I’ve seen plenty of conservatives say they’d rather have a loud data center than quiet solar farm near their home.
I don’t understand.
Possibly because the main data center companies are US held, while solar progress is much more international. Conservatives don’t see the world as “emissions vs technical progress”, but rather as “us vs foreign aliens”.
it’s crazy how close to post scarcity utopia we can get but you get these chuckle fuck red hats that are just hell bent on letting billionaires revert us back to feudalism
I doubt most conservatives have considered where the solar panels are being manufactured. They just hate them because their favorite talking head told them to.
But both are American owned and operated but manufactured overseas…
It’s cognitive dissonance of reality not aligning with the propaganda that indoctrinated them. They will never like it because words like clean, renewable and green are evil incarnate but they cannot give a proper logical explanation.
Well the solar farm uses tons of water and power, causing shortages and high prices, creates a giant eyesore of a building that will be worse than a dead mall when the bubble pops, and generates a crapload of noise and pollution. …… oh wait, that’s not solar
I have read the inverter and related cooling equipment of the solar system can be noisy if poorly implemented or maintained, though I doubt it would rival the downsides of a data center.
Even if both made the same amount of noise and/or occupied the same amount of space, a Solar Farm is better because it produces energy. A Data Center consumes energy (not to mention the energy is also being spent unethically.)
We are for the jobs the comet will bring.
Did any of them mention why?
Easiest to say when you’re not living near either
I know, those solar panels are just soooo loud
headline is clickbait. here’s the only thing it relies on:
According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.
Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.
so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear
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I mean, the literal meaning of efficiency would be the capacity factor (how much energy is actually extracted out of the inputs over how much energy the input contains) which is very measurable. I’ll concede that that is unfair, but even then there’s the extremely accepted measurement of land use per unit of energy:
(Solar is represented as CSP, concentrated, and PV, photovoltaic)
Edit: energy over land use→land use per unit of energy
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Yes, so nuclear uses 100 times less land for the same energy. The unit is hectares per TWh.
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what does this even mean
what is your standard of evidence? you’ve moved the goalposts three times now. first it was “define efficiency”, then “by the definition solar is better”, and now this which i still don’t understand
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The United States could meet its entire electricity demand just by putting solar panels on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol.
The land argument is beyond grasping at straws. The last refuge of the incompetent.
this is true. I’m not saying that we should stop efforts to install solar to install nuclear instead. as you say replacing the 12 million ha of corn ethanol with solar would produce nearly three times the US demand of 4200 TWh/y (with the averages from the chart above, you have 12 million/1000=12000) i’m for solar. however, i’m also saying that the us could meet nearly 300 times its entire electricity demand just by putting nuclear reactors on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol. we don’t have to debase nuclear for solar
Do you just burn piles of money for fun? Is that your hobby?
Who gives a crap what the maximal power output per land area is? It’s utterly irrelevant.
How do you read “solar is more efficient than Nuclear” from that title? And what would that even mean? The title is clearly about the amount of solar power generation, not efficiency.
you know how usually you look at statistics and assume they’re per capita? that was my mistake, though replace per capita here with per unit
they’re more economically efficient than nuclear, which means they give you more bang for the buck
so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear
We’ve known the ROI on Solar/Wind has been better than Nuclear for decades.
Nuclear usage is flat because it isn’t profitable to build or operate. The efficiency of Renewables is economic efficiency. Cheap scaling, low overhead, high profit margin
The main advantage nuclear has is size. It can produce more power per hectare of land than either solar or wind can, and this will be even more the case if the small scale reactors that Canada has been researching ever become a thing - basically a power plant in a shipping container, meant to service remote communities.
@Omgpwnies @technology Power density and the ability to generate large amounts of power quickly. There is less need for new methods of power storage (e.g., batteries).
People have been trying to do small scale fission for decades. They always slam headfirst into the square cubed law and the fact that fission plants were built giant for a damn good reason. Fission is so cost inefficient that the only remote hope you can have of making it profitable is if you build giant reactors and hope for big economies of scale. The hope of building small reactors on assembly lines has proven to be a pipe dream. Many have tried it, and it has failed again and again.
Which is definitely helpful for utility that’s constrained by space. For instance, with the nuclear powered freight shipping that Jiangnan Shipyard is looking to pioneer.
But for urban grid power or industrial production at the continental scale, space isn’t an issue. One reason why states like Texas and California are running away with renewable power even in the face of hostile political headwinds. Real estate is far cheaper than the energy is produces.
For the places that have enough land and environmental conditions suitable for wind/solar, that is true. In remote communities, just getting the materials for a wind farm there is incredibly difficult if there’s no warm water port for a ship to deliver the blades for instance. A nuclear reactor in a shipping container can be driven by transport on the logging roads or even air-lifted in. It’s not a universal solution, it’s something specific to fit a community’s unique needs.
For the places that have enough land and environmental conditions suitable for wind/solar, that is true.
Again, who doesn’t have this access?
In remote communities, just getting the materials for a wind farm there is incredibly difficult
Remote communities don’t have the kind of energy demand that nuclear power fulfills. Nevermind how it’s always going to be more expensive to build a nuclear generator than a big fan connected to a dynamo.
It’s not a universal solution
It doesn’t need to be, when the bulk of what we’re trying to replace is coal and natural gas.
I agree with this; I think the “universal” argument and subsequent infighting is propped up by the oil lobby to slow us down. I just think it’s important to highlight how efficient nuclear is. We should be using both good tools to solve this and part of that is knowing how good both are so they’re not unnecessarily ignored.
