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Comment by doingtheiroming | Hacker News Reader

I’m not going to read this. Tidal power has failed again and again despite huge amounts of investment. The sea is simply too hostile an environment and the power density too low. The only thing it has going for it is predictability of delivery but as a solution to that, nuclear is a dramatically better bet.

This is a fantastic X thread explaining just how hard it is:

https://x.com/Jordan_W_Taylor/status/1645160329771470848?s=2...

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When you say "huge amounts", how huge? Like "x times the cost of Hinkley Point C"? I'm only aware of fairly cheap failures so far, but I admit I haven't really tried to follow the subject.

See Private Eyes passim.

Joking aside, tidal has been a subsidy money pit that has attracted chancers and grifters for a long time. That’s not to say there weren’t honest projects (the link I posted being a good example) but nuclear is a proven, well understood tech that doesn’t need to be developed. We know how to do it.

Hinkley C is far too expensive for many reasons but it will generate steady power for many decades once built. Tidal is basically a non-starter. A tech that has been not been commercialised, that offers only low density power generation and which will inevitably be maintenance heavy. It’s a non starter.

To me that sounds like a handwavy rephrasing of "don't bother about numbers or data, just trust my authority, I know these things."

Not all tidal power is in the sea. A Severn Barrage would be in an estuary and could generate up to 7% of the UK's electricity demand, depending on what location was chosen for the barrage.

We can't even build a railway between our #1 and #2 cities let alone take on what would be one of the world's greatest feats of engineering.

Quite. There aren’t that many estuaries and the greens have demonstrated their commitment to preventing their use. Given the UK’s planning disaster, it’s not happening.

Unfortunately X threads are no longer visible unless you're logged in.

https://nitter.net/Jordan_W_Taylor/status/164516032977147084...

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