Hacker News Reader

Comment by barathr | Hacker News Reader

I understand the interest in baseload generation but don't see why there's so much interest in nuclear when low-tech concentrated solar in the desert can get the job done and scaling it up (and ensuring it's 100% safe) isn't a matter of R&D but just basic manufacturing. It strikes me a lot of the nuclear focus is (understandable, if not justifiable) interest in cool new technology.

Ironically, with concentrated solar, going lower tech, even at the expense of efficiency, might decrease costs because the materials would amount to cheap mirrors/collectors and steel pipes. Saul Griffith's classic talk highlighted that there's probably no meaningful manufacturing limit to building concentrated solar with existing industrial infrastructure:

https://longnow.org/seminars/02009/jan/16/climate-change-rec...

View on HN

> why there's so much interest in nuclear when low-tech concentrated solar in the desert can get the job done and scaling it up (and ensuring it's 100% safe) isn't a matter of R&D but just basic manufacturing.

Solar is dependent on the time of day (as the sister comments pointed out) and also on weather. Plus, you need to get the energy from the desert to wherever it's needed - this is non-trivial for densely populated areas far from the equator. You also need to maintain the solar panels; sand can be quite bad for their efficiency. Lastly, the areas that do have the space and solar power might be politically unstable, which makes the massive investments needed to get this going quite risky.

Real engineering has a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o

Which is why a lot of generating capacity is wind, not just solar.

Which is why utilities are focusing on energy storage and grid improvements like upgrading transmission lines to HVDC to make it more practical to 'ship' excess wind/solar to regions that need it.

Batteries require some pretty rare and gnarly materials and still hold only a tiny, tiny bit.

It still gets dark for about a third of the day.

You can always store energy by pushing rocks uphill.

The issue is then recovering the energy from said rocks, or not wasting too much energy lifting the rocks in the first place.

Gravity is an incredibly feeble force; storing large amounts of energy this way requires a lot of rocks and a lot of land.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengning_Pumped_Storage_Powe...

Pushing water uphill is relatively cheap and ~80% efficient. We can build more 2x nuclear power station equivalent "batteries" like fengning fairly easily.

Are there many sites with appropriate geology to build any substantial number of pumped storage stations?

Cant find it now but there was a study i remember seeing that suggested that there were 100x as many as needed.

How about any of the reservoirs in drought-stricken North America? Water could be pumped to Lake Mead, power generated at Hoover Dam, and then enter irrigation for farmland. Same for almost the entirety of the Snake River and tributaries.

Maybe you weren't aware, but those sites are drying out thanks to climate change, and have some other important responsibilities like drinking water

Hydro is failing worldwide. Look it up before responding please, thanks.

I love when people who have no familiarity with the long and failed history of water batteries assume it's easy

Grid storage has different constraints than, e.g. electric vehicles; in particular, size and weight is less important since they aren't moving. This makes it viable to use battery tech which is less efficient, but cheaper/safer/etc. For example, flow batteries or iron/air batteries.

Disinformation is not welcome here

There is absolutely no need for deserts, or for single-use solar farms anywhere. Solar coexists with roofs, parking lots, reservoirs and canals, and pasture, improving each.

The grandparent explicitly asked why solar in the desert is not considered as a solution. Also, pointing out the actual flaws of a specific approach is not disinformation.

Please don't claim disinformation unless there's evidence of intentional deception, which doesn't appear to the case here. Instead, try to add to the discussion. For example, your claim raises the question of why many existing solar farms were built in deserts. Did something change since they were built?

They turn unproductive, cheap land into something more valuable. A second advantage is that it helps combat desertification. A downside is that the temperatures reduce the efficiency of the panels so you need to mitigate that.

At any time that someone with no personal knowledge takes a contrarian position of fact, this has been achieved.

It's long past time to try to protect the world's energy anti-vaxxers.

Disinformation: spreading false information while knowing the information is false.

Misinformation: spreading false information while believing the false information.

We should be mindful how we use these terms. I believe that the parent to your comment fully believes what they are saying. If you wish to act in good faith just provide a few sources or comments to counter their claims and move on. Consider the context in which they are speaking (the op mentions building in deserts and sending electricity elsewhere, hence the counter). But do not attack them and call them a bad actor until benefit of the doubt is removed. We can't have a functioning community unless we operate under good faith conditions, even to bad actors.

https://www.mediadefence.org/ereader/publications/introducto...

I hate the word misinformation. That assumes a God like external judge of what is an isn't true.

The person you're reacting to was correct. They're reacting to someone who is spreading information they well know to be false.

Feel free to show me in what way my comment was false, I'd be very happy if I'm wrong and desert solar is a viable solution.

Two things.

One, I'm not responding to you. Do you know how the internet works?

If I reply to someone else's comment, it's not to you. I'm actually on your side, it turns out. Take your hands off your hips. I'm pro-nuclear. Solar has never worked, and it never will. Germany dumped $1.7 trillion into Energiewende, and failed. Their carbon went up, their power went down, their prices went up, and they drove industry to higher carbon grids. All it did was make the situation worse.

Now take a look at my comment. Who am I actually responding to? What were they saying?

Was it you? Was it pro solar? No?

Then why are you here demanding that I spend my time proving you wrong?

Two, "Feel free to show me in what way my comment was false"

Can you please get this out of your body for the rest of your life? You sound like a crank.

It's ANTIVAXXERS who say this "feel free to show me" stuff. Like what, you thought I was on the internet just waiting for your permission?

Do you realize how you sound? "Hey, I'm right until you prove me wrong?"

That's ridiculous. Even though you're right, your ostentatious delivery of an entitled nonsensical position is /still/ setting you back.

I'm on your side, and you've still left me feeling like your position is not defended by any skill or knowledge. If someone who doubted nuclear interacted with you, it seems almost certain that your lack of ability to display your own position, combined with your attempt to make it someone else's responsibility, would actually backfire and cause them to support nuclear less.

This will never do any good. You will never convince anyone this way. You sound confused. This isn't a fight, and you aren't a fighter. You shouldn't be attempting to defeat people this way, and you haven't risen to the standard you're attempting to demand from strangers, when the actual responsibility is yours, not theirs.

Every time you demand someone else prove you wrong, you have immediately and automatically lost.

If you say "2+2 is 4, prove me wrong," everyone watching you thinks you're wearing a Charlie Kirk mask, and arithmetic will try to rewrite itself to distance itself from you.

Please don't sit here like "do work for me because I permit it and deign it good, to amuse me and make me very happy for being wrong."

The amateur nuclear fanboy community really needs to stop taking discussion tips from Youtube flat earth channels. This is not how competence works.