That argument holds for existing proven tech like large nuclear and solar, but convincing governments to invest in unproven and unlikly tech is a great way to prevent actual transition to occur at all. They sop up cash and give governments reasons to build nothing now, or eventually build expensive tiny demonstration systems that do not effect the overall fossil fuel market. That list would include things like small modular reactors, hydrogen power, fusion, etc.
Again, who doesn’t have this access?
There are communities in northern Ontario that are only accessibly by airplane ~6 months of the year, and those 6 months also have very low amounts of sunlight. They’re not quite north enough to be completely dark all day, but they only get a few hours of useable light per day in the winter.
This means that a) solar is less effective in the winter, and b) if there is damage to a wind turbine blade in the winter, they may not be able to get a replacement until spring.
Remote communities don’t have the kind of energy demand that nuclear power fulfills
Each reactor cell produces about 1MW, which is about enough to power a small town of about 1,000 people. They can also be air-lifted meaning if it needs to be replaced during the winter, that is still possible.
SMRs will be neat if they actually work, but there is no demostration that they can be remotely economically feasible. Even considering carbon emissions, it would be cheaper and more effective to improve the carbon footprint of the main power grid by a tiny fraction of a percent and then just give those small northern communities modern fossil fuel plants, maybe supplemented with renewables over time.
For large northern communities, grid connections are going to be the eventual solution either way.
if there is damage to a wind turbine blade in the winter, they may not be able to get a replacement until spring.
And if there’s damage to a nuclear facility?
Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized (by nearly everybody but the US and Russia) to heck. This is like saying trains aren’t profitable because of how much the US subsidizes roads. Even then, nuclear ROI is still better in the long term, it just comes slower.
Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized
Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It’s entire existence is predicated on public R&D. Virtually all of its generators are public projects. It’s a notorious money loser to operate. We still don’t have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands and in Superfund sites, too.
That’s not the reason it lags the alternatives, though. If public spending got us cheap energy with zero trade offs, everyone would be France by now.
Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels. It outperforms in defiance of subsidies, often growing market share in states that are actively hostile to its expansion.
Even in the face of enormous cuts to public spending and bailouts to coal, under Trump 1 & 2, renewables increased their market share.
That’s because renewables aren’t just efficient, they’re profitable. Enormously profitable. The private sector loves high margins on their capex spend, and renewables consistently deliver.
Even France is replacing nuclear with other sources in the long term.
Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It’s entire existence is predicated on public R&D.
You seem to be implying that solar cells weren’t. I don’t believe that is true. Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites. (PV was initially discovered privately, but so was nuclear.) Solar was considered a notorious money loser to the point where it was only deployed for spaceflight. It was only after 60 years of public R&D that private commercial solar became variable in the 2010s.
We still don’t have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands
This I’ll concede. In fact, in the US, it’s worse than “public lands”: it’s often indigenous reservations, so land the US doesn’t even own and sacred sites.
I’ll note that despite this being indeed a very big issue, nuclear land use is still two orders of magnitude less than solar for equivalent energy generation.
Virtually all of its generators are public projects. […] Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels.
Not true at all. In FY 2016 alone, US subsidies were just 415 million to nuclear, compared to 3036 million for solar (https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf Tables A3, A4). That’s nearly an order of magnitude. Nuclear is operated by companies just as solar is.
Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research. Nuclear only got 40. I am simply saying we should give it the fair chance before you can say that there really is no potential.
You seem to be implying that solar cells weren’t. I don’t believe that is true
Tell it to Bell Labs. Tell it to the the Solar Energy Industries Association. Idk why Americans couldn’t get on the ball publicly. But solar was squarely in the private domain for generations.
Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites.
They were brought about by the industrialization of satellites, certainly. But the R&D was all heavily privatized by and for the private telecommunications sector.
When the US began rolling out large scale solar power plants in earnest, Walmart became the nation’s largest installer and purchaser. No state or federal department came close to it.
The largest investors in new build construction are NRG Energy and Google. Even the state regulated utilities lag behind.
Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research.
Largely overseas and financed by foreign governments or private firms. The US efforts at subsidizing solar are regularly stymied and gutted by conservative governments.
Tell it to the US Council for Energy Awareness. The existence of Bell Labs was a bit of an aberration as AT&T was effectively a government-supported monopoly. They had a consent decree with the government to release innovations into the public domain so AT&T would not be broken up as a monopoly. In fact, since 1913 it had official recognition by the government as the natural telephone monopoly, until of course its breakup in the '70s.
Solar R&D was hardly private. You’re completely excluding things like the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advanced Solar Energy Research and Development Division. I only haven’t mentioned things like the Atomic Energy Commission because that seems obvious, not that there is no solar analogue for these things.
When the US began rolling out large scale solar power plants in earnest, Walmart became the nation’s largest installer and purchaser.
Amazon is still the largest purchaser of solar. If the implication here is meant to be that solar’s biggest supporters are private, no state or federal department ever came close to being the largest installer and purchaser of nuclear power plants because there are absolutely no public-sector nuclear power plants. All builders are private. Westinghouse of Nikola Tesla fame has been the top builder for a very long time and was bought out by private equity (thanks to a bankruptcy, sure, but that bankruptcy can be blamed on Bush’s rugpull shortly after announcing long-term nuclear funding, the Great Recession, and Fukushima).
This is also to say nothing of
The US efforts at subsidizing solar are regularly stymied and gutted by conservative governments.
And yet, my point is, even they’re still subsidizing solar orders of magnitude more than nuclear! I am simply saying we should give it the fair chance before you can say that there really is no potential.
