The Energy Generation Megathread: Heated Exchanges

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MrYenko: Jun 18, 2012; #2 isn't ALWAYS bad...

CommieGIR posted:

https://twitter.com/simonwakter/status/1367154920890236934?s=20

So, Germany's Ex-Chancellor, who pushed Anti-Nuclear propaganda and supported the Oil/Gas Pipeline to Germany from Russia was just appointed to the board as a "Independent Director" of the Russia state owned Oil company.

Hm, wonder what the connection is....

The more things change, the more they stays the same.

That�s loving vile.

# ? Mar 3, 2021 21:26

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 19, 2024 19:24

Redgrendel2001: Sep 1, 2006; you literally think a person saying their NBA team of choice being better than the fucking 76ers is a 'schtick'

a literal thing you think.

Schröder has been a Russian asset since the early 2000s.

# ? Mar 4, 2021 04:01

suck my woke dick: Oct 10, 2012; I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

Redgrendel2001 posted:

Schröder has been a Russian asset since the early 2000s.

at Gazprom :lol:

# ? Mar 4, 2021 13:12

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

https://twitter.com/crudegusher/status/1368769514691821568?s=20

https://twitter.com/Anon1Oil/status/1368770391859167241?s=20

Energy Twitter is hilarious.

# ? Mar 8, 2021 04:50

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I figured this was the best place to post these wonderful contraptions.

Bladeless Turbines could bring wind power to your home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULCMJGfKBDM

quote:

The giant windfarms that line hills and coastlines are not the only way to harness the power of the wind, say green energy pioneers who plan to reinvent wind power by forgoing the need for turbine towers, blades � and even wind.

�We are not against traditional windfarms,� says David Y��ez, the inventor of Vortex Bladeless. His six-person startup, based just outside Madrid, has pioneered a turbine design that can harness energy from winds without the sweeping white blades considered synonymous with wind power.

The design recently won the approval of Norway�s state energy company, Equinor, which named Vortex on a list of the 10 most exciting startups in the energy sector. Equinor will also offer the startup development support through its tech accelerator programme.

The bladeless turbines stand at 3 metres high, a curve-topped cylinder fixed vertically with an elastic rod. To the untrained eye it appears to waggle back and forth, not unlike a car dashboard toy. In reality, it is designed to oscillate within the wind range and generate electricity from the vibration.

It has already raised eyebrows on the forum site Reddit, where the turbine was likened to a giant vibrating sex toy, or �skybrator�. The unmistakably phallic design attracted more than 94,000 ratings and 3,500 comments on the site. The top rated comment suggested a similar device might be found in your mother�s dresser drawer. It received 20,000 positive ratings from Reddit users.

�Our technology has different characteristics which can help to fill the gaps where traditional windfarms might not be appropriate,� says Y��ez.

These gaps could include urban and residential areas where the impact of a windfarm would be too great, and the space to build one would be too small. It plugs into the same trend for installing small-scale, on-site energy generation, which has helped homes and companies across the country save on their energy bills.

This could be wind power�s answer to the home solar panel, says Y��ez.

�They complement each other well, because solar panels produce electricity during the day while wind speeds tend to be higher at night,� he says. �But the main benefit of the technology is in reducing its environmental impact, its visual impact, and the cost of operating and maintaining the turbine.�

The turbine is no danger to bird migration patterns, or wildlife, particularly if used in urban settings. For the people living or working nearby, the turbine would create noise at a frequency virtually undetectable to humans.

�Today, the turbine is small and would generate small amounts of electricity. But we are looking for an industrial partner to scale up our plans to a 140 metre turbine with a power capacity of 1 megawatt,� says Y��ez.

Vortex is not the only startup hoping to reinvent wind power. Alpha 311, which began in a garden shed in Whitstable, Kent, has begun manufacturing a small vertical wind turbine that it claims can generate electricity without wind.

The 2 metre turbine, made from recycled plastic, is designed to fit on to existing streetlights and generate electricity as passing cars displace the air. Independent research commissioned by the company has found that each turbine installed along a motorway could generate as much electricity as 20 sq metres of solar panels, more than enough electricity to keep the streetlight on and help power the local energy grid, too.

A scaled down version of the turbine, standing at less than 1 metre, will be installed at the O2 Arena in London where it will help to generate clean electricity for the 9 million people who visit the entertainment venue in a usual year.