I think you took more offense in that than intended ;)

On your first point, you said

> The person you're reacting to was correct.

So I took "you" to be the parent (godelski) who was responding (=reacting) to ncmncm, who accused me of spreading disinformation. You then continued with

> They're reacting to someone who is spreading information they well know to be false.

I took this "they" to reference ncmncm, who is responding (reacting) to my original comment - which then means that you would've said that I'm spreading misinformation.

Given this new information, the "they" probably referenced "godelski", too - which is the source of our misunderstanding.

To you second point, you're right that this was probably not the best strategic response. That being said, my original comment provided arguments and a (hopefully) valid source, while the responses accused me of spreading knowingly wrong information (well, technically only one did, but as outlined in point 1, I was unaware of that at the time of writing the comment). Proving that I knew what I said was wrong is a pretty high bar, so I decided to ask for only points that were wrong in my original comments.

The comment was a bit salty, I agree, but in the context that I made a good argument (IMO) and the only response was "false" without even a hint to a specific fault, I didn't really see a more reasonable way to respond - but I should've pointed this out more clearly. It was definitely not my intention to make someone work for free to debunk my baseless claims.

And, to end things, just a minor nitpick - I'm actually not a nuclear fanboy at all, I was just responding honestly why desert solar was not an option, since it was something I've looked at before.

I wonder if some combination solar and mechanical storage, e.g. pumped storage hydropower could be engineered to outperform nuclear. PSH is pretty inefficient, but solar is getting cheaper and cheaper…

> but don't see why there's so much interest in nuclear when low-tech concentrated solar in the desert can get the job done

Because not every location has high solar irradiance[0] nor wind density[1].

I'm not sure why comments (for and against nuclear/renewables) with energy ignore this factor. Wind, hydro, and solar aren't homogeneously distributed around the globe (let alone the US) nor through time. The conversations always devolve into "why do we need nuclear when there's so much sun" vs "baseloads."

The truth is that you should be using whichever resource best matches your environment. If you can get away without nuclear, that's totally cool. If you can't, then nuclear is a far better option than coal or gas. That's about it, and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. Pro nuclear is supposed to mean that nuclear tech is on the table. It shouldn't mean "nuclear for everything" or "nuclear everywhere." Just use whatever works in your area and gives you the cheapest and most reliable power (under the constraint of zero operating emissions). Anything else is typically not meaningful discourse unless we're willing to dig way deep into the nuances and everyone involved has a decent amount of expertise on the subject (I'm guessing most of us don't). There's so many constraints that go into power systems (reliability, land usage, access, population density, resource access, diversification, etc) that are never discussed in these forums I just don't think we can meaningfully discuss except at the high abstract level and mostly appeal to experts. Which as far as I'm aware most experts say "nuclear is better than coal and gas. Let's do as much as we can with hydro, wind, and solar, and if that's not enough nuclear is the next best option."

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-fou...

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/where-wind-power-is...

While there certainly are local differences, with the exception of Alaska basically no part of the US is infeasible for solar. As the prices for panels fall, the region of economic usage extends northwards. Germany does very well with solar and the southmost regions start at 48 degrees north.

I literally link maps that show how some areas in the US have a harder time and would require substantially more build out. These same areas have nonhomogeneous sun distribution throughout the year too, with pretty drastic differences. If you require an extra 20-30% more panels, other options become more attractive. If you have longer winters with ever increasing snow storms, other options look better. If you are in a population dense area, something with a small footprint is attractive and with a trade-off. You don't want long power lines that would get cut and shut down your whole city. Nuclear's problem is it's price. But a few factors or trade-offs can make it competitive. Including just a $10/ton carbon tax.

Again, I'm not sure why were arguing as if it's renewables vs nuclear. You use whatever is best for your area and matches your needs. All I'm arguing is that nuclear can be advantageous in _some_ situations. (If you think nuclear for everything, or even solar for everything, your ideas about energy are very naive).

I don't deny that there are huge local variations in solar performance across the US. My point is: in most places it is economically feasible. As most places are still much better than Germany in that respect and it works well here. If in some places it makes more sense to invest e.g. in wind or water, that might be. But even in those, it is picking up low-hanging fruit to put solar cells on suitable rooftops for example. As they are going to produce energy for cheap.

It's quite ironic that you chose Germany as an example right when they got into hot water over their massive gas dependency on Russia. Compare and contrast with France with their sizeable nuclear fleet.

Nothing ironic about it, one has little to do with the other. My statement is, that solar energy is economic all over Germany. There are of course local variations in productivity, but all over Germany it produces electricity at costs which are very competitive. But also there is a very apparent gradient across Germany, solar is more productive in the south and consequentially more popular there, wind in the more windy regions. Still both are used across the whole country because they work best in a mix.

German energy politics is an entirely different matter. And actually the main complaint about it is: the switch to renewables wasn't done quickly enough. Nuclear always was the smaller part of energy production in Germany, so even if no power plant had been shut down, the question would still stand: where would 80% of the energy come from. Relying on fossil fuels for that is definitely wrong, even more so, if you tie yourself to one very problematic supplier.

And please look into all the huge problems France currently faces about their energy production before cheering for them! The good side is, the largest part of the energy mix is nuclear, so it is low in carbon production. That is the good news. The bad news is, that the energy crisis in central Europe was basically started by several nuclear power plants in France being taken off the grid at the same time as the need for emergency repairs appeared. Electricity in France currently is quite expensive, often more so than in Germany. Long term France has the problem that the nuclear fleet is aging. A lot of reactors are only operating because their life span has been extended. Currently there are no realistic concepts of replacing them, so France needs to hurry to expand their renewables considerably, which so far they haven't been doing.

> Because not every location has high solar irradiance[0] nor wind density[1].

Isn't that solvable with HVDC links?

I agree with GP at this point it is mostly a budget, political will, manufacturing problem.

It sure is solvable with HVDC links, but upgrading infrastructure isn’t free. That cost would need to be included when comparing it against nuclear

Nuclear power still costs more. It's clean and consistent but almost absurdly expensive compared to solar, wind, pumped storage, batteries and interconnectors.

The entire point of ThorCon is to try to make nuclear more cost effective. If their numbers are to be believed, from their website:

> The shipyard estimate supports our estimates that ThorCon power plants can be mass produced by shipyards at costs of $800/kW to $1000/kW

$1000/kW, or $1/W, is roughly the cost of utility-scale solar these days (SEIA reported $0.89/W for Q1 2021)

> Isn't that solvable with HVDC links?

No, because then you have the Russia situation times ten - namely that a foreign power can cripple your society at will.

> It strikes me a lot of the nuclear focus is (understandable, if not justifiable) interest in cool new technology.

