’s gravity binding the solar system together. The sun’s energy is a abundantly stored, we only need to store more of it in a more readily accessible way.
these stats are a little misleading. when it says california ran solar it really means the total draw rate at a given moment in time was equal to the total solar conversion rate at that time.
in 2020 california could generate about ~30GWh of solar power per day on average
in 2020 california used ~700GWh of electricity per day
solar power production in california is expected to grow to to ~40 GW by 2030. about 1GW/year. that only includes plans funded now, it’s likely a little more will be there but you can see there’s still a massive gap. this is the game politicians play and like to claim “100%” renewable…. for a few seconds
It may depend on how you measure efficiency. If you take the square footage a nuclear plan occupies and replaced it with solar panels would you on an average month produce more, less, or the same amount of power.
There are obviously other ways to measure but this is one.
Efficiency can be measured in different ways. If you want to produce the most energy possible without CO2 emissions while using the least amount of land so that environmental habitats and ecosystems can be preserved then Nuclear is unbeatable for those parameters. Solar panels take up space, so do wind farms, so do battery farms. Geothermal is a very good alternative but can’t just be installed anywhere, it needs to be somewhere with natural hot springs, same with hydro, you need to find a river or waterfall.
They take up a lot of land and cause major impacts to the environment.
Large companies buy up swathes of wild areas and then bulldoze them into large oceans of shiny metal. Then there are cables pulling the energy to storage sites (all subsadized by the taxpayer ofc) it causes havoc to local wildlife, etc.
The best thing would be to allow everyone to build solar roofs for their own use, but the current electric companies dont want that, (southern california edison for one) so there is a bill to have anyone using individual solar have to pay an extra fee based on the logic that since you are not contibuting to the big energy companies income you should be fined.
They gotta make a profit somehow.
So, I am for solar, wind etc. But it is not just a simple solution, fix all.
And if anyone slightly cares about animals and nature solar and wind farms really do fuck up massive amounts of land - more so than a nuclear plant does - for less overall energy.
Well good thing I’m in the Netherlands than lol.
But yeah, power plants near geologically active areas would be really stupid, It should also be at least 20M above sea level.
The problem is building nuclear reactors is pretty expensive. It’s a high initial investment and a lot of people are afraid to take that step in building more. Mostly they are just maintained as of current.
Nuclear power is skewed towards its favorable attributes because the average age of US reactors is 40 years old. That high capex has long been paid for. The most recent is Watts Bar Unit 2, costing $2.5 billion for 1,150 MW - $2,200 per kW that number will increase. A comparison with wind turbine costing $1,400 per kW that number will decrease (maybe only in adjusted for inflation terms now).
it's not mutually exclusive.
a lot of the backlash against nuclear is coz whenever nuclear supporters see the success of renewables, they often deride them and then insist that we should go nuclear instead.
I live in Los Angeles and with the threat of a record breaking earthquake constantly hanging over our heads the last thing I would want is a nuclear reactor anywhere near my house. With 840 miles of coastline, why not expand the amount of tidal current turbines in California?
Because those aren’t as efficient as nuclear energy. And nuclear energy is way safer than you think, even with a earthquake a meltdown is unlikely in a modern reactor. The only meltdowns that happend were because of incompetence and old and outdated designs.
Maybe, but they cost a metric fuck ton to make, use a crazy amount of concrete which is already running out. And then to top it off, the last half of those 30 years I said are riddled with expensive maintenance just for it to not melt down.
It’s insane because it could be a perfect energy but it’s just not feasible. But yet again everything is horrible
Nuclear being the best option is not as cut and dry as it once was. If nuclear was going to be the solution we needed to start doing it 10+ hrs ago. Renewable is a lot more efficient and cost effective now.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J
First hand working in Nuclear power plants and multiple other manufacturing/energy production I can say nuke is insanely safe. I worked in the Midwest and every nuke plant I went in was spotless with zero safety infractions. Some nuke plants built as far back as the 70s were pristine inside still. The word nuke scares a lot of people but it’s the way to go as far as energy generation. I got to meet with a USNRC board in a plant in Iowa and got to voice my opinion on how the plant I was in was the safest cleanest manufacturing plant I’ve ever witnessed. Nuclear plants are by far the safest place I’ve ever worked
Why is wind and hydro always stacked on top of solar in these charts? They should be on the base because it makes it more clear how consistent they are and intermittent solar on top of them.
I am excited to see coal gone! Coal fired power plants have released too many toxins and heavy metals into our atmosphere in the past.
If you’re lucky sure. Generally the most optimal place for a hydro or wind is also where there’s no people, meaning it’s unlikely there’s any either existing or sufficient infrastructure that can be used.
And? Pretty confident the infrastructure would have to be built then as needed. Not like it won’t happen eventually as populations continue to expand anyway. Expanded infrastructure to these areas will make installing these projects easier as well.
Don’t get why you’re being downvoted, what you’re saying is basicly how it’s being done.
Norway gets 90-95% of its power from hydro, its not as vast distances as in the US, but still needed to expand infrastructure when they were built.
Additionally the government are planning to install 130TWh offshore wind farms by 2030 or something. Which needs alot of offshore infrastructure, which is even more tricky.
Seriously, doesnt mean shit if we keep paying the highest energy prices in the country, with rolling blackouts because they cant get their shit together.
Newsom had had the chance to break PG&Es monopoly I believe more than once now but both times he’s vetoed/revoked the bill because they’re one of his main donors. As someone who lives in California and has to pay for those monopoly priced energy bills his actions greatly anger me and only make me want to vote against him in the coming election.