�While our turbines can be placed anywhere, the optimal location is next to a highway, where they can be fitted on to existing infrastructure. There�s no need to dig anything up, as they can attach to the lighting columns that are already there and use the existing cabling to feed directly into the grid,� says Mike Shaw, a spokesperson for the company. �The footprint is small, and motorways aren�t exactly beauty spots.�

Perhaps the most ambitious divergence from the standard wind turbine has emerged from the German startup SkySails, which hopes to use an airborne design to harness wind power directly from the sky.

SkySails makes large fully automated kites designed to fly at altitudes of 400 metres to capture the power of high-altitude winds. During its ascent the kite pulls a rope tethered to a winch and a generator on the ground. The kite generates electricity as it rises into the sky and, once completely unspooled, uses only a fraction of the electricity generated to winch back towards the ground.

Stephan Wrage, the chief executive of SkySails, says the airborne wind energy systems mean �the impact on people and the environment is minimal �The systems work very quietly, practically have no visible effect on the landscape and barely cast a shadow,� he adds.

Today, the design can generate a maximum capacity of 100 to 200 kilowatts, but a new partnership with the German energy firm RWE could increase the potential output from kilowatts to megawatts. A spokesperson for RWE said the pair are currently looking for the ideal kite-flying site in the German countryside.

# ? Mar 16, 2021 15:02

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

I love my big throbbing turbine

# ? Mar 16, 2021 15:26

Phanatic: Mar 13, 2007; Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

DrSunshine posted:

I figured this was the best place to post these wonderful contraptions.

Bladeless Turbines could bring wind power to your home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULCMJGfKBDM

"There�s no need to dig anything up, as they can attach to the lighting columns that are already there and use the existing cabling to feed directly into the grid,"

How are they going to synchronize with the grid?

# ? Mar 16, 2021 16:35

Lurking Haro: Oct 27, 2009

Phanatic posted:

"There�s no need to dig anything up, as they can attach to the lighting columns that are already there and use the existing cabling to feed directly into the grid,"

How are they going to synchronize with the grid?

There's some wiggle room.

I'm doubtful about the longevity of those.

# ? Mar 16, 2021 17:06

Phanatic: Mar 13, 2007; Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Honestly, "made from recycled plastic" and "mounts on existing light poles, feeds directly into the grid," and other things sound like red flags that mark it as about as impractical and marketing-driven as "solar roadways."

# ? Mar 16, 2021 17:13

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

Phanatic posted:

Honestly, "made from recycled plastic" and "mounts on existing light poles, feeds directly into the grid," and other things sound like red flags that mark it as about as impractical and marketing-driven as "solar roadways."

Pretty much. Its a neat idea, maybe for a home system, but I cannot see that being adopted on a large scale like normal wind turbines.

# ? Mar 16, 2021 17:17

Blorange: Jan 31, 2007; A wizard did it

Those vibrating tubes are a scam, they never mention how much power they generate because it's practically nothing. Imagine how much smaller the wind harvesting area of a wacky inflatable tube power is compared to an actual turbine, they're only good for bilking investors.

# ? Mar 16, 2021 18:08

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

Blorange posted:

Those vibrating tubes are a scam, they never mention how much power they generate because it's practically nothing. Imagine how much smaller the wind harvesting area of a wacky inflatable tube power is compared to an actual turbine, they're only good for bilking investors.

Yeah the only actual ones I've seen actual output numbers on look like this:

# ? Mar 16, 2021 18:12

Harold Fjord: Jan 3, 2004

I don't know if it was here or climate change thread but there was an effort post about those kinds of turbines being put up along a highway and how they are terrible due their design/engineering even if you set aside the fact that the "excess" energy along the highway is that much more gas being burned.

# ? Mar 16, 2021 18:29

Phanatic: Mar 13, 2007; Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Harold Fjord posted:

I don't know if it was here or climate change thread but there was an effort post about those kinds of turbines being put up along a highway and how they are terrible due their design/engineering even if you set aside the fact that the "excess" energy along the highway is that much more gas being burned.

And generally what's the point of an oscillating windmill? Oscillation compared to rotation sucks, since your load is constantly shifting back and forth and has to reverse direction all the time. And you're what, going to couple it to a rotational generator? Turbines just go around and around, it's a lot simpler mechanically and far more reliable.

# ? Mar 16, 2021 18:44

catspleen: Sep 12, 2003; I orphaned his children. I widowed his wife.

It seems like putting one of those wind dildos on top of an existing street light would cause problems with the base, no?