AT&T was effectively a government-supported monopoly
It was certainly a monopoly. But hardly government supported. The government has issued major sanction against the company no less than three times.
- The Kingsbury Commitment, which forced AT&T to divest its stake in Western Union, stop acquiring competing independent local phone companies, and allow other companies to connect to its long-distance network
- The 1956 Consent Decree, requiring AT&T to stay out of the emerging computer/data processing market and license its transistor patents royalty-free
- The 1984 Bell System Breakup, which formally split the comment company eight ways.
Solar R&D was hardly private. You’re completely excluding things like the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advanced Solar Energy Research and Development Division.
The NSF has always languished in funding and has historically failed to deliver major breakthroughs, much less any kind of physical rollout, of a public solar/wind energy grid.
If anything, it has operated as an echo chamber of the fossil fuel industry, downplaying the efficiency and ultimate profitability of a renewable grid.
Hardly a subsidy.
And yet, my point is, even they’re still subsidizing solar orders of magnitude more than nuclear!
Show me the solar powered submarine.
Show me the solar powered aircraft carrier.
Show me any meaningful federally contracted project to implement solar power for domestic or international consumption.
At the very least, I can point you towards Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4. Nothing like that exists in the renewable space.
Nuclear power plants are much more subsidized than almost anything on the planet.
How many private sector nuclear power plants are there? How profitable are they? What is the cost per watt?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28903948
There are zero public-sector nuclear plants in the US.
It is literally impossible to operate a fission plant without government subsidies. Private insurers won’t touch the things, as the potential damage they can do in a worst case scenario is something only the budgets of nation states can absorb. Nuclear plants always rely on national insurance schemes to make them viable.
Solar is much more efficient at turning investment per watt than every over form of energy production. It has been so for years.
Turns out we already have fusion power, it’s just been placed safely 149.6 million km away. The solution to energy independence comes up every morning.
All energy comes from the sun except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum which might as well be the sun because it wouldn’t rotate without something to orbit around.
Technically nuclear came from a different star. The sun won’t create those kinds of heavier elements until it burns through its hydrogen and helium fuel to start fusing its way up to lead, and I don’t think it’s massive enough to actually reach the kind of supernova collapse required to smash lesser elements together into heavier elements than that in any significant amount. So technically, fission is the only the form of energy that isn’t based on solar. It’s just the still-cooling-embers leftover from someone else’s dying star, a whole bunch of billions of years ago. I guess you could say the sun’s gravity at least attracted it all into this general vicinity though, at least until the Earth’s own gravity started pulling its own weight.
All accessible energy originates from the low entropy state during the big bang.
Well, it’s like I told my old friend Einstein, everything’s relative!
btw geothermal does not come from the earth’s rotation. it mostly comes from nuclear decay of heavy isotopes in the earth’s interior and the enormous heat capacity of the earth’s interior, which means it’s still warm from the friction heat from when the planet first formed. in other words it’s there since the Earth formed, independent of the sun.
also there’s another (practically accessible) form of energy that comes neither from geothermal nor from the sun: you can pull energy out of the tidal movement that comes from the moon’s changing gravity field as it orbits around our planet. i think that one’s not really being used though because the only way to really utilize it is to build dams across havens and important shipping routes and that interferes with trade, which is considered the more economically valuable activity from the two.
Tidal energy is being used in many countries. You don’t have to block the canals. You can build structures in coastlines, or just put underground generators that run automatically without any dams because the water moves without the dams as well
except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum
emm that is not the source of geothermal energy…
TIL - according to one source 80% of the geothermal energy comes from radiation and the remaining 20% is from the sun.
Didn’t the molten core also originate in some way from the sun?
Yes but no. The sun didn’t form the Earth. The Earth and the sun both formed from a primordial star. You don’t hear much talk about the star that actually birthed us, because theres very little we can say for certain about it. We can’t even say for certain if Sol (the sun) is a second or third generation star because we only have vague notions about if the star that produced all the elements that aren’t hydrogen in the solar system was long lived or went nova in under a billion years.
Probably
The molten core is hot because a whole lot of rocks crashed into each other. Also, nuclear decay.
I know you are joking, but we have several commercial fusion plants that are in the construction phase.
Now you know why Big Oil is pushing so hard for massive profits. Between renewables and fusion the energy landscape is going to change dramatically.
…and it’s still 20 years away.
That is the propaganda big oil pushes. You are correct.
149.6 million km
how many American hotdogs is that?
At least three.
Found the guy who buys the fancy third of an AU dogs.
Well you know what they say about the length of your sausage. If it can’t reach Venus, then what’s the point, really?
km
American
You can’t mix units like that
I’d want to say “about a week”, but I learned not to overestimate people, so probably 5 days top
I’m curious, I wonder why something like a large magnifying glass, hasn’t been used to heat up something like a special metal/material or even oil or something, which can somehow be turned into storable energy for the grid 🤷♂️
Other than solar panels? Consumers have to pay for their implementation, with power sold to the grid at such a low rate these days, that for single occupier dwellings, they’re not worth it financially.
Do you mean something like the Mojave Solar Project, which has produced 5.1 million MegaWatt hours since 2015?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Solar_Project
Or do you mean something like a smaller scale, e.g. home use? Look up Parabolic Solar Collector.
Or are you thinking of an Heliostat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat Something like the Solar Two, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat#/media/File:Solar_two.jpg
Yes, something exactly like that, thank you for the link, I wonder why this idea hasn’t been replicated more around the world.
I’ll take a read today, maybe I’ll find out why this is so.