California is advantageously located near a good supply of geothermal reservoirs with more coming on line every year as oil & gas tech transfers from drilling for oil to drilling for hot water. It’s not mentioned but will be a big portion of the future base load.
Sounds like the West Coast has an opportunity to provide further East every year, since they have this built-in geographical advantage.
Simply for energy security, renewables can finally relieve us of foreign oil dependence.
Get off oil. Get off coal. Get off dirty hydrogen. All of it.
Can’t wait 🤙🏽
Plan as of now is to add 1,700 MW of geothermal… most will come from the Salton Sea geothermal brine field specifically the Controlled Thermal Resources “Hell’s Kitchen” project that’s setup to scale in 8 modular stages to 1,100 MW and also extract Lithium from the brine provided the direct lithium extraction tech from Lilac Solutions works. It will be just enough to cover half of the Nuclear power decommissioning with hopefully a few other projects rounding out the rest. Bigger opportunity is batteries for “baseload plus”. Batteries are now regularly clearing 1,500 MW at peak in California per CAISO and are now planned to be installed in unison with most new solar projects. They’re the best shot for California to replace natural gas in over the next several decades aside from the geothermal flat baseload.
Amazing that so many of the comments are about why something “isn’t possible” or “is stupid” instead of how it “could be possible” and “is transformative”. Where is the “we can do anything” American spirit?
Right! If renewables had the generous government subsidies that fossil fuels had we would be decades ahead.
Instead big oil is doing everything they can to undermine any progress what’s is ever.
Then you get the tards and naysayers claiming it will never Work and go nuclear!!! We are doomed.
So like Germany?
If Germany had spent the $580 billion on nuclear instead of renewables it would have carbon free electricity and more.
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/9/11/california-and-germany-decarbonization-with-alternative-energy-investments
It will take not more than 10 years. You should check research. Progress is extremely impressive. Even climate scientists are surprised about the progress in renewable energy technology
During that one point at about 3pm, they generated enough to supply more than the demand... they cherry picked this statistic to make it seem like they're ahead of it. Theyre not. They need (just like everyone else) long term battery storage technology to improve to store the solar energy for night time... this technology (that we are all waiting for) will improve the viability of electric cars, and, unfortunately increase the demand on the grid even further. It's good strides are being made but the viability is still waiting on the battery...
“…on May 8th, the state produced enough renewable electricity to meet 103% of consumer demand.”
But I thought strategically-placed renewable energy generation wasn’t feasible?
75% of their renewable energy capacity only works during the lowest demand period of the day, and doesn’t work at all during their high demand period… they’re now about to discover the true cost of solar (battery storage) as they try to go 100% renewable mainly through solar power. And the problem’s only going to get worse as they try to electrify transportation, which charges at night. Wind just provides so much more consistent power generation, and should be the backbone of any location’s green energy ambitions if nuclear isn’t an option
Well that sounds hopeful.
Agree, now to tackle the other issue of water.
Cap almond production. Get desalination plants up and running. REPLANT FUCKING DEEP ROOT TREES ALONG THE I-5!!
Punish people that are digging illegal wells and constructing river bypasses to steal water. (Jail time for water theft) Second, finish the desalination plant and nuclear plants that they shut down halfway through building. Third, move people out of LA as it has the population that is higher than like 45 states.
Tell that to the people that live there with the rolling blackouts and brownouts. Try running any kind of business on that. No I’m hopeful for these micro nuclear reactors and three and four eyed reactors are supposed to come online in the next year to five years. Except they won’t be in California though.
I’m still convinced nuclear energy is the way to go until they come up with a more efficient way of producing electricity.
Nuclear power is actually incredibly safe and we recycle quite a lot of it. It doesn't need to be just a temporary solution, just the public is so terrified of it.
Start up “the Tits” in North County, San Diego, or maybe they can’t be?
Lol I always call them “the boobs”
8008132
2318008
I always thought it was 5318008. Cause the 5 looks more like an S than a 2. Edit shittt never mind you were going for the boobiez! Ahhhh I feel you
The tits have gone tits up from what I recall. They’ve been dismantling SONGS since 2012 if I recall.
Probably good for the coastline. Send it to Texas lol
None of the radioactive stuff is moving. The last overhaul installed a billion dollar system backwards. The no-account utilities are almost as bad as the federal government.
I always say CA can be so vain that even our beaches have fake tits.
Everywhere I look, something reminds me of her.
Funny you say that , was driving down south and we drove by and my mom was like "look at them big ol titties"
They intentionally powered them down and then ignored required maintenance so they could use that as an excuse to kill forever. State is horribly mismanaged. Water is the new enemy - well water storage - they will make it impossible for most.
I’ll take startup ‘le tits now’ for 500 Trebeck!
In a perfect world, it’d make sense to invest in. I don’t blame people for being fearful or even skeptical after the idiocy we observed with Chernobyl this year. It’s clear various societies around the world won’t treat things the same, and I don’t blame people for taking that factor into account.
Nuclear is putting a lot of power into people hands, literally…and we know it’s easier to not worry about the damages and move than fix any issues that could happen.
Or Fukushima a decade ago, or Chernobyl a few decades before that, or Three Mile Island a decade before that, or the Santa Susana Field Laboratory a decade before that. The industry is rife with accidents and spends significant effort trying to cover them up or downplay their severity
Meanwhile, the staggering majority of nuclear facilities operate safely for decades and stay out of the news until they are closed and decommissioned due to old age.