This is very funny. The first nuclear power plant began operation in June 1954. That same year is when Bell Labs created the first commercially viable solar cell (although I doubt it was used to generate power for any grids until long after that).

So this (implied) claim is not just wrong about the age of nuclear power, it even gets the chronology wrong in comparing it to solar.

I've personally visited the X-10 reactor at Oak Ridge (built in the forties). So in the above, nuclear is not 'technology' until it's producing power for customers?

I'm sure the intent of their statement is salt/SMR/other exotic designs that the NRC has not greenlit (and, I think I'm ok NOT greenlighting designs that don't account for 50 - 80 years of maintenance/operation/risk)

I don't think technology and invention (or discovery for that matter) are synonymous. There has been progress in nuclear technology, even if it's so far non viable.

> cheap mirrors/collectors and steel pipes

The funny thing happened, solar panels got close to the same cost as a curved mirror.

Unless someone can demonstrate that nuclear projects are preventing solar and wind deployments, why not do both?

Money is fungible. Each dollar spent on clean generation displaces some rate of CO2 exhaust. A dollar spent on renewables displaces much more than the same dollar spent on nukes. You cannot spend the same dollar on both.

Thus, a dollar spent on nukes instead of renewables brings climate catastrophe nearer.

I think I take issue with both of your assertions:

A dollar spent on renewables displaces much more than the same dollar spent on nukes -- this project is going to provide CO2-free power at 3 cents / kWh. It's in the same ballpark, but also, nuclear's main competition is coal and gas, as they all provide baseline power. Solar with storage can do that, but adding storage drives the cost up.

And you cannot spend the same dollar on both -- while this is true, I think the fallacy is that spending a dollar on nuclear power necessarily takes a dollar away from renewables. It's possible that this will sometimes be the case, but it also will clearly be taking a lot of dollars away from coal in places where practically speaking, the choice isn't coal vs renewable, it's coal vs nothing, so if you don't spend the dollar on nuclear, it WILL be spent on coal.

Capital markets compete on a level field.

The vast majority of nuclear power plants weren't funded privately.

True, but that means money spent on them was coerced out of the public economy and spent where it would not have been. So, they still compete for spending, but unfairly.

"is going to provide" is a bold statement given that molten salt reactors are still not ready.

> Money is fungible.

Which is why wasting it in trying to shoehorn solar or wind which are completely unacceptable as baseload power sources is doomed to failure.

If you think batteries[1] are a solution, you should go buy some batteries, and try to take advantage of wholesale energy price arbitrage between daily oversupply (when energy is ~free) and undersupply (when energy is very, very expensive).

You'll quickly discover why nobody has managed to make a profitable business out of it. The economics of battery storage, compressed air storage, etc, etc are horrible.

[1] Pumped hydro is okay, cost-wise. Unfortunately, the capacity isn't there to meet our energy needs.

>Pumped hydro is okay, cost-wise. Unfortunately, the capacity isn't there to meet our energy needs.

We can build plenty of pumped hydro before running out of space.

You are alluding to low "capacity factor", what we call duty cycle elsewhere: something called for in only part of a day or month, where you only get to charge for it during the time it is used, so has its fixed costs amortized over just that limited usage time.

Batteries can fare badly, here, because their cost scales with total storage capacity, though storing or delivering the power is free and round trip efficiency is high. They do well at leveling peaks, where they can respond faster than other media, and the total energy they must deliver is small. (Cf. Australia's Tesla system.)

Others, like pumped hydro, synthetic chemicals, liquified air, and compressed air, can fare better because tankage is cheap, and the pumps, catalyzers, and furnaces cost according to the rate that energy is to be banked or drawn down, not the total stored energy. Storage as an independent business would rely on transmission lines to be able to deliver power to utilities in the whole region and stay busy, and draw on the grid's excess to refill.

Pumped hydro and compressed air have good round-trip efficiency. Chemical systems, much less; that matters surprisingly little.

Transmission lines cost according to maximum power and distance, but are called for only when energy must be moved. Actually moving the energy is free; all the costs are independent of usage.

But a public utility that manages its own storage is not constrained by a storage business model: it builds as much generating capacity and storage as it needs to meet its needs almost all the time, and fills periods that exceed the sum of its momentary generating capacity and storage drawdown rate (until it is empty) buying power from the regional grid at spot price, refilling its storage when it can or price is low.

Capacity needs to be built out, and hasn't been, yet, because it takes time to do, hasn't been needed yet in most places, and its costs are still in free fall. Building out later gets you more for your money, and generating capacity is more immediately useful.

Synthetic chemical storage has the advantage that tankage is both cheap and portable, so you can work the catalyzers at all times except when storage is actually being drawn down, either filling local tankage or filling shippable tanks for sale. The market for it will never saturate.

A wrinkle for many storage media is that the equipment to bank and to draw down energy is not the same, is sized and costs by the power capacity in one direction, and one costs more than the other. For example, the catalyzer to produce hydrogen or ammonia is completely separate from the furnace or fuel cells needed to deliver power. Another wrinkle is that startup time and fixed cost to start up, in either direction, may be very different.

Running a grid with completely independent generation, storage, transmission, and delivery makes bad incentives, so needs regulation. But a public utility district can manage all of this internally, and mostly just sell power to end users and excess to the grid.

Everything works much better when there is plenty extra of intermittent generating capacity, so it is good that is very cheap.

Ah yes, "just build it in the desert". It's only a matter of:

- Building hectares upon hectares of solar panels in one of the most hostile regions in the world - Maintaining them because the sand is horribly damaging, and replacing them regularly - ignore the fact that, in the Sahara, there's multiple wars going on over there and that it would be a prime location for a terrorist attack - Somehow, also build the infrastructure to transfer that energy through the desert without losing it all as heat. Remember, you've got multiple GW coming out of here. A single 800kV line will not be enough - have backup power lines in case your inaccessible and hard to repair line breaks.

Man, life as a solar zealot sounds easy, all you have to do is ignore physics and reality.

> ... in the Sahara ...

I suspect the OP was in the US. Desert would then be something like Nevada - definitely a shortage of wars, and Sagebrush scrub (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_scrub) is probably less destructive than the Saraha's sands...

Yes, sorry, you're right -- I forgot to state that I was speaking from a US-based perspective where there is ample land (and grid infrastructure) that could support baseload solar at scale (in addition to rooftop solar, which will put a huge dent in daytime CO2e/kWh).

One of the reasons why I favor nuclear is quite simple. And its not new technology. In fact, nuclear is the only green energy that ever has actually reliably powered an industrial nation.

France did it in 70/80 with technology not more advanced then what is available in the 60s.

They have not only proven that nuclear can do it, but also that nuclear scales amazingly well. There really is no technical question what so ever.