I’m wondering, too. I haven’t looked into the topic for some time, e.g. back when Solar 2 was being set up. At the time I had calculated that an efficient heliostat could scale down to the amount of power that four homes would use. And that was when I started thinking of forming a solar power coalition with my 3 closest neighbors. Of course we’d need a place to put the heliostat. So we’d need to raize the home on a fifth property. And of course we’d need gardens, sized for sustainable agriculture. Going from Jeavon’s How To Grow More Food, my property would have enough space for me, but I would need more for my partner. Assuming 2 of similarly sized properties for each of the above would be 8, plus one for the heliostat equals 9 properties, which is pretty much the whole block. Of course the HOA was going to have issues with that, so we had to take them over their properties as well. That was ages ago, and so now we’re realizing the need for additional power to run a moderate sized Data Center, and there IS that ridge to the North, which would be good placement for some discretely placed Wind Turbines… lol
You mean a Dyson Sphere right?
Dyson swarms would be more feasible. Heat rejection on a sphere would give an engineer a complete meltdown.
Nuclear plants - with high start-up costs, national security risks and high output - will always require concentrating large amounts of power in few hands.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Greater inequality results in a worse society in just about every imaginable way. And nuclear will always encourage that more than solar.
Yeah, damn governments holding all the uranium for themselves. It’s just not fair.
My son would argue that governments should have invested heavily in thorium reactor technology instead.
That is remains a cool potential technology, but why spend billions of dollars trying to develop a worse technology when solar already exists and for much cheaper? It’s just being sidetracked while letting investors enrich themselves on government research money
Plus it harkens back to the old adage about base power. No, we don’t need base power when we have large scale grid storage. Thats just coal propaganda
That is remains a cool potential technology, but why spend billions of dollars trying to develop a worse technology when solar already exists and for much cheaper?
This was the exact same argument made against solar. We should research and improve energy technologies. I doubt Thorium is the solution, but we’ve discovered a lot of our technology by researching something else and then discovering an interesting function or byproduct unrelated to the original goals.
Plus space exploration will need to be nuclear.
I seriously doubt there’s any useful overlap between nuclear for space and for terrestrial power generation. Even if there were, we’ve spent close to a century proving that nuclear is expensive and time consuming to run and thorium’s theoretical advantages re mostly only in comparison to existing nuclear technology. Research is always good, but that really looks like a dead end, especially in comparison to something that is cheap and ubiquitous, and entirely ready, just needs scale out. Even that is already happening
especially in comparison to something that is cheap and ubiquitous
In some countries nuclear is cheap and ubiquitous. The key is simple standardization.
In France for instance, nuclear accounts for about 70% of their power. They operate 57 nuclear reactors, all of which are one of 4 reactor designs. By having standardized designs these reactors are cheaper to maintain, parts and equipment are more available. The engineers that run the facilities are more familiar with every aspect of the plant, operating procedures are better understood. It’s easier to find qualified engineers and technicians. Accidents are uncommon (I believe they’ve never had any kind of major accident).
The price French households pay for power is comparable to what we pay in the US and they generate significantly less CO2 per capita. They also have less reliance on oil states.
We could have that too if we were motivated to make it happen.
And yet even in this ideal case where France built out a full country of standardized nuclear power half a century ago …… a quick online search shows me they still have double the cost/KWH compared to solar
LOL
Why bring Space Nuttery into this?
Nuclear power is a very important technology for space vehicles, probes and bases. There’s proven potential for greatly improved propulsion systems as well.
You can’t just hear the word space and declare it “nuttery”, that’s just ignoring whole industries and areas of active research and engineering.
Your response is exactly Space Nuttery. Dream-like nerd fantasies.
Space Nuttery is thinking it’s somehow important or relevant for humanity going forward.
A power source for a floating camera to go take pictures of dead rocks and frozen chemicals is a niche interest. No one has a RTG powered city.
“You can’t just hear the word space and declare it “nuttery”,”
You can’t just hear “Space Nuttery” and talk about space. Space is a mostly empty sucking vacuum hostile to all life and a radiation-blasted hell.
Space Nuttery is living in a fantasy world where we’ll just somehow go space mining and colonizing Mars with water from Saturn’s rings like it’s just a question of a longer trip to Home Depot.
It’s an intellectual dead end.
Nuttery?
Every dollar spent at NASA has returned so much more. They develop things for space travel that have uses far beyond space. We wouldn’t even have satellites and GPS if we didn’t venture into space.
Space has a lot for us to explore and a ton of resources we can use. Why strip mine the Earth when we could just take it from the asteroid belt?
You really need to disconnect space exploration from the likes of Musk or Bezos. We’ve been advancing humanity through space exploration before those two assholes were born
NASA has nothing to do with nuclear research. The world would benefit from nuclear research more than sending another group for a lap around the moon.
Thorium has been imminent for the last 40 years, like fusion.
I know right. How can I become a super hero from exposure if I can’t get some uranium.
This is why SMRs are a thing, and may still take off.
Too expensive
Depends on the location. In some places space is the commodity.
Like on the north pole maybe, but otherwise it’s just a massive loss of economy of scale.
Uhh any major metropolitan area without US large area infrastructure? Also, underwater.
Cheaper to drag a cable there.
I… don’t think you are thinking this through.
So far, they are not a thing though.
Sure they are, they’re just relegated to government use atm.
Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.
Not when we buy all our panels from China.
You buy the panels, and they last for 25+ years though.
In those 25+ years, there’s time to develop your own domestic supply chain.
You only buy them once though.
You mean we can make FREE ENERGY in our BACKYARD for almost NO Money? This is TERRIBLE!
-LITERALLY Conservatives!