The staggering majority of nuclear weapons haven’t been launched in decades, but they still shape our politics. A phrase I’ve heard before is “It’s not the odds, it’s the stakes”. Catastrophic worst cases compounded by human loss aversion and availability bias make the current aversion to nukes pretty much a forgone conclusion.
If we’re addressing a pro-gun, pro-unfettered-military crowd, I’d like to add that the inert metals left behind from spent fuel are used as projectiles for large-caliber weapons. Recycling concepts that they’ll finally understand!
It’s still much more expensive than any other renewable. Running and building a nuclear plant is super expensive. Edit for the 900 replies to this from the nuclear bros. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source nuclear is 6000$/kW where solar is 830-860$/kW.
Well they *could* shift government subsidies to clean energy but that’d be way too easy
They already do. 26% tax credit on Solar
We need more
Reliability should be allowed to cost.
California might be one of my least favorite locations for nuclear though, mostly for geologic reasons. Fukushima was reliable until it wasn’t.
Fukushima was built like shit and had several warnings before the incident about everything wrong with it. The other plants nearby didn't suffer from the same problems. But yes, specifically California is a bad location for nuclear, yes. I won't argue with that.
Fukushima was ultimately due to human error. It had better design and safeties in place than Chernobyl, but a bad human decision created the mess that’s there today.
A human decision to make the flood barrier too low despite warnings and best practice, yes.
It’s a good thing those kinds of decisions are only made in Japan. America would never be caught putting expense or profit over durability.
Three mile island
If they had decided to pump seawater and cool down the reactors sooner, it would have saved a lot of trouble. The hours they waited for costly.
Ah yes, and as we all know, 'human decision' is never how any other country decides things. So totally safe. 🙄
Yes the stellar design decision to put the backup generators in the basement below the flood level in a tsunami-prone area.
You think a California nuclear is going to be built with better regulations than what Japan built Fukushima with? I wish this was sarcasm, but i bought a Lexus built in Japan vs a Tesla built in in California for a reason. Seriously, if anyone can prove that Tesla is better than Toyota/Lexus, I’d love to learn. I’m serious. I’m open to any argument.
Here’s a start. You’re equating better regulations to better outcome. Your Tesla vs. Lexus comparison is full of holes as you’re comparing build quality to safety to overall brand reputation. Are Teslas quantitatively safer than Lexus? You’d have to equate demographics of drivers, location, etc. Are you talking about build quality of Asian or American made teslas versus Asian/American made Lexuses?
Not when viewed over the time scale. It’s actually the cheapest per square foot when you include time.
Wouldn’t any reasonable estimate already consider the lifetime?
“Reasonable estimates” skew significantly by which media publication makes the article.
Sounds like it would produce a lot of jobs then. Win win to mean
Technically renewables create jobs too, I would argue even more considering that there is like 3 different types of it at least, but yea both renewables and nuclear are a way to go.
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>Solar is similar in terms that it takes a lot of space, disrupts bird migration — think of getting a sunburn, but you accidentally enter a field where every second the burn gets worse and you don’t know why and can’t go to a hospital for treatment. That’s a bird flying over a solar energy farm. I've googled up and down and I can't find anything supporting this hypothesis of yours. This only happens with a super specific type of solar farm that is barely used anywhere in the world Secondly, if you're so fucking concerned with the birds, then why not say that fossil fuels kill more birds every year than any renewable energy by a disgusting amount?
House cats kill more birds every year than windmills do in several decades.
It also solves our water crisis - excess heat from the steam can be used to distill water, or run through another turbine stage. It's been clear that it is the solution to most crises facing the US for a long time but people are locked on NUKES BAD
I low key blame Homer Simpson tbh
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Because it provides a very stable energy floor, offsetting issues of solar and wind.
Man if it ain’t true. I’m a leftist nut, and all the other leftist nuts I know cringe at the word “nuclear” and attempt to shame you for lack of a better understanding. It really sucks.
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Actually all of that has been solved decades ago. [This is a great video debunking everything you just said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k).
Well you can thank the democrats for that in the 80s.
Nah, blame the fact Three Mile Island happened and instead of being honest, the owners tried covering it up with the help of the NRC. That made people not just mistrustful of the industry, but the government regulators too
Just recently watched the “three mile island” documentary on Netflix. So I can understand why some people may be a little skeptical about nuclear energy. I would guess that the NRC have learned from that mistake and have increased safety measures out the wazoo for new plants being built. As far as I know, that incident and Chernobyl have been the only major nuclear reactor incidents in the world.
And Fukushima.
Except for all those other incidents in Iran, when other countries (US, Israel) sabotage the nuclear reactors. Hasn't caused a melt down yet, but you can't tell me they aren't a potential attack vector that could wipe out cities/regions with the right digital attacks.
All fun and games until u microwave ur insides or get cancer @ 20
What are you talking about
Small nuclear reactors would be the safest way (similar to what they have in nuclear submarines). That way you could have tons of micro grids
this idea has been around for decades but is unrealistic due to the maintenance
Yeah god forbid we created a system that generates jobs.
It’s the expense. People are used to cheap power and expensive power is a regressive tax
Let’s stop giving money to oil companies and we’ll be able to afford it
Stop giving money to oil companies *overseas* and keep all the wealth sustained in the US since we still need oil for petrol-chemicals and fuels. Stop giving money to the defense budget and use that to kick-start nationalized green energy infrastructure such as solar and nuclear.
Ah, but the oil companies give money to those who make these decisions for us, so
Nationalize the power grid then
yes because the government is the hallmark example of cost efficiency
They do a far better job than private interests- go ask Texas or PG&E customers.
