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Solar modules deployed in France in 1992 still provide 75.9% of original output power
(www.pv-magazine.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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Imagine where we'd be if leftists embraced nuclear power instead of killing it off everywhere they could.
You think if we take away 50 years of burning fossil fuels we'd be in "the same situation as we're in now"?? Wtf are you smoking?
It literally is, though I suspect the greens are the useful stooges of the fossil fuel propaganda.
So I quoted this sentence:
And then you started talking a bunch of blah blah about renewables, which I will note is NOT in that sentence.
And you did not mention nuclear, which I will note is the entire SUBJECT of that sentence.
Uranium price has being multiplied by 7 in 2007, and France's electricity, which were 70-80% nuclear at the time, didn't see any increase in price. Uranium price is definitely not driving electricity price, because nuclear use so little resources and fuel, that's one of its main appeal.
And 60+ years of french nuclear produced a 15 meters-wide cube of high level waste. This is what it looks like . Does that looks like some unsolvable issue to you?
Yes, because the government decided they couldn't raise the price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
The government does not decide for the cost of producing nuclear electricity, which has barely changed that year.
That's false, solar and wind power consume considerably more resources than nuclear and therefore produce considerably more waste than nuclear power.
What's more, because of their low load factor and intermittency, they require oversized capacity, storage devices and redundancy, further increasing their footprint.
Only if you don't account for oversizing the capacity, the storage and redundancy induced by the wide adoption of solar and wind power.
No, because until we solve the storage issues with electricity. You need a reliable baseline power source in the grid. Solar has 0% cost effectiveness at night. Nuclear is 100 times more environmentally friendly than coal. Even with the long term waste storage issues.
This has not being solved. There's not a single country in this world that has managed to not rely on hydro, nuclear, fossils or importations for electricity generation.
Please provide those "studies and researches" that backup your claim, because a simple calculation shows that the world's largest WWTP, Hongrin-Leman (100GWh in capacity and 480MW in power, over a 90km² basin) contains just 10% of the capacity needed and only 0.7% of the power required for a country like France to last a winter night (~70GW during ~14h of night).
So we'd need “only” 10 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of capacity, but 142 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of power. In other words, we'd need to flood at best 8.5x the surface area of Paris, and at worst the entire surface area of the Île de France department, home to 12 million inhabitants. And that's just for one night without wind (which happens very regularly), assuming we rely on solar and wind power.
Then we need to find enough water and enough energy to pump it to fill the STEP completely in 10 hours of daylight, otherwise we'll have a blackout the following night.
Wind and solar power cannot form the basis of a country's energy production, because they are intermittent energies, and the storage needed to smooth out production is titanic. These energies rely on hydroelectricity, nuclear power and fossil fuels to be viable on a national scale.
Point the flaws in my logic, debate my ideas, or just leave. Don't waste your time making another reply if you can't keep respectful, I won't bother reading it.
Asking for sources and data to support a disputed claim is the basis of scientific debate. Becoming aggressive and disrespectful after such a mundane request is much more revealing of who is debating in good faith here.
Relevant critic here
TLDR : The study does not support the claim made in the title. It just says that it will be economically feasible. When asked about if its physically possible, they just throw some vague techno-solutionism, and even admit that 100% renewable will may never be actually possible
A request must be made to access this article, I highly doubt that you made one and actually read that report, so I won't waste my time either.
This report does not even relate to our debate at all, it theorizes multiple scenarios for 2050, does not tell if it's feasible and how, and none of these scenarios are 100% renewables anyway. This is out of subject.
I'm not going to bother to keep going, it becomes obvious that you just took random studies whose title seemed to support vaguely your points , hoping that I'm as bad-faith as you and I that I won't open them.
Your statements are based on void and you become aggressive when asked for explanations. I take back what I have above: don't bother to answer at all, I'm just going to ignore you from now on.
Did you even read the links you posted?
Why waste time replying just to behave like a child?
Hydroelectric plants, batteries, generation on site, wave power, geothermal, ... There are lots of ways to reduce the need of non renewable energy.
We've basically solved the storage issues through about eighty different methods that have various applicability in different situations. They just need to be scaled up at this point.
It's actually better. No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result. A wind+solar+storage solution can match demand very close. This means we don't need to replace every GWh of coal and gas with a GWh of renewable. The lack of wasted power takes off a pretty big chunk.
"We totally can go to Mars, we have engines, they just need to be scaled up at this point"
Scaling up is almost the entirety of the problem that needs to be solved, you can't just brush it aside like this.
Check my comment that shows the scale of the problem
Absolutely false. Power consumption is very stable and previsible, plants can react in minutes, and the surproduction is small enough to be stored or exported.
The French electricity system operator, RTE, provides all the information on this subject:
Real-time consumption and production by region
Real-time forecasting and consumption
I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.
If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn't be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.
React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.
This is critical because it means we don't have to replace a GW of fossil fuel generation with a GW of renewables. The difference between demand and supply all but disappears. You don't have that for nuclear, though, because it doesn't react that way. In fact, it's preferred if they only provide baseload that never changes.
No, just no.
We know what happens when we build nuclear:
It's called France.
We also know what happens when we want to do without nuclear when we don't have hydro-electricity:
It's called Germany.
Take this [map] (https://app.electricitymaps.com/map)
Can you tell me how much green countries do you see which does not rely on hydro and/or nuclear?
The answer is: >!not. A. Single. One. Even after trillions of euros invested in it worldwide, not one country managed to reduce their electricity carbon print without nuclear or hydro.!<
Why this arbitrary date? In five and a half years, there would be no power plant, but if you launch 15 1GW projects in parallel, maybe it will take 15 years to build because of legal recourse as well as a shortage of engineers/technicians because people have been told for 30 years that nuclear is Satan and we want to stop. But after 15 years you have 15GW of nuclear.
But how long before we find a solution for storage? How much will it cost? Is it even possible to store so much energy with our space constraints and physical resources?
The debates and even this thread are filled with "we could totally go 100% renewables with political will and investments". No you could not, that’s called wishful thinking. In reality you can’t force your way through technological innovation by throwing money and gathering political will, or else we would skip renewables and go straight to nuclear fusion.
On thing that money and political will can help with, on the other hand, is to speed up and reducing costs to build nuclear. But somehow, you act like nuclear is inherently too slow to build, before an arbitrary date that you forget conveniently when we're talking about renewable storage. It's called hypocrisy and double standards.
I just proved that your theory is wrong by bringing up empirical data gathered over a whole country, why do you keep insisting?
Here in Italy, the only parties that seem to be favorable to nuclear are right-wing.
And of course, they got elected and didn’t actually do anything towards it.
Never trust right-wingers to do literally anything.
If a right wing party promises to take all the money from the rich and redistribute it to the poor, they're lying.
If a right wing party promises to invest in public transit, they're lying.
If a right wing party promises to pass a law enshrining LGBTQ rights, they're lying.
They're just a bunch of fucking liars, all they exist for is to make rich people richer.
Oh, I trust them to do everything I wouldn’t like them to do.
For example, so far they’ve been following through with removing LGBTQ rights and lowering taxes for the rich, just as they promised.
I'd like to specifically blame the vocal greens and not left or center left people in general.
Me too. Fuck the Greens. Joke political party in so many ways. Even if I lived under a system where First Past the Post voting wasn't the norm, I'd be looking for parties other than the Greens.
Compromised political party.