I heard Hunter’s laptop ran on solar energy!!
Won’t somebody please think of the investors!?
What a nice coincidence, just recently edited this. I usually don’t get to use my custom made memes twice.
Don’t y’all know everything is made from oil and this is why we should keep burning the stuff to never see it again?
-Also LITERALLY Conservatives
nuclear power is expensive to maintain, plus needs all those expertise. and building the power plant takes like a decade+, and then you have to deal regulatory issues.
solar, you can pratically put that anywhere on the cheap.
Nuclear is the best for investors. They invest a fixed amount of money and the government pays dividends. Minimum kWh promised. Minimum price promised. There is no wonder why everyone wants nuclear.
Plus it makes people dependent on the electrical grid so you have a captive market.
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A “you can’t put a meter on it” moment.
We could have had this 30 years ago. There have been improvements in the tech and manufacturing, but the main reason for the price drop has been the scale of sales.
Wind Turbine technology has improved very marginally over the last 30 years
What’s really changed is capacity of production (and scale - these turbines are truly collosal) combined with the rapidly rising retail cost of electricity.
Marginally? Wind turbines are close to 15MW each now. 10 years ago it was more like 5-10MW. 30 years ago it was 3MW for an offshore turbine.
You don’t think that’s significant progress? 5x the power. You don’t think that requires improvements in technology?
Wind turbines are close to 15MW each now. 10 years ago it was more like 5-10MW. 30 years ago it was 3MW for an offshore turbine.
That’s almost entirely been due to size increases.
The average new build rotor in the US is 133 meters, 5x the size of 90s era standard blades
You don’t think that’s significant progress? 5x the power.
Biggest Blades = More Energy
Yeah. Just bolt bigger blades on it. Simples.
We included solar panels and a battery when we built our new house in Tokyo, and even though it’s in a quite shadowy area, I’m surprised how much power we get out of them (even on cloudy days). Switching to an EV now too. It’s an absolute no-brainer.
Only dark clouds reduce solar panel outputs. Panels don’t care if the light is hitting directly from the sun or diffused by cloud, as long as sum of incoming radiation over surface is high, you get your energy
Lucky you. I tried to get solar installed but around here it’s still ridiculously expensive. Unfortunately it’s also one of the scammiest industries. I went through a good dozen installers without finding one that didn’t make me feel ripped off, and that’s even before spending money.
Anyway, government incentives expired and the prices to consumers are still so high that there really isn’t a payback period. While I understand that the market should be able to stand on its own, we should have had a few more years to get off to a good start and build economies of scale or something.
Anyhow I was looking at $30k+ to cover half my electricity usage. Even worse, none of them wanted to actually sell me anything. Even when I made it an initial condition, they all wanted to dazzle me with word salad and sell me a lease or PPA agreement (totally not a lease, bro.)
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
Nuclear produces waste, which is mentioned often but it is usually responded by pointing out that it could be recycled and the worse to be buried.
Here is what people miss:
Are all our nuclear waste handled correctly today? If not then why should we imply that they will be in the future.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
And imo that’s a very valid argument on why we should use solar as much as we can.
While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.
The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.
Thats not even the biggest problem with nuclear power as the waste angle, at scale, will hit us decades in the future. The more urgent problem hitting us now on even on existing deployed nuclear plants is cooling water.
The byproduct of nuclear power generation is lots AND LOTS of waste heat. You have to get rid of this every second to continue to produce electricity. This is why nuclear power plants are typically built next to a large body of water. However, with reduced water supplies in reseviors theres less water to use for cooling nuclear plants. A double whammy is with climate change increasing temperatures, the water that remains is already hotter than it was, meaning it can carry away even less heat.
If a plant can’t get rid of its heat it needs to curtail (reduce) electricity production. This isn’t just theoretical. Its happening now in 2026 to existing power plants:
-
Hungary - Aug 2026 Hungary plans to shut down only nuclear power plant amid drought
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Romania - Aug 2026 Nuclear power plants are being shut down as Europe’s drought becomes an energy crisis
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France & Switzerland - Aug 2026 Droughts cause nuclear power plants in Europe to reduce output
At the time when Europe was experiencing its worst heatwave is recorded history, many European reactors had to be turned down or off. 2026 isn’t the first time this has happened either, you can go back in the last 5 years or so and see many reports of nuclear plant curtailment because of lack of cooling capacity (cool water).
When we know global temperature are rising, it looks like this will just get worse. How can we say nuclear is the future when the conditions for it working well are already declining?
Fuck, that’s a terrifying thought. Bring on the panic attacks! Yay!
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To the disposal argument i like to ask; are we handling our waste from burning fossil fuels well?
Is run away climate change “doing it well”?
Would you rather your waste be buried in the ground or pumped into the atmosphere?
Containing the waste and burying it in the ground is the default for nuclear, meanwhile doing the same for CO2 is very challenging and it may never be viable.
IMHO another big issue with nuclear is concentration of power. nuclear is quite stable, but not always and when it fails you suddenly loose a huge bunch of production that becomes hard to replace. (and Im not even getting into safety here)
France had to deal with a lot of issues just this year, with around 20% of their nuclear plants unoperative, which increased prices dramatically.
Solar is mostly distributed by design (and need) and failures are smaller
A hailstorm wiped out 350mW of solar in Texas in 2024. But, they learned that the angle of panels was critical to avoid damage and now they have a hail storm mode that increases the angle to protect the panels.
Not sure if panels can survive hurricanes, certainly not tornados.
350mW
Maybe they should keep some AA batteries around just in case another hailstorm hits.