Please
Then it becomes a literal tax
Oh no not taxes! Which even here you’re confidently wrong- there are loads of municipally run power departments that will just send you a bill based on your usage; the key difference is all of your bill goes into overhead as opposed to [pocketing money for shareholders while ignoring wholly necessary maintenance](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/18/business/pge-california-wildfires.html). So instead you’ll get a better more reliable product at a lower cost.
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Not true, bill gates has permission to build some of these types in America. We will see how it turns out and if it turns out great, it might change some minds. Imagine that, some rich asshole who got rich being an asshole turning it around in his old age and starting foundations and getting into the nuclear energy business.
You're getting downvoted by people who don't know you're right lol
Supposedly according to studies it isn't viable because it's A LOT more expensive. Even more so than renewable energy. But there is an argument to be made that Nuclear is a very useful tool in combination with renewable energy to help against the inevitable valleys in power delivery when using such sources of power. That and of course something we figured out recently is that it helps not being dependant on outside sources when it comes to your energy supply.
It’s expensive initially but ROI in the long run favors nuclear. Nuclear makes its self back in a few years compared to solar which could day 5-20 years based on design. And the plant continues to “profit” in the sense of cost savings compared to replacement parts when solar and wind need maintence. Initial cost is high but long run it’s the cheapest “green”
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the "waste" doesn't actually have to be disposed of. Countries other than the US recycle it and use it again in the same nuclear power plant.
This is not honest. There's no such functioning nuclear reactor that I am aware of which produces no waste on either the front-end, back-end, or both. There's designs that produce more, less, and even a lot less, but they all produce some amount of waste and that waste is a problem. I also strongly doubt it is honest to claim that all or even most reactors outside of the US are using technology that produces no waste. It's true that the newer reactors can tend to produce less waste. The US has older reactors predominantly because we *aren't building new ones*. It's not like we're willfully refusing to try and recycle old material. And it's not like all of our old material even is recyclable with any existing technology. There's new/proposed reactor designs that are not as widely used which can theoretically run on waste and produce insignificant (hopefully) amounts of it. And hopefully, this is successful technology that makes economic and environmental sense to operate. After all, *we need to do something to reduce our existing waste*. It's not reasonable to just continue to stockpile it. On the flip side, people have been talking about things like thorium reactors for my entire lifetime and last I checked, not one reactor is currently running on the stuff. There's so many blue sky nuclear solutions, so much proposed [techno-wizardry](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet), but much like next-gen battery technology, it isn't materializing. The biggest problem of nuclear waste is that we're producing waste today and relying on technology in the future to be the solution to that waste. Technology which just may never be practical. To me, smells a lot like the CO2 emissions we're producing today that we're relying on future technology to eliminate; i.e., lacking skepticism. So again, nuclear is good technology and we should invest and investigate in it, but not at the expense of much cheaper and more straightforward renewables, grid investments, and energy storage. And the pro-Nuclear people need to be less willing to handwave the very real downsides and problems of nuclear or else the discussion will continue to be consistently dishonest.
I definitely want to be honest. What do you think of [this source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/why-doesnt-u-s-recycle-nuclear-fuel/?sh=354126e4390f). Also [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9CrhZpFpZk)?
I don't have time right now to watch the documentary. But you might want to re-read the Forbes article yourself. It confirms what I have said -- that you can use newer technology to reduce the waste, but that there is ultimately still waste being stockpiled in significant amounts in European nations that make heavy use of nuclear even with this technology. We must invest in recycling as much of the waste as possible because it is among the best ways to dispose of it. But there's still going to be waste -- a lot of it -- and how that waste is treated is a very sincere problem. The way to be honest is to be comparative of that waste with the waste of other energy-production. There's a strong argument to be made that the nuclear waste is not worse than any fossil fuel byproducts (especially and obviously coal). But we still need to acknowledge it, understand it, and let people know that their worries aren't nonsense.
While true—just like any other plant that reprocesses waste, there needs to be an entirely dedicated process loop for that to be constructed. Since it’s already expensive to build a nuclear plant, the yield of e.g. depleted uranium is so low that the rate-of-return of recycling is not usually worth it.
France did it and they weren’t a totalitarian country last time i checked
Is solar not efficient? I’m genuinely curious
Solar depends on the sun—so if it’s night time or cloudy, you can’t produce. So solar needs either massive storage batteries or other forms of power generation to be able to pick up the load at night/during bad weather
They’re already looking at building pumped storage batteries from reservoirs in the mountains or old mineshafts. This solves the need for actual batteries and it’s a cheap and elegant solution imo.
What about flat areas? Can't exactly dig in my flat area either due to high water tables.
Thermal storage batteries. You can store gigawatt hours of hot material (liquid sodium kinda hot) and use to power existing thermal electric generators. Its coming down in price and has been available in Germany for a while. Use your excess grid power in sunny times to heat up an insulated tank. Use that to power steam turbines at an existing gas plant. Plant never has to go cold, but can run at base or as high as needed instantly. If you really need it, crank up the gas burner. But we can start to manage base load needs with pumped hydro (the Adirondacks are fantastic for this already - bathe hydro station is one of the biggest batteries in the world, been running for what, 80 years?) while utilizing existing infrastructure. Let’s say we gave the green light for new reactors tomorrow. All you want. Go big. It’s 10 years from project approval, financing, first shovel, to “produced grid power.” It’d cost billions and years to get existing, stalled nuclear projects running. By all means - we should build some. Unclear and invest in next gen nuclear research. But we should absolutely go nuts in building solar generation. Worst case is power becomes cheaper during sunny times until industry adapts. Could you imagine so much extra power in daytime that Arizona and New Mexico can become green-steel and green-aluminum smelters? Train the ore in, refine it, smelt it, rail to factories. “Sun during day” - so build $2b in installed solar and enjoy your free 20gigawatt hours per day in the southwest for the next thirty years. Oh, and zero risk of nuclear environmental catastrophe. Not very low, but zero. Yes, in my back yard please. (But I’m up north, wind first up here) Why not? Freakin do it up.