# ? Mar 17, 2021 14:26

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I'm very skeptical about this goofy-looking thing too, but here's the info from the company's website: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/

EDIT: After reading - yeah it's bullshit!

DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Mar 17, 2021

# ? Mar 17, 2021 16:48

Ionicpsycho: Dec 25, 2006; The Shortbus Avenger.

DrSunshine posted:

I'm very skeptical about this goofy-looking thing too, but here's the info from the company's website: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/

EDIT: After reading - yeah it's bullshit!

Did they quietly say a 2.75m tall one of those would produce a whopping 100 Watts? Yeesh

# ? Mar 18, 2021 19:13

Serjeant Buzfuz: Dec 5, 2009

Ionicpsycho posted:

Did they quietly say a 2.75m tall one of those would produce a whopping 100 Watts? Yeesh

I would expect a vibrator of that size to be consuming energy, I'm impressed.

# ? Mar 18, 2021 20:48

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

The Natural Gas industry: Burning down the world to harvest more methane

https://twitter.com/ToughSf/status/1358460519120855042?s=20

# ? Apr 1, 2021 23:17

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

CommieGIR posted:

The Natural Gas industry: Burning down the world to harvest more methane

https://twitter.com/ToughSf/status/1358460519120855042?s=20

Yea...

None of this true and extremely unlikely. There's a deeper conversation in the global warming thread about a year ago - https://climatetippingpoints.info/

# ? Apr 1, 2021 23:38

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

Yea...

None of this true and extremely unlikely. There's a deeper conversation in the global warming thread about a year ago - https://climatetippingpoints.info/

That's not the point, the point is that the Industry as a whole sees such theoretical tipping points as business opportunities to harvest more fossil fuels.

# ? Apr 1, 2021 23:48

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

Yea...

None of this true and extremely unlikely. There's a deeper conversation in the global warming thread about a year ago - https://climatetippingpoints.info/

So there's zero risk of methane release from permafrost and seabeds because of climate change?

# ? Apr 2, 2021 15:36

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

Raldikuk posted:

So there's zero risk of methane release from permafrost and seabeds because of climate change?

Its probably a real issue, but maybe not as large of what as we thought. Regardless, the point was that the fossil fuel industry is wringing their hands at the possibility.

# ? Apr 2, 2021 15:42

Owling Howl: Jul 17, 2019

There's some tentative movements in nuclear

Von der Leyen wants to include nuclear in European taxonomy for green energy

Biden wants to include nuclear in green energy standard.

Almost seems coordinated. Probably means some governments will throw money at nuclear although it's probably unlikely to affect public perception.

# ? Apr 2, 2021 20:41

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

Owling Howl posted:

Von der Leyen wants to include nuclear in European taxonomy for green energy

Biden wants to include nuclear in green energy standard.

Almost seems coordinated. Probably means some governments will throw money at nuclear although it's probably unlikely to affect public perception.

Actually Public Perception of Nuclear is on the right, above 50 percent for the first time in years.

quote:

For three decades, a perception gap told a story of stigma attached to nuclear energy; the majority of Americans judged public opinion about nuclear energy to be less favorable than their own. In April 2019, for the first time ever in 36 years of surveying the national public about nuclear energy, a majority of Americans said they believe that a majority of people in their community favor nuclear energy; 53 percent perceive the majority to be in favor, and 47 percent perceive the majority to be opposed. That finding suggests that the image of nuclear energy may be changing. Among younger Americans, ages 18 to 34, 58 percent perceive public opinion to be majority favorable, and 42 percent perceive it to be majority unfavorable.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-31...20be%20opposed.

# ? Apr 2, 2021 20:53

A GIANT PARSNIP: Apr 13, 2010; Too much fuckin' eggnog

CommieGIR posted:

Actually Public Perception of Nuclear is on the right, above 50 percent for the first time in years.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-31...20be%20opposed.

Ok but the �personally favor� metric dropped from 65% to 61%

# ? Apr 2, 2021 22:30

MightyBigMinus: Jan 26, 2020

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

Yea...

None of this true and extremely unlikely. There's a deeper conversation in the global warming thread about a year ago - https://climatetippingpoints.info/

I spot checked a few of these and they were really good, thanks for the link.,

Raldikuk posted:

So there's zero risk of methane release from permafrost and seabeds because of climate change?

Hi Raldikuk, if you read a several page article that has dozens of specific numbers, models, and projections, and your brains' takaway from that was "so there's zero risk" then you are suffering from a psychological condition known as 'splitting', a common symptom of depression.