Any nation that wants to have a green grid could go to South Korea for example and if you tell them that you would like 20 or even 100 reactors and you are willing to pay, they would build you those reactors. Within 10 years you could likely finish 3-4 reactors a year.

Nuclear economics analysis shows that if you actually have a real industry with lots of people experienced in such plants, they become much, much cheaper and far more predictable on timeline.

Instead in the West every other nations has some unique plant design that they are only building once and its a totally new industrial project supported by an industry that barley exist anymore and had to shoestring since the 80s.

And we are no longer in the 70s, so unlike France with some small amount of effort we could actually avoid using 60s technology. Doing, and building modern plants (see Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy, ThorCon) would not only solve the Green energy problem. We could also eat up nuclear fuel waste and (hopefully) nuclear weapons material (as was done in the US with Soviet nukes). We could also produce far more medical isotopes and nuclear batteries for space exploration (and other uses).

We could also then use such plants to produce hydrogen (for chemical and industrial processes). Using highly efficient nuclear heat is a far better plan then electrolysis with renewables.

These modern plants would as be so much smaller that they could be produced in a factory that could likely produce 100s such reactors in a year, just like we can with airplanes or rockets. You transport them to the a prepared location and drop them into a big nuclear concrete reinforced hole and put a bit steel lid on top.

Nuclear is the lowest in land use, lowest in total resources mined, lowest in disruption to the environment and can be built pretty close to where people actually live, so its the lowest in required energy transmission as well. If you use modern nuclear its also doesn't use require water cooling anymore.

So, nuclear, even if you use shitty old nuclear would work and is proven to work. Using modern nuclear would improve on that 10-100x.

The only thing that prevented this from happening in the 70/80s is that coal was cheaper and the nuclear scare made politicians not interested in pushing it anyway. Today its totally clear that coal killed 100-1000x more people and we are actually willing to invest into clean energy.

Wake me up when the nuclear industry starts calling for the repeal of the Price-Anderson Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

I was a major LFTR/MSR supporter.

But the emerging economics of solar/wind prevent any non-subsidized nuclear from being viable.

Look at the solar/wind curves for the last decade. Yes, it is unlikely solar and wind will continue such a breakneck pace of improvement, but it doesn't matter. The point is that almost everyone will agree that solar and wind have not reached peak technology and economies of scale, and certainly battery storage has not either with forthcoming sodium ion and other approaches.

No existing nuclear design can compete. Natural gas turbine is being passed by unsubsidized wind/solar right now per LCOE charts. Other/new nuclear designs are (let's be honest) 10 years at a minimum before they come online. What price is being targeted by such a nuclear project?

I believe these new designs should be researched (and liquid fuel thorium research should be allowed too) and so should fusion.

I also believe that existing nuclear should probably be kept around for now for baseload and to keep the nuclear industry viable for the future.

Hopefully in 10-20 years solar/wind will stabilize, and then modular MSR/Thorium reactors can have their day.

I would love to be proven wrong, but essentially any nuclear plant has to look at the current wind/solar price, and target half of that (inflation adjusted) as a target competitive price. It's possible that won't be enough though.

Maybe with lots of investment and buy in we can do that in the West.

However for emerging economies like India, Indonesia and many others I still think reliable nuclear power close to population centers is a far better plan.

The actual investment required to get a modern MSR style (doesn't have to be thorium) is not actually that much.

I would at least like to see nuclear get an actual shot at it.

But I agree that after nuclear getting the short straw for 40+ years solar/wind are finally getting to the point where they might be an option.

If we cannot afford nukes, how can they? If we cannot make them reliable and safe, how can you expect them to?

Foisting nukes off on poorer, badly governed countries does people living there no favors.

Nukes are farther from viable than ever before. Subsidizing them has become indefensible.

Good questions. One of the founders of ThorCon wrote a book (link to review[1]) about why we can't afford nuclear power (among other things), and it's not really anything to do with the essential cost of building a plant, it's a lot of regulations that don't really make sense and don't make anyone safer. I don't want to over-simplify regulation into the common "more vs less" scale -- some regulations make sense and others don't and you have to consider each one individually, but I think Devanney makes a good argument that the nuclear regulatory environment in the USA is pretty non-sensical and has cause far more harm than good by pushing investment back onto fossil fuels.

As for "if we cannot make them reliable and safe, how can you expect them to?" I think we can, and I think they can. There's a ton of detailed information about the ThorCon molten salt reactor designs and why they are safe, how they'd withstand e.g. a Fukushima-style event, etc.

[1] https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

The easiest solution to getting rid of the crufty old regulations would be by shutting down all obsolete nuclear power plant designs and building new ones. Considering the financial cost of a single nuclear meltdown, upgrading your entire fleet is basically free. That upgrade will save you a trillion dollars in clean up costs.

Then, not building them will save another $trillion.

Emerging economies? You means ones that have crappy grids?

Wind/Solar + battery is a dream power combination for the third world. No reliance on a substandard perpetually underinvested grid, corrupt companies, corrupt/oppressive central governments.

Starlink as well should be a HUGE boon to the third world. Again, buy dish, plug it in, pay money, get internet. I can see remote third world villages with solar/wind/battery + starlinks + a couple 5g towers and BAM, that is a modern power and communications infrastructure that scales from 1 to 1000 people.

Rooftop solar is a sneaky liberating technology from a government/politics standpoint, in the sense it empowers individuals (literally and figuaratively) without the government imposing corruption, and generally speaking has minimal/no impacts on your neighbors and surroundings.

I know MSR / LFTR is designed to avoid weapons-grade isotope chains in its breeding so are somewhat proliferation safe, but it's still a breeder reactor, I'm sure smart nuclear physicists could figure out how to make plutonium in them.

>Nuclear economics analysis shows that if you actually have a real industry with lots of people experienced in such plants, they become much, much cheaper and far more predictable on timeline.

Yeah and then the nuclear advocates build monolithic plants that last 50 years, exactly enough time for all the people involved to retire and not pass on their knowledge.

The world uses about 556.63 exajoules per year. Say your nuclear reactor produces 3GW. That's more than 5000 reactors to power the world. You can probably safely cut that in half because electricity is a better source of energy for transportation and heating that fossil fuels, but still. Do you think we can scale reactor production sufficiently to build thousands of reactors in two or three decades?

> Do you think we can scale reactor production sufficiently to build thousands of reactors in two or three decades?

Humans can do some cool things when we decide to. And scaling solar isn't as easy as it sounds. What's the cost, in energy and fossil fuels, to mine the materials, build and ship not just the panels but also the massive batteries required for solar? Not to mention having to constantly replace them?