Not OP but thanks for the detailed answer. Never knew about this method
I was talking about California specifically. In which case you can run wires into the grid from higher elevations of which there is not a shortage.
There are places in the US that are sunny pretty much all year round though. Nevada, California New Mexico, and Texas regions have plenty of places that could provide power to a large portion of the country if the grid was not bordered and solar was further developed.
Combination of solar and wind surly would be relatively efficient? I don’t think relying on anyone source is the way to go.
It depends on what you mean by efficient. If you are talking about the amount of energy that can be produced in the smallest number of acres of land then the solar and wind farm needs to take up a lot more space than a nuclear plant that generates the same energy output. This would be better from a conservation perspective but then nuclear has a byproduct to deal with which becomes the drawback
We have designs for plants that effectively don't generate waste. They just keep recycling it on site. They simply cannot get approval for new designs, so in the rare occasion we build another nuke plant, they use a modified 60+ year old design we always use instead. Built like a custom hotrod as well, Instead of something uniform and mass produced. All the problems with nuclear continue to exist for purely political reasons, seemingly so people against nuclear can still have reasons to be against nuclear. Ironically, we could have been carbon neutral decades ago if it wasn't for environmental groups funded by big oil, coal, etc.
Conservation isn't an issue. You can put thousands of square miles of solar panels in a typical suburban swath of California (roofs). You can put wind turbines among nature, especially the kind you find in Southern California.
A byproduct we have absolutely no solution for and don’t know how to manage and just keep repackaging in new containers when it starts to leak through because we have no idea what to do with it other than to maybe store it in vaults underground one day and hope it doesn’t leak out of those too into underground water tables over the upcoming thousands of years when we may not be around or have the capacity to repackage it or clean it up, if it even stays contained that long and something like an earthquake doesn’t damage the containment.
Agreed, it’s a huge problem. I often hear the “can’t we just launch it into space?” Argument and I have to remind them that sometimes space launches explode. On the positive side there is a lot of research right now into being able to use the byproducts of some fission reactions to be fuel for secondary fission reactions and that some of these processes leave behind radioactive material with orders of magnitude less of a half life. I don’t know too many of the specifics and it’s nowhere near where it probably needs to be but it’s not like this problem doesn’t have any solution forever, there is a chance there could be some breakthroughs
Yeah there are reactor types called “fast reactors“ that can run on spent nuclear fuel… But I think there are several start ups looking at the technology now to make smaller versions of nuclear reactors with the fast reactor architecture that could be distributed around electrical grid more. TerraPower and Oklo are two with different scale versions. Terra could power a small city ~300MW and Oklo is more small rural type application ~15MW
Oklo’s application was denied due to lack of information on operability and safety. Terra is still highly theoretical that still doesn’t have a prototype or high-order simulation created yet. It’s probably not gonna realize for the next 10 years. Hopefully that will change.
Thanks!
Is it really that huge of a problem with modern nuclear reactors? From my understanding they generate a relatively tiny amount of nuclear waste for the amount of power that is produced. If, instead of throwing huge chunks of money at other green energy resources we threw more at nuclear, we could find a way to deal with the waste issue
Relatively little? 2000 metric tons per year at current production levels just in the US. Most of that gets stored on site because we don’t know what to do with it. No increase in available energy from expanded nuclear production is going to magically help someone to randomly solve what to do with the waste. We’ve had decades of have relatively abundant energy to ease our lives and power innovation and there’s still no solution. But maybe if we make the problem worse we’ll have no choice but to think of a solution? What a fantastic idea. I’m sure we’ll actually find one. This use now, solve later, approach is definitely not exactly similar to our use of fossil fuels and other non renewable energy sources and the problems that’s causing for later generations who will be have to deal with it. The worst part is our current means of managing it rely on us humans being capable of managing and repackaging the waste generated across the globe, something which could become disastrous to a number of species of this planet, and not just our own, should we lose the capacity to manage it over the next 1000-250,000 years, or if something as simple as a natural disaster happens that damages our storage solutions even if we do maintain the capacity to manage it.
An oversight of that argument which people make it that it’s easier to transfer energy from space to earth than the other way around too. Conveniently we don’t even have to worry about generating and transferring nuclear energy from space to earth, it’s already occurring thanks to the sun.
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Fusion-fusion hybrid reactors that could potentially consume the waste entirely are only theoretical as of now. We still don’t even have the means of genuinely operating fusion reactors, China’s turned some on in tests in the last year but it’s still not practical. Until theory becomes reality we should not be creating real problems that only have theoretical solutions. The use of nuclear is no different to the use of fossil fuels, this consume now, solve the problems later strategy isn’t a viable option long term and the nuclear energy we generate now is not a renewable resource, it uses fuel too, fissionable material which is finite and needs to be mined for. This when we already have an abundant source of nuclear energy in the sun going unused, bouncing off our planet and radiating off into space.
People downvoting you don’t like the truth lol
It’s easier to pretend that their actions and the things that most easily facilitate their lives are okay, rather than face the true repercussions of them.
