Turning Water into Watts

unlike solar, geographic diversity in wind goes a long way toward addressing intermittency. anyone who's ever build a server cluster or a DR plan knows the solution to higher availability is to just leave some spare capacity on the table. when wind costs 1/3rd of nuclear, and has half the capacity factor, well the math is not hard.

nuclear reactors are mainframes. gas plants are ibm/hp/sun. on-shore and off-shore wind are windows and linux on intel. solar is cell phones.

we never got rid of mainframes. they are still built and sold today. but no amount of arguing about their technical superiority in the 80s would have put you on the right side of that bet.

Thank you for the correction and the "correction". When I Google, the top 3 results all show that:

1. 60% is too high for current turbines; 45% is about what recently installed turbines do. 2. Only old (and outmoded) turbines are anything like 25%. 3. The newest 12MW turbines should achieve 55-60%, as Hywind did for the (windy) winter months. Since future deployments are the topic here, that's the relevant number. Call it 55%, and say I was exaggerating by 10%.

I'm glad that ~10GW of nuclear is coming online, albeit at high LCOE. We don't know how to accelerate deployment. We do know how to accelerate the wind deployment that is already at higher volume. The small-modern nuclear camp is hoping to reach 10GW a year a decade from now at higher-than-wind LCOE. And I hope they succeed! But that is not a reason to talk down the wind and solar-plus storage wave happening right now.

Nuclear electricity is good. I wish we had a lot more of it. Nuclear advocates spend way too much time bashing variable renewables, including with trivially-Googleable misinformation such as your "25%", and not enough tackling the horrible political economy of nuclear. Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies.

The point is risk mitigation. It seems to me we should expect an increasingly turbulent natural environment that will be driving an increasingly turbulent political environment.

If you don't remember the 2003 blackout, perhaps failure modes aren't forefront in your mind, but they merit consideration. Designing for 2050 while assuming the world looks like 1950 is a bad idea.

While the OP's statement is factually untrue, fear of nuclear is one of the biggest reason indeed.

If there is no safe levels of radiations, then I hope OP doesn't get near other people because a human body radiates 5000-7000 Bq.

Hopefully he lives in a lead bunker because the earth telluric a background radiation ranges from 1mSv/year to 35 mSv/year.

I hope he doesn't take the plane, too.

And so on...

> Hydo is very cool, and very green.

Well, maybe. I think this depends on what you mean by "green". If you mean low on CO2 emissions, then sure, but we need to consider habitat loss, methane emissions from decomposition, and the possibility of triggering earthquakes. Hydro is also quite expensive to build, and often requires seizing land through processes like Eminent Domain (in the US).

Hydro may require drowning valleys, but micro-hydro with a weir utilizes existing waterways with minimal impact. As to energy density, there's no fixing that, but for most people, density is far less a concern than 'enough' -- solar isn't a viable solution for my current household because it would require clearing enough trees that it feels counterproductive. So, I can go with solar, but I couldn't be self-sustaining on solar.

For most people, that's not a real concern. If you can capture enough solar power during the day to offset your energy bill to zero or near zero, that's good enough, but my concerns are a little more esoteric. That said, for either method, density hasn't really played a factor beyond local storage into battery banks - which is normal enough, but a very different concern.

I've heard it argued that depending on the kind and quantity of vegetation in the valley being flooded, the net methane release from so much rotting plant matter may upend the whole carbon balance of the project.

That is not to say that all dams do this, but that consideration is necessary and may require modifying or rejecting certain proposals.