# ? Apr 2, 2021 22:53

silence_kit: Jul 14, 2011; by the sex ghost

MightyBigMinus posted:

a psychological condition known as 'splitting', a common symptom of depression.

Wow, I looked up the term 'splitting' and posts in D&D make a lot more sense to me now.

# ? Apr 2, 2021 23:58

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Sometimes I am simply stunned when it comes to Climate Twitter vs. Climate Energy... We are not hitting 1.5C. :psyduck:

And I like Micheal Mann and Glenn!

https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1379046613537161217?s=20

# ? Apr 5, 2021 23:10

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

MightyBigMinus posted:

I spot checked a few of these and they were really good, thanks for the link.,

Hi Raldikuk, if you read a several page article that has dozens of specific numbers, models, and projections, and your brains' takaway from that was "so there's zero risk" then you are suffering from a psychological condition known as 'splitting', a common symptom of depression.

I appreciate the internet psychoanalysis thanks. The poster in question said "none of this is true", which is in fact not what the articles he linked to say. My issue was with the poster not the articles.

# ? Apr 6, 2021 01:25

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

Sometimes I am simply stunned when it comes to Climate Twitter vs. Climate Energy... We are not hitting 1.5C. And I like Micheal Mann and Glenn!

https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1379046613537161217?s=20

this seems like a really dumb thing for them to gang up on him over and reading more of the thread it seems like they�re doing everything in their power to not understand what he�s even saying

ain�t twitter great

# ? Apr 6, 2021 01:31

FreeKillB: May 13, 2009

Interesting piece on why nuclear is so drat expensive.

Seems like a classic 'the perfect is the enemy of the good' phenomenon.

Quoted example:

T. Rockwell's What's Wrong with Being Cautious? posted:

A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer�s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.

The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

FreeKillB fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Apr 17, 2021

# ? Apr 17, 2021 13:06

Heck Yes! Loam!: Nov 15, 2004; a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

FreeKillB posted:

Interesting piece on why nuclear is so drat expensive.

Seems like a classic 'the perfect is the enemy of the good' phenomenon.

Quoted example:

This pains me to read. We could have hundreds of nuclear plants but nope they're too expensive. Meanwhile let me drive up the cost with some pointless grift.

# ? Apr 17, 2021 15:01

MiddleOne: Feb 17, 2011

FreeKillB posted:

Interesting piece on why nuclear is so drat expensive.

Seems like a classic 'the perfect is the enemy of the good' phenomenon

Yeah it's basically three effects which all add up:

1. Increased safety requirements, Chernobyl and Fukushima both increased the regulatory burden across basically every nation on the planet
2. A lot of people are terrified of nuclear power, which adds upon factor 1) significantly
3. Nuclear construction has kept decreasing over the decades increasing marginal costs on everything involved through no longer having the advantage of economies of scale, something oil, coal, gas and renewable all benefit from

# ? Apr 17, 2021 19:36

Trabisnikof: Dec 24, 2005

MiddleOne posted:

Yeah it's basically three effects which all add up:

1. Increased safety requirements, Chernobyl and Fukushima both increased the regulatory burden across basically every nation on the planet
2. A lot of people are terrified of nuclear power, which adds upon factor 1) significantly
3. Nuclear construction has kept decreasing over the decades increasing marginal costs on everything involved through no longer having the advantage of economies of scale, something oil, coal, gas and renewable all benefit from

There was a recent study that showed that safety concerns and related regulatory burden only accounts for a portion of the increasing costs of nuclear power and most of the increase costs are because of construction inefficiencies:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/

quote:

The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent�and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays.

Many in the nuclear industry view this as, at least in part, a failure to standardize designs. There's an extensive literature about the expectation that building additional plants based on a single design will mean lower costs due to the production of standardized parts, as well as management and worker experience with the construction process. That sort of standardization is also a large part of the motivation behind small, modular nuclear designs, which envision a reactor assembly line that then ships finished products to installations.

But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"�the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent.
...
Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators "required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material." Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.

But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.

By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate.

So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima.

As for the majority of the cost explosion, the obvious question is whether we can do any better. Here, the researchers' answer is very much a "maybe." They consider things like the possibility of using a central facility to produce high-performance concrete parts for the plant, as we have shifted to doing for projects like bridge construction. But this concrete is often more expensive than materials poured on site, meaning the higher efficiency of the off-site production would have to more than offset that difference. The material's performance in the environment of a nuclear plant hasn't been tested, so it's not clear whether it's even a solution.

the actual paper:

https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S254243512030458X

https://sci-hub.se/https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S254243512030458X

We've seen a good example of that at the Vogtle plant, where initial construction didn't meet the design requirements and so they had to tear part it out and start over.