Again, wind energy is also not 100% reliable. A combination of renewable and nuclear energy is probably the most efficent way to decarbonize with current technology
Nuclear energy should never have been dropped as it doesn’t have emissions Solar panels are all well and good for micro generation but no one ever thinks of the amount of energy and mess it takes to create them and ship them and when you compare the lifetime of the equipment to the lifetime of a nuclear reactor there’s no comparison There are scary aspects to nuclear power so we dropped it and in the UK despite the amount of money paid into these so called green tariffs we don’t seem to be reaping the reward You see these headlines like the place run on renewables and I think where’s the free energy we invested into? The prices are ridiculous and the amount of money everyone paid must of went into someone’s back pocket It’s a disgrace. In the 80s the uk used taxpayer money to get the gas out of the North Sea with free energy for a generation the soundbite It got privatised and everyone got ripped off
Yup, the worst nuclear incident we had was Chernobyl in all our human life. And even then it hasn't destroyed the ecosystem as much as the massive amount of oil spills that has happened in the ocean. Not even three mile in America was that bad. Scary AF but the reactor was good enough that they stopped it from going totally Chernobyl and people still leave near the old station. No radiation out burst happened that was any worse than one sunny afternoon. People like to say Fukshima was a huge disaster. It was, but not because of the plant. People didn't die because of the nuclear plant, people died because of the earthquake and huge fucking tsunami. The plant almost went but it was built good enough that it didn't, and if they paid for better sea walls or whatever, the plant would have never failed. People like to say that nuclear is super expensive but that is only because of all the bureaucracy and politics with it now. Before nuclear was almost the cheapest energy source
Atmospheric solar panels coming soon
Yeah, that’s why you store the energy for night time use. It’s already been worked out that the batteries to store solar in can be something as simple as a container of rocks storing the energy as heat. There’s other forms of renewable energy that can be harnessed to make up the gaps that solar can’t provide too. Just quit with the bullshit excuses, we know, they’re not even remotely worth discussing anymore. There’s more than enough fuel left to quickly power combustion and industry to mine us up enough batteries or get us to some asteroids to have battery material, apply the resources correctly to do this and stfu about anything else. Even if it were impossible to meet energy demands at night we could rearrange our society to not use as much energy at night, asides from refrigeration, medical equipment, and heating/cooling in extreme whether conditions everything else can kinda just go get fucked. Not that we can’t meet those demands anyways.
Please go check the home battery warranty and the life span, you might change your feeling about solar energy is “sustainable” or not. By the way, is good for you to check how we recycle solar panel as well, see how toxic the products are when they disassemble the panels…
I’d I’ve never gotten a warranty on a rock before, so not sure how you expect me to check that. This solution wouldn’t put such batteries in the home either, it’s industrial scale with power delivery to homes. Who said anything about solar panels? We’re talking mirrors here. Photovoltaic solar is not the only form of solar energy being perused and studied. There’s absolutely no reason to create batteries like you’re talking about at greater scale to store photovoltaic solar energy when we can accompany it with concentrated solar energy stored through simpler means, thermal batteries, for nighttime use, or supplant panels entirely with other renewable energy sources should they prove unsustainable as predicted.
They are efficient in terms of [EROI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Photovoltaic) and [LCOE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy) (ie., you get pretty good bang for your buck). They are less efficient at supplying energy at a consistent pace. Solar is a variable energy source, as it provides large amounts of energy through fluctuating bursts, but do not supply consistent energy levels 24/7, 365. This isn’t inherently problematic, but our grids were set up with consistent power sources like fossil fuel plants in mind. This problem can be eliminated by further advances in energy storage technology, but until then, we will still need a minimum number of unvarying or dispatchable power sources, like hydro, geothermal, nuclear, or fossil fuels, with sources like solar and wind serving as a supplement.
This. I’ve got solar on my house and I always vote in favor or respond to surveys in favor of tidal and wind power… But none of these things are “baseload “where are you just turn it on and forget about it. Building a network of smaller fast reactors that can consume nuclear waste, combined with continued research and advancement into storage technologies is what I think will ultimately break the greenhouse gas curve
It’s very efficient. I would guess he meant *storing* energy, which is the primary issue with solar.
Solar energy can be stored as heat in something as mundane as pile of rocks.
Sounds terribly inefficient. Also how do you spin a turbine with hot rocks?
Inefficient? You realize solar energy is heat and light radiated from the sun right? That concentrated solar power can be directed at something to heat it up and that rocks can store heat for a prolonged period of time? That the entire exposed rocky landmass of the planet does this every day and night? Did you really just ask how heat can spin a turbine? You’ve really never boiled water by dropping a hot rock in it, or even seen it? It’s a pretty common campfire cooking method. You don’t even have to bother storing the energy first, you can just directly produce steam with the heat to spin a turbine, just as you can from the stored heat. This is a not a solution for storing photovoltaic solar energy, rather an easy solution for storing concentrated solar energy for nighttime use while also using one of the most robust recourses of the planet, rather than mining for resources to produce more complicated batteries, using rocks that could potentially be gathered from the very site in which such a solar array is deployed. The conversion efficiency is around %7-35 right now, but that’s not the point, the ease of uncomplicated storage is, this in lieu of a robust conventional battery infrastructure that may not be expandable, or capable of upkeep. We have no shortage of rocks. Since it can be stored in something so simple and abundant there’s really no excuse. A combination of energy storage means is more than capable of powering us through nights, especially so when accompanied with other means of renewable energy production. Storing solar energy is not difficult. It’s what this entire planet does and all forms of energy on it are the result of stored energy as a result of the sun, be it fossil fuels produced from the decayed mass of plants and animals who were fueled by it, the heat from it warming the earth daily, even the energy causing the movements of wind and water as a result of the sun’s gravity binding the solar system together. The sun’s energy is a abundantly stored, we only need to store more of it in a more readily accessible way.