That's something I don't really see solar advocates addressing: if we have to burn every last gallon of oil to build our marvelous solar and battery arrays, then the planet is screwed anyway. Nuclear has much higher energy density. The problem is our economic system isn't accounting for energy output vs input...it uses prices, which are incredibly useless in this particular instance because prices do not internalize costs. Price and cost have significantly diverged, so you can't look at "what's cheaper in price" and assume that it's the optimal outcome.

Why not attack from all angles? Build solar, but also crank out as many nuclear reactors as humanly possible.

I don't know how much more material you need for solar panels and wind turbines compared to nuclear reactors (there's a lot of concrete in a nuclear reactor too). But as you build more renewables the amount of fossil fuels you need for manufacturing goes down. It would of course be nice if externalities were better reflected in prices.

> Humans can do some cool things when we decide to. And scaling solar isn't as easy as it sounds.

Weirdly enough, we're already currently annually installing so much solar power (in terms of actual energy output, not just nameplate) that it equates the progress accomplished in the nuclear industry in the past fifteen years or so. In other words, the nuclear industry would have to accelerate by more than an order to magnitude just to catch up with today's solar power growth. But of course solar power growth itself increases by around 30% every year on average... To me that almost sounds like it's scaling nuclear power that isn't as easy as it sounds.

> but also the massive batteries required for solar

Yeah, there's no such thing as "massive batteries required for solar" in a proper high-renewable grid. Simulations show (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.07.004) that in a cost-optimal grid mix, pumped hydro is economically preferred over batteries.

> pumped hydro is economically preferred over batteries.

Which is a massive battery.

If by "battery", you mean "a primary or secondary electrochemical cell or cells", as is its usual meaning, then it's not.

Yes.

5000 reactors is not actually that much. Think about how many planes we produce.

Imagine 5 Gigafactory each producing 100s reactor cores every year. That not really hard to imagine is it? Those would more likely be 500MW. So you need a few 10000+.

The rest of a nuclear plant without water cooling is none nuclear and building a concrete hole, and a concrete bunker a whole bunch of electronics, pipes and the same turbine used for gas plants.

And we have tons of thorium all over the place for basically free in every country.

Look at fast France managed to make their nuclear, and that was with 60s technology.

France installed less than 60 reactors over 15 years, I think they aimed for 80. Even just constructing "a few 10k+" fossil fuel plants over say 30 years seems really ambitious to me. Each is a fairly large construction site that binds specialized construction skill for several years. In many countries you would also face prolonged legal battles before you can even start construction.

For comparison, assuming a "business as usual" situation in the solar power industry, the electricity output of five thousand 3GWt nuclear units would be reached around 2040 (maybe 2035 if the long-term annual growth factor of 30% were to be maintained, but that's unlikely in the future).

Good question - note that the ThorCon project is not a nuclear power plant, but a factory for producing nuclear power plants (class NuclearPlantFactory? :) ). From their site:

"A single shipyard can produce 20 GW’s of ThorConIsle power per year. In terms of resource requirements, one gigawatt of ThorCon power is not a big deal. The scale up rate will not be limited by shipyard capacity, but by the rate at which the turbogenerators can be built."

So let's say 18000 GW (converting 556 exajoules/year and rounding up). Divide by 20 (GW per shipyard per year) to get 900 ThorCon-shipyard-years. If we say two decades to get it done, that's 45 shipyards, which seems doable? There are 285 active shipyards worldwide right now.

But anyway, like you said, we can maybe cut it in half, and not everything has to be powered by nuclear, just enough to replace fossil fuels.

On the other side, many areas of the world are energy poor and impoverished because of that. It would be great if we could use a lot of this energy to improve lives of people living in these areas, so we would probably want to build substantially more.

> Nuclear economics analysis shows that if you actually have a real industry with lots of people experienced in such plants, they become much, much cheaper and far more predictable on timeline.

All these experts must have retired in France. Half their reactors are out of order for planned and unplanned maintenance.

You would expect nuclear to get cheaper over time, but the opposite has happened. SMRs are betting on turning the tide by reducing the manufacturing cost but they will have to deal with larger operation costs so it is not yet clear that this will make economic sense. The bet size is smaller though, so investors will be more likely to give it a try.

> We could also eat up nuclear fuel waste and (hopefully) nuclear weapons material (as was done in the US with Soviet nukes).

You can do this, but does it make economic sense. That is the question and the answer to that right now is no.

In France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it. In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 7.9% of the gridpower in 2019).

The sole reactor currently in building phase (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 11 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19.4 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion ).

My understanding is that one of the big problems is transmission. It reduces the cost competitiveness when you have to factor in running many more high voltage transmission lines across the US. You need them to get the power from the desert to city centers that have the bulk of demand. Building transmission lines in the US is apparently very hard because there is a lot of red tape and politics and NIMBY-ism (to be fair they are ugly).

Nuclear can mostly be built near the centers of demand and reduce the need for elaborate new transmission.

Transmission is cheap.

But there is absolutely no need to site solar in deserts. It can be local, anywhere, coexisting neatly with other land use.

The Real Engineering youtube link in one of the comments above mine in this thread has an example where putting it in the desert yields three times more than putting it on location in Germany. So there is a significant difference in some places. I'd imagine that makes a difference in being cost competitive.

Also in the video: A single 700MW line from from morocco to spain cost 150M. Though I suspect thats a more expensive than overhead lines.

The lesson of the RE video was that they cancelled the Sahara solar projects because panels had got so cheap, putting them right there in Germany was better despite efficiency arguments. Efficiency turned out to matter a lot less than other things, as price fell.

On the other hand, I don't understand the focus on 'baseload', its effectivley meaningless.

But even if we assume it was a meaningful thing to aim for, concentrated solar power isn't as cost effective as solar pv, wind and batteries to provide the same thing.

This is basically true of all non-pv solar power. In the past really basic solar heaters have made a lot of sense in many places. As the costs of PV and batteries have plummeted they no longer make sense.

When you need electricity, PV gives you that, if you want heat then PV plus heat pump gives you that and cooling at the same time.

Even basic things like designing houses for solar gain can be substituted for just slapping cheap PV on the roof now.

I'm fairly sure the Saul Griffith of 2022 would agree with that, no matter what the 2009 Saul thought. PV wind and battery price drops have surprised even the smart people paying attention to this area, like him.

And here he is, saying "electrify everything":

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-09-07/climate-chang...

> a lot of the nuclear focus is (understandable, if not justifiable) interest in cool new technology

This is certainly the case in the UK where the Government is rushing headlong into the Next Shiny (nuclear) Thing. In the meantime they inexplicably scrapped the Swansea Bay Tidal Power project! http://www.tidallagoonpower.com/projects/swansea-bay/

To answer your question: the sun doesn’t shine at night, that’s why we can’t do solar only (without enough energy storage to get us through the night).