AAA might be more portable though Texas might loose them in a strong gust of wind
The fact is that humans are just not well equipt to deal with problems beyond human scales.
We’re not good at accurately assessing risks beyond human time scales and we’re not good correctly prioritizing action when the benefit is beyond human time scales.
Big Oil predicted global warming pretty spot on, they just fought it and hid the findings instead.
To some extent I think we’ve gotten pretty good at long term predictions on things like this, but no one wants to hear it.
Global warming is a great example of how terrible we are at dialing in the correct priority for issues beyond human scales.
When some humans worked out it was coming, nothing happened - the opposite of nothing. As more humans became aware, more effort was put into styming efforts than actually doing anything.
Even now, as the effects are near-universally understood, present, and killing people - still we fail to act on the threat with anything like an appropriate level of seriousness.
I don’t think that’s fair unless by “we” you mean the oil companies and their bought politicians.
Being pro-nuclear was a very valid position up until a few years ago. Now solar has gotten so cheap that there is practically no reason to do it except to protect yourself against US imperialism.
You can still like it if you are looking far enough in the future to realize it’s the only viable energy source for space travel past like… Mars. Further than that and solar panels just won’t generate enough.
Nuclear reactors could still be useful in things like the mass production of hydrogen through steam electrolysis or even using fancy stuff like thermochemical reactions.
I know China is planning on building the world’s first nuclear reactor integrated into an industrial area for the production of very hot steam.
The trends on wind and solar have been clear for at least a decade if not more. The time for nuclear was last century when it had no serious competition.
You do realize that you can support multiple things? You don’t have to be antinuclear to be pro-solar.
You need to choose a thing to build there is not unlimited budget.
Nuclear, both fission and fusion (which will never happen anyway) are relics of an era of cheap fossil fuels and relative world order.
Solar electricity is viable at scale but also indicates a change in our species’ living arrangements on this planet.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. If it’s not just about the power and the cost, there are actually a lot of other factors that we have glossed over.
Solar is cooperative and local while nuclear necessitates centralization. In a nuclear future, large nuclear generating corporations are the sellers and we are the buyers. In a solar future, we pool and exchange our power depending on current production ability and current electric need… comrade.
Yes, but the bonanza of fossil fuels that rocket-propelled humanity from 1859 onwards with chemicals and pesticides and fertilizer is not sustainable with only renewable energy and resources.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
You think things are kind of uncomfortable now wrt inflation and fuel prices? Oh hold on, it’s not going to get better!
We have started to build the first commercial fusion plants now. You may want to update your rhetoric.
I look forward to seeing them produce energy in a short 20 years from now.
You should read up on the topic, I know I was surprised, the breakthroughs have recently happened. Now it is just permitting and building. Obviously there will still be issues, but there is little question to the reality now.
I’ve read of smaller reactors that should speed up prototyping, but nothing about actual net positive energy production. That’s still far away.
This happened a long time ago. Prototyping is over. I was very skeptical as well up until they figured out a practical reactor design and are in the process of building and permitting several commercial plants around the world.
No, there won’t. You sound like you’ve never heard of a scam. Here’s one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaren
Just, no.
Living in denial as they are building commercial plants. Looks like Big Oil propaganda got you.
You may want to update your physics, engineering, and reality.
You can remain ignorant, it is up to you. Cheers!
Haha! Hilarious. Get back to me in a year. Cheers yourself!
Solar still has some huge problems when it comes to seasonality and day/night cycle. You either need massive battery build out or some other form of energy to handle base loads and/or offset when solar isn’t producing enough.
Not saying solar isn’t part of the future, but we literally can’t just rely on solar.
You have to over build and you have to diversify. As many different types of generation as you can.
Nuclear probably has a role. However it doesn’t fit well in a dynamic generation scenario. It doesn’t like just sitting there waiting to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. It wants to be a full power all the time just due to economics.
If we could get tidal working, that would be superb. Regular, predictable and almost universal.
Battery tech is getting super good though, and the materials are recyclable. If solar becomes cheap enough we could even store it in creative (but less efficient) batteries like lake batteries or weight batteries and the like.
I had heard of lake batteries over the years, but never a weight battery. Thank you for teaching me something new today!
You know what else I haven’t heard of in a while? Thermal solar, where they use a parabolic mirror array to concentrate the sun onto a small tube full of water pushing a steam turbine. Even the plain steam could be used for heating and more. Steam can absolutely be concentrated under pressure (more of a capacitor than a battery since the temp won’t hold, but it does provide stability). The steampunk future from comic books is at our finger tips only we will generate the steam using the sun rather than big factories of iron and steel.
You haven’t heard of a weight battery because the weights need to weigh something close to a lake to be useful.
Companies come up every so often selling the idea and then people realise that the energy stored in the tower, mine, or whatever is about the same as a couple of EV batteries unless you have something the size of a lake.
Solar panels have become more than ten times cheaper than they were a decade ago. They are easily able to gather half the energy of what they did a decade ago in the summer now in the winter.
So even in the winter solar is twice as price efficient.
Yes there is downtime but solar is a fast and cheap way to replace most electricity cost. Then the rest can be fixed with nuclear in 20 years. We need clean cheap energy now and we can mostly get it.
I’m not talking about price, I’m talking about generation.
I have solar panels, they are great. However, I get too much energy in the summer, not nearly enough in the winter, and no power at night. Since I’m on a grid that doesn’t matter too much for me, but highlights some of the issues.
Even if I installed a battery, I’d end up with extra power in the summer and not enough in the winter. Which just highlights the discrepancy in production. Batteries obviously help solve this, but some mixture of wind/nuclear/other is needed.