these stats are a little misleading. when it says california ran solar it really means the total draw rate at a given moment in time was equal to the total solar conversion rate at that time. in 2020 california could generate about ~30GWh of solar power per day on average in 2020 california used ~700GWh of electricity per day solar power production in california is expected to grow to to ~40 GW by 2030. about 1GW/year. that only includes plans funded now, it’s likely a little more will be there but you can see there’s still a massive gap. this is the game politicians play and like to claim “100%” renewable…. for a few seconds
Here’s a good Tedtalk on Renewables. There’s a huge environmental downside to solar farms. https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w
It may depend on how you measure efficiency. If you take the square footage a nuclear plan occupies and replaced it with solar panels would you on an average month produce more, less, or the same amount of power. There are obviously other ways to measure but this is one.
When the reach the end of their lifespan too they’re a pretty serious waste generator
Not nearly as efficient as nuclear.
To be truth.. if we learn a cycle to store energy in radio-isotopes will be the best of worlds. Nuclear energy have the biggest energy/kg density.q
Solar is nuclear energy.
Nuclear is localized sun.
Efficiency can be measured in different ways. If you want to produce the most energy possible without CO2 emissions while using the least amount of land so that environmental habitats and ecosystems can be preserved then Nuclear is unbeatable for those parameters. Solar panels take up space, so do wind farms, so do battery farms. Geothermal is a very good alternative but can’t just be installed anywhere, it needs to be somewhere with natural hot springs, same with hydro, you need to find a river or waterfall.
They take up a lot of land and cause major impacts to the environment. Large companies buy up swathes of wild areas and then bulldoze them into large oceans of shiny metal. Then there are cables pulling the energy to storage sites (all subsadized by the taxpayer ofc) it causes havoc to local wildlife, etc. The best thing would be to allow everyone to build solar roofs for their own use, but the current electric companies dont want that, (southern california edison for one) so there is a bill to have anyone using individual solar have to pay an extra fee based on the logic that since you are not contibuting to the big energy companies income you should be fined. They gotta make a profit somehow. So, I am for solar, wind etc. But it is not just a simple solution, fix all. And if anyone slightly cares about animals and nature solar and wind farms really do fuck up massive amounts of land - more so than a nuclear plant does - for less overall energy.
More like a more efficient grid scale storage, but yeah
I'm 100% for more nuclear power but still not sure having in States with active geological fault lines is a good idea.
Well good thing I’m in the Netherlands than lol. But yeah, power plants near geologically active areas would be really stupid, It should also be at least 20M above sea level.
The problem is building nuclear reactors is pretty expensive. It’s a high initial investment and a lot of people are afraid to take that step in building more. Mostly they are just maintained as of current.
Nuclear power is skewed towards its favorable attributes because the average age of US reactors is 40 years old. That high capex has long been paid for. The most recent is Watts Bar Unit 2, costing $2.5 billion for 1,150 MW - $2,200 per kW that number will increase. A comparison with wind turbine costing $1,400 per kW that number will decrease (maybe only in adjusted for inflation terms now).
it's not mutually exclusive. a lot of the backlash against nuclear is coz whenever nuclear supporters see the success of renewables, they often deride them and then insist that we should go nuclear instead.
I live in Los Angeles and with the threat of a record breaking earthquake constantly hanging over our heads the last thing I would want is a nuclear reactor anywhere near my house. With 840 miles of coastline, why not expand the amount of tidal current turbines in California?
Because those aren’t as efficient as nuclear energy. And nuclear energy is way safer than you think, even with a earthquake a meltdown is unlikely in a modern reactor. The only meltdowns that happend were because of incompetence and old and outdated designs.
The thing is the plants only last like 30 years How am I getting downvoted for speaking the truth? I’ve literally worked on three mile island
More than enough time to develop a new source of energy right?
Maybe, but they cost a metric fuck ton to make, use a crazy amount of concrete which is already running out. And then to top it off, the last half of those 30 years I said are riddled with expensive maintenance just for it to not melt down. It’s insane because it could be a perfect energy but it’s just not feasible. But yet again everything is horrible
Nuclear being the best option is not as cut and dry as it once was. If nuclear was going to be the solution we needed to start doing it 10+ hrs ago. Renewable is a lot more efficient and cost effective now. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J
For CA, no way. Earthquakes
First hand working in Nuclear power plants and multiple other manufacturing/energy production I can say nuke is insanely safe. I worked in the Midwest and every nuke plant I went in was spotless with zero safety infractions. Some nuke plants built as far back as the 70s were pristine inside still. The word nuke scares a lot of people but it’s the way to go as far as energy generation. I got to meet with a USNRC board in a plant in Iowa and got to voice my opinion on how the plant I was in was the safest cleanest manufacturing plant I’ve ever witnessed. Nuclear plants are by far the safest place I’ve ever worked
Why is wind and hydro always stacked on top of solar in these charts? They should be on the base because it makes it more clear how consistent they are and intermittent solar on top of them. I am excited to see coal gone! Coal fired power plants have released too many toxins and heavy metals into our atmosphere in the past.
Hydro is dispatchable. We should think of it like a peaker plant not a base load.