# ? Apr 17, 2021 20:29

suck my woke dick: Oct 10, 2012; I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

That's kind of consistent with the general issues plaguing major construction projects in North America and the EU. See for example the muricans and Brits wasting 25 years and $Texas to build about as much high speed rail/subway tunnels as China can build every year for like 1/3 the price, or ze Germans having almost exactly the same problems the article describes for nuclear when building the new airport in Berlin down to having to tear down and rebuild half the thing.

# ? Apr 18, 2021 11:25

Pander: Oct 9, 2007; Fear is the glue that holds society together. It's what makes people suppress their worst impulses. Fear is power.

And at the end of fear, oblivion.

Nobody wants to invest in nuclear because the profit is out of line with the risk. At almost any point in the process of siting, construction, or operation there can be a curveball thrown your way that you simply can't fix, or fix at an exorbitant cost. And that's on top of the inherent difficulties with nuclear construction/QA as cited above.

I just don't think the typical Gen II-IV style single or dual-reactor site pushing thousands of MWs is viable because the of that risk. The only way will be the less efficient to operate but much simpler to construct modular reactors, and those are still in the "maybe sometime later this decade?" proof of concept stage. I'd like to see investment in that direction (research, pilot plants) and a different set of regulatory guidelines directed specifically for a more novel style of nuclear power plant (many smaller reactors vs few larger reactors), but it's going to have to be investment in renewables and battery energy storage system development to do *something* in the short term.

# ? May 5, 2021 20:18

A GIANT PARSNIP: Apr 13, 2010; Too much fuckin' eggnog

Nuclear reactors seem like a strange thing to have a private company operate anyway, and private companies also aren�t properly valuing the true cost of things like coal and natural gas. Nationalize the power grid, nationalize the construction of power plants, have entities like the epa pre clear reactor designs and then pre clear areas to put those reactors, and just assume a certain percentage of reactors will be halted due to unexpected issues.

# ? May 7, 2021 18:32

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

Pander posted:

Nobody wants to invest in nuclear because the profit is out of line with the risk. At almost any point in the process of siting, construction, or operation there can be a curveball thrown your way that you simply can't fix, or fix at an exorbitant cost. And that's on top of the inherent difficulties with nuclear construction/QA as cited above.

I just don't think the typical Gen II-IV style single or dual-reactor site pushing thousands of MWs is viable because the of that risk. The only way will be the less efficient to operate but much simpler to construct modular reactors, and those are still in the "maybe sometime later this decade?" proof of concept stage. I'd like to see investment in that direction (research, pilot plants) and a different set of regulatory guidelines directed specifically for a more novel style of nuclear power plant (many smaller reactors vs few larger reactors), but it's going to have to be investment in renewables and battery energy storage system development to do *something* in the short term.

Unfortunately we're reaching the point climate wise where we really have no alternative: Germany's green revolution is a flop and is largely doubling down on fossil fuels via Nordstream 2, nuclear is the only viable way to get fossils off the grid. Between that and things like closing Indian Point in New York, which is already slated to be replaced by Natural Gas plants, any talk of a non-nuclear baseload is practically bait-and-switch to support fossil fuels.

We are not cheaping our way out of the Anthropocene, and maybe its time we hold Power Generation and Fossil companies accountable by forcing them to finance nuclear via subsidies or other incentives or remove For-Profits from the picture entirely. Nationalize the Grid.

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 18:53 on May 7, 2021

# ? May 7, 2021 18:51

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# ? May 19, 2024 19:24

Orvin: Sep 9, 2006

For another data point, in Illinois, the Dresden Nuclear station is slated to be shut down later this year. Jackson Generation is 1.2 GW of combined cycle gas fired generation that comes online in a month or two a couple miles away. Also, ground was just broken on Three Rivers Energy Center, another gas generation site. This one you can see from the entrance of Dresden.

There is some talk of getting some money out of the Illinois government to save Dresden and Byron stations, but it is seeming pretty doubtful that anything is going to happen fast enough. Definitely going to laugh/cry when the price of natural gas starts shooting up, taking the price of power with it.

# ? May 7, 2021 19:28

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