Agreed. Are we seriously forecasting 5000 years of stable, deep, under-mountain storage. For all those years, waste storage is a prime target for contaminating locales.
The other quality argument I’ve heard from Lemmy, is that the security requirements for nuclear plants are essential and costly, due to plants being a similar target for creating contamination.
Essentially, nuclear power is a fascist tech, due to the centralised, militaristic, security apparatus required for the life of the plant and waste.
nuclear power is a fascist tech
Calm down, Francis.
Guess which single country is making all the PV panels?
Technically solar power is nuclear power ☝️🤓
All power is solar power if you go deep enough. Or to be more accurate, stellar power.
Tidal and geothermal are not.
You’re not deep enough yet, tides and earths core only exist because stars exploded billions of years ago and some particles eventually formed earth
That’s what she said
Solar is great but so is nuclear. They have different use cases, we need both.
Nukes are very expensive to build, but easily the cheapest energy is that you have a nuclear power plant up already and you keep it running. Germany royally fucked that one up.
Nuclear is not there when you need it. It’s prohibitively expensive to build, it takes decades to finish. If we wait for nuclear power to replace coal, we’ll be at 4°C.
Better stop complaining about that fantastical technology and use the tools that are there. They’re quite good already, we can do it.
What about using both instead of being idiots who fight about which is better? They clearly have their use cases. We can use all kind of renewables to decommission coals and meanwhile build nuclear reactors.
Or if you’re Germany, use renewables to decommission your nuclear reactors while continuing to burn Russian natural gas and Polish coal 🙄
Because it can be accomplished without nuclear, meaning nuclear is a huge expense and a lot of toxic waste for no advantage?
Nuclear waste can mostly be reused and what remaiin can just be sealed off, also, they are experimentig with thorium rn which is a LOT more safe; you also ignore that solar energy uses a lot of terrain
And also the mining and manufacturing and disposal/recycling for the panels. They don’t just pop into existence at the supply warehouse. Any full analysis should include the environmental entire manufacturing chain, regardless of whether it’s solar, wind, or nuclear.
Should also included the conseguences of installing them: will it disrupt any habitat? Will the color of the materials/object affect the temperature of the zone? Etc etc
You’ve got some valid points in your criticism of nuclear. They are also points that could be addressed - we built lots of nuclear power plants within budget and timelines, once. Like solar, and like everything, nuclear benefits from scale.
Similarly, there are valid points of criticism that solar gushing ignores: Power is needed 24/7, solar doesn’t deliver power 24/7 and batteries (pumped hydro, chemical, heat etc) are nowhere near large enough to see the whole of society powered through the winter. If we built renewables like we built traditional power plants we would say “I’d like 1 GW, 95% availability, steerable down to 0.6 GW”. Solar right now goes “weeell, not really my problem what you want - I can give you power sometimes and sometimes not”.
So like coal power socialises the cost of pollution, renewables socialises the cost of consistency.
We could instead say “storage is the solar field operators’ concern” and then you’d be able to see what solar really costs”.
And hear me right; I’m ALL in on renewables. I’m also ALL in on nuclear. We need everything that can deliver power with low carbon output. If nuclear goes away, you’ll have to start a tonne of gas peaker plants when there’s not enough wind and not enough sun to power everything.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
the planet has a finite amount of uranium. It’s rare.
That doesn’t matter. Uranium isn’t that rare, and we only need a power source that kicks the can down the road long enough to build renewable alternatives. Once we start running out of uranium, its price will increase and it’ll be profitable to replace nuclear plants.
The only reason the same logic doesn’t apply to fossil fuels is that climate change is an externality that will kill us long before we run out of fossil fuels.
If nuclear solves the problem for a century, then in 2126 our solar, wind, batteries, enhanced geothermal, wave etc will be very mature and able to replace nuclear quite easily.
fantastical technology
Ah, the “fantastical technology” of the 1950s.
It’s only prohibitively expensive the way that we’re currently doing it in the US, there are better ways.
Not in France, Great Britain or Germany either. Or Poland or Spain. To my knowledge not in Japan either.
Probably you are talking about some countey with lax regulations. Which is curious , because proponents of nuclear power always say Chernobyl could not have happened in a country with good regulations (so Japan probably is not included in that list either)
Fukushima survived an earthquake and then a tsunami before partly going prompt critical. The meltdown was incredibly controlled compared to Chernobyl.
That…is remarkable brain acrobatics to paint Fukushima somehow in a good light. Tell that shit to yourself. The lucky thing that happened to them was the wind blowing seawards, and not towards Tokyo, else they’d have to evacuate a 30 million inhabitant metropolis. That’s not an achievement of well controlled technology.
I live in Finland, in a few months it’ll be -20C outside and about 0-10 hours of sun per month, depending on cloud coverage. Solar is not really an option for half the time here. Wind is bit better, but unfortunately doesn’t quite work at the coldest times.
It’s possible that nobody should live in Finland…
Sure, we’ll put it down your street and bury all the waste in your backyard if you don’t mind.
This is such a cheap shot, nuclear power generation and waste disposal is mostly a solved and highly regulated and enforced problem. I can just as easily ask what is the solution to the waste regarding batteries/panels? I know the industry is saying recycling, may I ask the figures, especially regarding normal folks at home.
Don’t get me wrong, I am pro solar just as much pro nuclear. The future should be a mix of what works best at a given location and constraints. Solar saved my country South Africa, read about how a corrupt government destroyed a world class energy company, built the most cost and time overrun and largest two coal plants in the world, they fucked up. We sat for years in the dark and the private sector built the same capacity, using mostly solar, as the two coal plants within 4 years.