We will build out storage, and transmission lines, to "get us through the night".

Now do the math on how much storage would be needed, and how much would it cost, then show your work. Investors have done exactly that, which is why large scale storage is not happening yet.

Storage cost is plummeting even faster than solar or wind cost ever did.

A renewable dollar is still better spent today on generating capacity, and will be for several more years, most places. Waiting, you get more storage for your money, and you then already have overcapacity to charge it from.

Until the share of renewables approaches enough to destabilize the power grid, building out renewable generating capacity displaces more carbon from entering the atmosphere, and so is a better use of capital.

At the same time, decreasing load factor of nukes and fossil plants, as they become too expensive to win bids, will drive them offline in favor of much cheaper storage methods as fast as that comes online.

The enormous industrial and export value of synthetic hydrogen and ammonia production, after local tankage is full, make them the compelling choice for long-term storage. Initially, those will be burned in gas turbines as they edge out natural gas, both locally and abroad, but improving fuel cells will finally displace turbines.

> Storage cost is plummeting even faster than solar or wind cost ever did.

About batteries, that's no longer true - lithium, nickel and cobalt prices have exploded in recent months. Furthermore they're impractical ( you need massive space, and then you have a giant fire hazard) and most importantly, needed elsewhere. EV adoption is already stifled by lack of sufficient supply of batteries, and heavy duty vehicles are let to be electrified. Replacing all cars, buses, trucks, etc. ( and apparently trains in the US because they can't be bothered to electrify like normal countries) with EV versions will require a lot of batteries. And of course they have a limited lifecycle, and need to be replaced. And speaking of lifecycle, a nuclear reactor has 2-3 times ( at least) the life of a solar panel or wind turbine.

About hydrogen, green hydrogen in any quantities is only theoretical at the moment.

IMHO the best way forward is to hedge bets and do everything - build nuclear power plants ( and ffs don't close existing ones that can continue to operate to replace them with gas "temporarily" like the dimwits in Belgium are doing), expand renewables, invest in different potential solutions for storage. Fuel cells will probably have a part to play in transportation too, e.g. in aviation. However getting rid of the only low-CO2 baseload power source we have is shortsighted.

and ffs don't close existing ones that can continue to operate to replace them with gas "temporarily" like the dimwits in Belgium are doing

Actually, Belgium has decided to keep open the two plants that are easy to continue to operate (easy is relative, they will still require a billion euro in maintenance work). They’re still closing the five that would require extensive multi-year downtime and costly renovation (like pouring new concrete) and replacing them with gas plants, but there’s not any real alternative anyway as they would have to shut down for multiple years so new gas plants are unavoidable.

An interesting fact is that a few years ago there was a constitutional court decision that prevented keeping the plants open on anything less than a five year timeline from the moment of deciding, unless there is a risk of blackouts. The only reason the plants will be able to stay open in 2025 is therefore because of Putin.

> but there’s not any real alternative anyway as they would have to shut down for multiple years so new gas plants are unavoidable.

Of course there were alternatives. One would have had to anticipate this crisis a few years ago and could have built up renewables or new nuclear plants. Instead somebody made the decision to go with fossil fuels from Russia and here we are.

It's of course a complete coincidence that the "green" energy minister who was instrumental in the decision to shut down Belgian nuclear power is a lawyer whose main clients included, (drumroll... wait for it), Gazprom.

Just like it's a complete coincidence that the head of the government responsible for shutting down German nuclear power, Gerhard Schröder, now is the chairman of Nord Stream, Gazprom as well as having been nominated to a director position at Rosneft.

Everybody knows batteries are the most expensive storage. So, rising battery prices have no impact on utility-scale storage cost.

A GW-scale electric ammonia synthesis plant is under construction in Norway. Hint, you don't built a GW-scale operation on unproven tech.

We will need hundreds more of them.

Every cent diverted to building nukes from building out renewables brings climate catastrophe nearer.

>they're impractical ( you need massive space

This isn't even close to true. A lithium-ion battery can store roughly 1 megajoule per liter, which I'm going to use because it makes the math easier. (Other batteries are slightly less dense, but the correction factor is small). Total global energy consumption is around 1 exajoule per day. That's a trillion liters to store a day's worth of energy, or one billion cubic meters. Assuming you can stack batteries ten meters high -- which seems doable -- a battery farm to store a day's worth of energy for the whole world would take up about 100 million square meters, or 100 square kilometers, slightly smaller than San Francisco. That's less than the amount of space currently taken up by solar or wind farms.

Using zinc-bromine or other technologies will take up more space, but as you can see, a small reduction in energy density won't be that big of a deal.

Furthermore: iron is not getting more expensive. Massive iron-air battery factories are under construction now.

Got a link by chance to some such company, ideally with a sort of price tag attached?

https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/

Last figure I saw was 1/4 the cost of Li batteries. (I guess lithium cells have got cheaper since they made that page.)

"Just build a 10m tall San Francisco sized battery farm lol smh"

Congratulations on suggesting the most impractical, stupidly dangerous (mmmmh battery fires), impossible to make, single point of failure. At least it won't be attacked because it only lasts a single day anyways.

Stick to philosophy and let actual engineers build a grid, thank you.

Way to miss the point.

San Francisco does not occupy much of the Earth's surface, or even of the continental US. This battery farm, spread out between all the towns in the US, would not even be noticed.

You're missing your own point.

It lasts for a single day. A project using up pretty much all of Earth's currently usable lithium resources, for a single day of storage. It's worthless.

Then it is a good thing not much of the storage built will use lithium.

You are really reaching. It wears badly.

He's not missing it at all.

I've seen the investment pitches. Nobody is seriously considering it for a reason, it's a terrible, terrible, idea.

Covering intermittent sources is pretty much 100% public sector's responsibility, everywhere.

Yes, and it is done with resources in place, not in San Francisco.

And, for resources in place, whether so impractical as lithium batteries, or as practical as pumped hydro, iron-air batteries, banked hydrogen, or transmission lines reaching operating generation elsewhere, the space required is in no way prohibitive.

Which was the point.

No need to do the math: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211...

It's ultimately inevitable.

I don't have to do the math. Solar+storage is being sold for 4 cents / kWh.

https://www.8minute.com/solar-projects/

For most projects, there's at most four hours of storage, just enough to shift peak daytime supply to peak evening demand. That's not the same as getting through the night, or having enough overcapacity to meet demand in cloudy winter weeks.

