Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition.
A fire broke out last Thursday at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads.
Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish.
Last week’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places.
Solid rebuttal, good job 👍
I put as much effort into my rebuttal as you did in your initial comment. If you want an actual conversation, by all means begin any time you like.
I already did. New nuclear isn’t economically viable.
rebuttal: yes it is.
great conversation! feel free to add any context, reasoning, or citations to support your opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs
lol this is such lazy bullshit. god forbid you actually have to type more than one sentence to explain your position.
yes, nuclear has a high startup cost, this is known. that does not automatically mean it’s not economically viable.
Read the rest of the article, focus on the LCOE section. I’m not here to hold your hand.
Alternatively, just admit you don’t know what you’re talking about and we’ll leave it there.
The main argument for nuclear is not its individual cost, neither for remewables. The main argument is that we need to rid ourselves of fossil fuels.
When planning for a future global energy system w/o fossil fuels, nuclear power has a key role to play as the most reliable source of clean, dispatchable electricity. This allows it to punch far above its equivalent capacity by massively reduce the need for expensive grid scale storage solutions.
Source 1: IEA (2019), Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/nuclear-power-in-a-clean-energy-system, Licence: CC BY 4.0
Source 2: NEA (2019), The Costs of Decarbonisation: System Costs with High Shares of Nuclear and Renewables, OECD Publishing, Paris https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_15000
I really don’t get this. Nuclear isn’t dispatchable. It never was and never will be. You have to create heat from the fission reaction, use that to turn water into steam, and use the steam to drive turbines to generate electricity.
All of that takes time to ramp up which makes nuclear non-dispatchable. Compare it with a battery or pumped hydro where you can get power flowing anywhere from milliseconds to seconds.
Furthermore, nuclear is so expensive that it makes no economic sense to build new nuclear that would run as close to 24/7 as possible, let alone as a dispatchable source.
So this begs the question, did you already know this?
this will be my last reply only to reply specifically to LCOE since you put so much effort into finally typing some kind of semblance of an actual argument. Yes, nuclear is expensive (partly because we haven’t been DOING it), we have already covered that. I assume the unstated premise you are operating on is that we can supply our entire energy needs with cheap renewable, but that is NOT the case, especially as we use more computing and electrified transportation in the future.
Renewable energy sources are all geographically limited. Solar and wind takes up a lot of space and are are highly variable, so they require lots of grid storage as stated already (did you factor grid storage into your cost analysis?). I’m not even arguing against them, by all means we should be using them as much as possible. But we need to be realistic about their limitations and true LCOE.
Also the cost of nuclear can be greatly reduced by directly replacing coal plants with them where all the grid connections already exist. You can’t do that with solar or wind.
So your entire premise that nuclear isn’t viable because renewables are cheaper is a non-sequitur. The choice isn’t between renewables or nuclear, the choice is between renewables and coal. In that context, nuclear is absolutely economically viable because we know coal is not.
I have read plenty and know what I’m talking about, but I’m not here to participate in lopsided conversations. I know a sea lion when I see one, and I look forward to your arrogant 5-word disrespectful reply.
edit since a citation was requested:
https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood
I stopped reading there.
Drop the attitude and provide sources to back up your claim like I did or quit wasting my time.