Recurring blackouts, load shedding, are a thing of the past.
We actually have kind of solved that problem in Finland. It’s essentially burying the waste in our backyard, but the backyard is half a kilometer underground.
Great solution. Will you take ours, too? Sincerely, Germany.
I think you guys also have an underground. Have you checked?
Do you not have any of your own backyard you could also dig up?
Serious questions for people not looking to play political whack-a-mole and slapping people around online.
I haven’t taken the time to research - but is the “solar overtaking nuclear” because of the dramatic increase in solar farms? Or primarily from the increase of tech? I imagine an mix of both, but the quantity increase seems to be significant.
Are nuclear plants as efficient as they can be? Or are most of plants decades old with problems from aging?
Can the rise of solar be more person to person investment? Or is it’s increase mostly from huge cap ex from people wanting to own and charge for the energy? Nuke is obviously a huge expense begining to end.
The price per watt is rapidly shrinking all while the batteries keep getting cheaper and better. Progress keeps being made. Sodium batteries are coming and promise inferior storage capacity, but excellent reusability at a much better price point than regular lithium batteries. So they might not be put in phones, but for static installation such as houses, they are very promising.
I believe the price per watt almost everywhere on earth is better with solar than with coal/oil/gaz, even in the USA where they are actively working against solar. Another advantage solar has, is how easy anyone can have it installed. So it fits almost anywhere without complications. I couldn’t tell you if the rise is mostly individuals or companies looking to resell the energy though. But for sure, solar is replacing all of those.
As for nuclear, they require HUGE commitments, a lot of consideration on where to put those plants and where to store the wastes. Nobody wants to live anywhere near wastes and everybody is at least lowkey fearful of a nuclear powerplant. It’s not surprising with what happened in the past. Even if all incidents were mostly due to someone cheaping out on something. Even that incident in japan due to a tsunami. (Btw check out the show Chernobyl if you haven’t, it’s really good).
Another disadvantage of nuclear is they are far too dangerous for gouvernments to just “let you build it out” as an energy company. That’s not much of a problem for solar plants.
Modern nuclear remains very much cheaper on the long term and is totally safe, but it’s hard for governments to keep long term commitments when political will is so easily changed. So nuclear plants are rarely built and yeah, mostly aging out.
When we figure out fussion though… Oh boy, nuclear is going to be THE source of electricty. No wastes. Just clean energy. But that’s not soon.
The Dept of Energy was stripped of a lot of nuclear oversight staff and regulations by Trump and Doge, to fast track microreactors for data centers.
Fuck us and all the life forms living here I guess.
…and I think they’ve all gone “Screw that! Gas turbines are cheaper. Fuck the emissions.”
I think it’s just the economics of it, as it almost always is.
Solar panels have been dropping logarithmically in price for 50 years. Battery improvements don’t hurt either.
I am a fan of nuclear energy, but its cost has not done anything like that. It would be a good thing for us to develop cheaper fission and build more reactors. I know there are companies trying to bring it back, at least.
Nuclear has lots of regulations so there had been little to no research in scaling it up compared to the vast sums of private RnD that panels and batteries have seen.
Yup, it’s all about the economics. Solar + Lithium batteries is cheaper is cheaper than anything else. When Sodium batteries start getting cranked out it’ll be even cheaper.
Averaging nuclear over the entire world really doesn’t give it a fair shake, since there are many jurisdictions that won’t build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones. Where I am, the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is more than five times what’s supplied by solar and wind combined, and we’re doing just fine (and building out more nuclear in addition to more renewables).
In UK in 2010, 10 new nuclear plants were announced. Since then 5 older plants have been shut leaving us with 5 active. 1 of the 10 new ones started construction and it’s massively over budget and delayed.
In the same time we’ve added about 20GW of solar.
New nuclear plants take like 10 years to build, and need to plan out a 50+ year useful life in order to be worth the up-front construction costs.
I wonder what the state of energy production in 2075 will be, where a nuclear power plant designed in 2025 and completed in 2035 will still have 10 years in order to break even on cost, competing with whatever the state of the art is on generation in 2075. Fusion? Widespread solar+wind+geothermal+batteries? Something we haven’t even dreamed of?
That’s why I’m skeptical of nuclear fission these days. It locks us in too long.
I’m all in on solar for most places.
Sure it uses a bit more land, but it makes no noise, no pollution, there’s zero risk of an accident, no targets for terrorism and your grid isn’t completely shut down if it is somehow turned offline.
You don’t depend on others for your own resilience. No need for oil, gas or uranium.
Unless you live in the high northern latitudes, there is almost no reason to not be building a durable and resilient battery-renewable grid
btw the reason why denmark and germany are building so many wind turbines is mostly because they’re so far north.
Nuclear is slow. Solar is fast.
Nuclear has been slow, for a variety of reasons, but that is about to change.
SMR
Modular reactors are fast. Ontario will have three online in 2 years.
You can have a solar panel up and running in like an hour.
Solar is still faster
Solar and wind don’t render entire regions uninhabitable when something goes wrong.
Solar and wind alone can’t run a grid unless there is a significant amount of battery storage.
Its possible to build reactors that don’t fail spectacularly. Just look at penslyvania with the three mile island nuclear plant or hell you could even look at fukushima. People still live around those locations.
edit: Build out more solar too because that is a great way to generate power but don’t snub other things just because they aren’t “perfect” from your perspective.
And if Republicans weren’t such greedy assholes we’d have been here decades ago
