187
Bill Gates-backed nuclear contender Terra Power aims to build dozens of UK reactors
(www.cityam.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
187 points (92.7% liked)
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Hi, I'm a physicist who believes that nuclear power is the most realistic option of moving ourselves off fossil fuels, without the astronomical cost and untested technology that would be required in order to create a majority intermittent grid.
I do also have strong feelings about crypto, mostly about how much of a incredible waste of resources it is and how disgusting it is that the obvious scam nature of most of it hasnt been clamped down on by governments
If you're a physicist why are you stating what you "believe"? I would've thought facts and evidence would be more appealing than feels. Of course facts and evidence point to nuclear being a massive waste of everyone's money when far cheaper alternatives are now available. Maybe that's why?
bevaise human afairs cant be reduced down to a sime harmonic oscillator and solved. There is no equation to solve for "best societal outcome".
renewables are good to an extent but storage is an unsolved and difficult problem. Including enough storage to make them work as the majority source of power for a grid is vastly more expensive than nuclear power. Currently we are nowhere near that however, and given solar and wind deployment are bottlenecked in many places the obvious way forwards is to build as much renewables AND nuclear as possible.
Source on "storage is an unsolved and difficult problem" and "the majority source of power for a grid is vastly more expensive than nuclear power" because both of those appear to be false.
Storage at the scale needed to deal with intermittant generation is unsolved. You would be looking at trillions of dollars on top of the costs of actual generation for a large european country. Price per kWh of storage and usage of countries are easily searched figures, multiply them together for a few hundred hours and it is obvious.
That is what makes a majority renewable grid more expensive. Obviously fossil fuels are cheaper ignoring externalities, but assuming you want to get off those and dont have spare hydro capacity what otber choice is there?
Facts and theory can only tell you so much, eventually things need tested and there are a lot of factors going into a potential move t nuclear power