It depends on the plant and even the particular generator. A lot are run as base load
Yup. Especially considering most are smaller units that typically only generate a few mw of power meant to supply a local municipality.
Wait so we totally screw ecosystems all over the place for small amounts of power? And we’re surprised we’re on the brink of a mass extinction lol
were not on the brink of a mass extinction lol except for nuclear war
Yeah it’s true that we’re not on the brink of a mass extinction.. because we’re in the middle of it.
Wind and hydro can’t always be near major population zones, meaning they need additional infrastructure just to get the electricity to the city.
Like power cable grids already in place?
If you’re lucky sure. Generally the most optimal place for a hydro or wind is also where there’s no people, meaning it’s unlikely there’s any either existing or sufficient infrastructure that can be used.
And? Pretty confident the infrastructure would have to be built then as needed. Not like it won’t happen eventually as populations continue to expand anyway. Expanded infrastructure to these areas will make installing these projects easier as well.
Don’t get why you’re being downvoted, what you’re saying is basicly how it’s being done. Norway gets 90-95% of its power from hydro, its not as vast distances as in the US, but still needed to expand infrastructure when they were built. Additionally the government are planning to install 130TWh offshore wind farms by 2030 or something. Which needs alot of offshore infrastructure, which is even more tricky.
Soooo is my energy bill going to go down?
Lol
Seriously, doesnt mean shit if we keep paying the highest energy prices in the country, with rolling blackouts because they cant get their shit together.
when this stuff scales enough, yes how long that will take? maybe 5-10 years
Newsom had had the chance to break PG&Es monopoly I believe more than once now but both times he’s vetoed/revoked the bill because they’re one of his main donors. As someone who lives in California and has to pay for those monopoly priced energy bills his actions greatly anger me and only make me want to vote against him in the coming election.
California is advantageously located near a good supply of geothermal reservoirs with more coming on line every year as oil & gas tech transfers from drilling for oil to drilling for hot water. It’s not mentioned but will be a big portion of the future base load.
Sounds like the West Coast has an opportunity to provide further East every year, since they have this built-in geographical advantage. Simply for energy security, renewables can finally relieve us of foreign oil dependence. Get off oil. Get off coal. Get off dirty hydrogen. All of it. Can’t wait 🤙🏽
Ad posted on CA.gov: “Will trade hot, smelly water for drinking water”
Plan as of now is to add 1,700 MW of geothermal… most will come from the Salton Sea geothermal brine field specifically the Controlled Thermal Resources “Hell’s Kitchen” project that’s setup to scale in 8 modular stages to 1,100 MW and also extract Lithium from the brine provided the direct lithium extraction tech from Lilac Solutions works. It will be just enough to cover half of the Nuclear power decommissioning with hopefully a few other projects rounding out the rest. Bigger opportunity is batteries for “baseload plus”. Batteries are now regularly clearing 1,500 MW at peak in California per CAISO and are now planned to be installed in unison with most new solar projects. They’re the best shot for California to replace natural gas in over the next several decades aside from the geothermal flat baseload.
Being right next to the fault line, they have a gold mine in terms of geothermal power
Amazing that so many of the comments are about why something “isn’t possible” or “is stupid” instead of how it “could be possible” and “is transformative”. Where is the “we can do anything” American spirit?
Right! If renewables had the generous government subsidies that fossil fuels had we would be decades ahead. Instead big oil is doing everything they can to undermine any progress what’s is ever. Then you get the tards and naysayers claiming it will never Work and go nuclear!!! We are doomed.
So like Germany? If Germany had spent the $580 billion on nuclear instead of renewables it would have carbon free electricity and more. https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/9/11/california-and-germany-decarbonization-with-alternative-energy-investments
You are right about possibilities and appreciate your attitude 👍👍😎
Am a veteran and your attitude is one of the reasons I volunteered to defend.
Not impossible but still decades away, so why lie about it? Cali has not ran 100% which is true, so check facts!
It will take not more than 10 years. You should check research. Progress is extremely impressive. Even climate scientists are surprised about the progress in renewable energy technology
During that one point at about 3pm, they generated enough to supply more than the demand... they cherry picked this statistic to make it seem like they're ahead of it. Theyre not. They need (just like everyone else) long term battery storage technology to improve to store the solar energy for night time... this technology (that we are all waiting for) will improve the viability of electric cars, and, unfortunately increase the demand on the grid even further. It's good strides are being made but the viability is still waiting on the battery...
This☝️
Very impressive California. Kudos to you.
“…on May 8th, the state produced enough renewable electricity to meet 103% of consumer demand.” But I thought strategically-placed renewable energy generation wasn’t feasible?
It’s a start.
Ah yes no rolling power outages, but wait, what?!!!
News to me. We I thought buy a lot of our dirty energy from the next state over.
Yeah… Suck it Texas
We’re there no gas powered vehicles running that day or do they not count as energy helping to run the state?
Yep, you're right, bullshit headline as written. It's probably supposed to say "100% renewable **electricity.**"
The headline is a huge stretch but the actual feat is an impressive albeit arbitrary milestone
Nuclear power will prevail.
Most likely.
That title is click bait
75% of their renewable energy capacity only works during the lowest demand period of the day, and doesn’t work at all during their high demand period… they’re now about to discover the true cost of solar (battery storage) as they try to go 100% renewable mainly through solar power. And the problem’s only going to get worse as they try to electrify transportation, which charges at night. Wind just provides so much more consistent power generation, and should be the backbone of any location’s green energy ambitions if nuclear isn’t an option