Lazard puts the wholesale cost of solar PV plus four hours storage at $165 to $296/MWh:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Until we have more renewable generating capacity online, four hours is plenty. As the share of power generation increases, building more storage is favored. Lazard's figures are (as is proper) for existing storage, not for the much cheaper storage that will be built.

It is generally a mistake to assume people controlling billion-dollar budgets have no idea what they are doing.

Yes, and building more storage raises the cost by quite a lot, as you can see by Lazard's cost figures for storage. Nuclear can easily be competitive in a grid not backed by natural gas, especially if MSR companies like Thorcon are successful in lowering nuclear costs.

Lazards's cost figures are backward-looking, so not representative. As I already pointed out. Yet, generation + even those figures is still cheaper than building nukes.

Lazard is the one widely cited by renewables advocates attempting to make their case. You're the first person I've seen claim that it overestimates renewable costs.

Can you point out where in the Lazard report it describes its methodology in a way that makes clear it doesn't reflect the cost of new renewable projects today? And reference a thorough study that shows lower-than-Lazard average costs for solar+storage today, not in some estimated future, and not with cherry-picked projects in ideal locations?

And if that cost includes sufficient collection and storage to get through a windless night, like nuclear can do, that would be nice too.

If PV and storage were that much cheaper, those people controlling billion-dollar budgets would have built that instead of gas plants and this discussion would be moot.

And now they are building out PV and gearing up to build out storage.

Are they? Why haven’t they already? It looks like they are supplementing peak capacity right now with gas plants dynamically reacting to varying demand with storage being oders of magnitude too small.

Do you understand the difference between already built-out storage, and preparing to build out storage? If you want to compare like against like, the number of ThorCon reactors deployed is exactly zero (0).

Storage is not already built out because it is still obviously better to spend the money building out generating capacity, and will be until its share is much larger. In particular, before storage can be useful, you need enough spare generating capacity to top up your storage while also driving customer load.

The business model for storage is leveraging the difference in prices at different times (of the day mostly). There is already quite a price difference on energy markets and negative prices happen regularly around the world.

You seem to be talking about storage as a separate business. But the major market for storage will be public utilities that also own generating capacity, and sell power principally to end users. After their storage is full, maybe they sell any extra to the grid, or use it to synthesize liquid fuel for sale.

Negative prices are a very, very temporary phenomenon. Very soon, all surplus generating capacity will be absorbed producing hydrogen and ammonia for sale into an unlimited market.

That graph actually shows the levelized cost of solar+storage capacity at $165-296/kWh-year

The levelized cost of solar + storage according to Lazards is even less: $85-158/MWh.

Oops, you're right, sorry. But that's still only four hours storage, and still higher than Thorcon's estimated cost for their reactor, which could actually supply power through the night and through all seasons regardless of weather conditions without extra cost.

ThorCon can make up any number they like. By the time they could get one built, prices for the alternatives will be much lower.

In addition to not being the same as getting through the night, it's far from the same as getting through several cloudy days in a row.

Energy sources that work when they want to will never replace energy sources that work when you tell them to. Lobbying against nuclear is just lobbying for coal and gas.

As someone who lives in an area that gets weeks of heavy cloud cover and little wind, it is sad to see this get voted down.

Porting electricity over HVDC from half a continent away (with several metro areas in-between soaking up supply) just seems impractical when we could have small reactors distributed around in smaller, more resilient grids.

Yes, small: much less power available, for the money, than would be ported in.

But you are not limited to porting in power from far off, you can draw down local, banked storage. If that runs low, you can bring in liquified ammonia synthesized in the tropics. All of this will be chosen according to what costs least. All of it costs less than the nukes would have set you back.

I hope we will, the problem currently is that this is not competitive compared to just burning natural gas. This is because the externalities related to global warming are not accounted for when the market determines the price of gas. Electricity will be more expensive either way and this really hasn’t sunk in yet. Were these costs accounted for, nuclear would be quite competitively priced, even with newer more modern reactors vs running the insecure ones from the 70s forever which is what we do now for the most part.

That being said, there is great potential in batteries becoming much denser and cheaper.

> I hope we will, the problem currently is that this is not competitive compared to just burning natural gas.

[Citation required]

Grid-scale battery systems have fallen more than 70% since 2015.

> nuclear would be quite competitively priced

Nuclear is one of the most expensive and keeps getting more expensive; it's not competing against natural gas. It's competing against wind and solar, the two cheapest forms of generation. Solar is dropping ~10% per year...

> Grid-scale battery systems have fallen more than 70% since 2015.

Then why are there checks notes 0 deployments ? Battery costs are exploding currently due to the hikes in prices of lithium, nickel and cobalt. Battery demand outstrips supply by far, and batteries are needed elsewhere.

> It's competing against wind and solar, the two cheapest forms of generation.

They're complimentary, not competition. Solar+wind alone

Poor research skills do not tell us much about power generation build-out status.

> Grid-scale battery systems have fallen more than 70% since 2015.

Grid-scale batteries are still tiny. Lithium batteries will not solve the grid problem anytime soon. Lithium (and co) will be strained to the max already.

Every other technology has barley been deployed at all. And there is already a whole litter of energy storage startups that have died.

> Nuclear is one of the most expensive and keeps getting more expensive

In order to get more expensive we would actually have to build plant.

But literally any series engineering analysis of modern GenIV plants show gigantic potential of cost improvement. And if we could actually build them in series production there is another order of magnitude of potential cost improvement.

Storage startups dying is a symptom of plummeting prices -- bad for them, very, very good for us.

There is little need, thus far, for storage, so little has been built. Right now, generating capacity is a better place to spend the money. Next year, the same storage will be much cheaper.

By the time any nuke started could be finished, even if it would have been competitive today, it would not when finished. So, it would be abandoned before completion. They would not return any of the money spent.

Companies doing molten salt reactors, including Thorcon, think they can make nuclear dramatically cheaper. There are reasons to think they're correct. It seems like a good idea to let them try.

Electricity will not, in fact, be more expensive. It will be progressively cheaper.

We have squirmed in the grip of petroleum and coal megacorps for decades, and will finally be free of them.

With concentrated solar you can store the heat and generate power in the night.

Yes but that costs quite a bit more than PV. Lazard puts it at $126 to $156/MWh.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

That overlaps with Lazard's range for conventional nuclear. And there are lots of reasons to think molten salt reactors in general would be significantly cheaper. Thorcon thinks it can get their cost down to $30/MWh.

Lazard's figures are for the cost of storage already built, not for the cost of the storage that will be built, a much lower figure.

The figure I quoted above was for thermal solar with storage. That's pretty basic tech, the storage is generally thermal as well. I don't see why the price would drop all that much.

Lazard is the source that most renewables advocates point me to, to prove how uncompetitive nuclear is. If your counterargument is that future costs will be lower than today's costs, then I think it's fair to also consider the costs Thorcon and others estimate for molten salt reactors.

ThorCon true costs are just unknown. Storage, like solar and wind generation, costs are subject to statistical laws.

That's just not the case. Pumped hydro is fundamentally limited in scope. It might be fairly cost effective but you only have a small amount of suitable sites, it can never scale up by many orders of magnitude to support the energy storage needed to enable meeting all energy demands with solar, wind, and hydro. That leaves the only proven energy storage method of grid scale electric batteries which again are only a tiny miniscule fraction of the energy needed. You can make more and more batteries, but lithium isn't plentiful, good luck mining enough lithium to support 100% electric vehicles and energy storage, prices would go through the roof.

Personally I think deferring electric vehicle charging and feeding power back into the grid could help a lot here and make this make economic sense, but that doesn't give you enough energy storage to go 100% solar and wind. Right now intermittent power sources are being subsidized heavily with being able to lean on cheap natural gas. Nuclear doesn't depend on any resources that would be strained even if relying on Nuclear power for 100% of demand. Nuclear is also power dense and other than NIMBY concerns is easier to site closer to where the energy is needed than large scale wind farms. Before you say "rooftop solar!" I'll admit, a PV panel is great for being able to scale down to tiny amounts of power instead of just "hundreds of MWe". That still doesn't address the fact that massive swaths of the globe do not get enough sunlight during the winter months to make 100% solar every week of the year worth it. You could currently overproduce enough in the summer to be net zero, but that doesn't change the fact that you're still relying on massive overproduction in sunnier climates and transporting energy large distances or fossil fuels to make up the difference. No chance energy storage bridges the gaps for seasonal changes instead of just a few days.

Renewables true costs are just unknown.

The number of sites suitable for pumped hydro is overwhelmingly more that is always assumed. In particular, you do not need an existing dam, a watershed, or even a mountain. But pumped hydro's main appeal is that it is very cheap to operate, in places it is easiest to build.

Ammonia electro-synthesis and air liquification are both mature tech, and just need to be built out. Hydrogen, similarly. Tankage for all of these is cheap, and power can be released via existing gas furnaces. Building out takes time.

Chemical storage has the massive advantage that it may be shipped from the tropics to anywhere it is needed, anytime it is needed, just like oil and LNG is today. That is where the majority of energy will be banked, because there is always demand for the same chemicals as industrial feedstock, so an always ready market to sell excess production into.

Batteries are the most expensive storage. You won't make much progress understanding power by thinking only about batteries. But anyway batteries are not dependent on lithium; iron-air batteries are cheap and iron is plentiful.

Nukes have no place in this future. Their power costs way too much to win a bid, almost all the time, but they need to win all the time to service their crushing debt load. And, it takes many years before any power at all comes out. So, they will predictably default on their debts; and thus not be built at all.

"when low-tech concentrated solar in the desert can get the job done"

Every attempt to do this in human history has failed, bar none.

There is a reason they build an LNG plant next to every solar plant they build.

> solar in the desert

Some places don't have deserts. Or even large unpopulated areas. Definitely not large unfarmed areas.

nuclear fusion can give us actually unlimited energy. maybe it won't work soon, but some people don't want to give ip a probably final resolution.

There is a huge fusion reactor in the sky. We don't need "unlimited" energy, we need cheap energy. There is zero reason to assume that fusion on Earth will be any cheaper than what we already have.

>when low-tech concentrated solar in the desert can get the job done

Consider West Virginia. (Just for example.) The Senator from there, buoyed by local public opinion, has been an obstacle to climate policy. A look at the state's economy will quickly debunk the idea that coal mining revenues alone drive this opposition.

Instead, West Virginia, like other places where opposition to reform holds fast, has a large manufacturing sector predicated on the ready availability of cheap electricity. Herein lies the real dependence on coal. The mountainous topography makes the widespread deployment of solar panels infeasible, and the cloudy weather and high latitude aren't helping. Wind faces a similar issue. There are no deserts nearby.

Nuclear power is attractive not only because it can support a transition to renewable energy[1], but because it can also be deployed readily to mitigate the economic fallout of carbon emissions reduction. And if the last ten years of political upheaval haven't demonstrated the importance of paying attention to the downsides when championing a policy that works well on average, well, I don't know what will.

1: http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...

There is, in fact, no need for desert to site solar arrays.

Reservoirs and pasture are places where siting solar is easy, and provides side benefits of higher operating efficiency and higher agricultural yield.

Resistance to renewables is nowhere technical, and always political. Disinformation is one political tool.

>Reservoirs and pasture are places where siting solar is easy

Reservoirs are deep, pastures are not relevant everywhere. Both approaches are essentially theoretical at this point due to the increased cost of construction vs. dedicated solar farms.

>nowhere technical, and always political.

You're forgetting "pragmatic". Lots of things are technically possible but not economically practical, at least not when you need them to be. Nuclear prevents disruption in the short-term; it is not necessary in the very-long-term, but the markets can remain irrational longer than you or I can remain solvent.

>Disinformation is one political tool.

I know, you replied with it. I studied a bunch of dry economic data to write the gp comment. It's not disinfo to know where money comes from.

Reservoirs have a surface.

It costs no more to site solar in pasture than in desert. It can be cheaper; you don't need to buy the land if it remains equally useful for its current use, and may be nearer market, so not need long distance transmission. Furthermore, lower operating temperature improves efficiency, and shade improves grass yield and lowers water demand.

That biggest current projects are in desert is a sign of market immaturity.

>Reservoirs have a surface.

Are you suggesting floating solar panels? Surely you jest?

>It costs no more to site solar in pasture than in desert. It can be cheaper; you don't need to buy the land if it remains equally useful for its current use

You have to stop using it during construction. That's a cost. Nobody is actively using the desert. But more relevant to the original point, there are no areas of large, flat pasture in Appalachia.

Floating solar panel installations are already in use. They operate at much higher conversion efficiency than desert panels, and reduce biofouling in the reservoir.

You don't need flat ground for solar. A south-facing slope is strictly better.

You are really reaching for objections now: It is universal practice to rotate herds between pastures. You would build in a pasture that livestock are not in this week. You might even build in winter when they are inside.

I think the term "mountain" is a bit strong wrt. West Virginia, but the terrain structure could make it actually a big winner with the change to renewables. As others have pointed out, it is not impeding the use of solar, but it gives something even better: cheap storage. If you have hills, pumped storage is difficult to beat and there are enough flat regions in the west of West Virgina and of course Kentucky, so that there should be plenty of solar to store. That would give WV a good chance to have around the clock electricity just based on solar only - and of course, there is always wind too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com