It had nothing to do with renewables they had a voltage surge and the hadn't prepared for it. They could have been running their entire grade off nuclear and they still would have had the outage.

It's a classic case of not spending the money to keep infrastructure of to date in order to prevent disasters. The basic problem is that nobody ever gets a pat on the back for stopping a disaster they get it for the cleanup afterwards...

Put another way nobody likes spending money on preventative maintenance.

Again though you have to compare it to alternatives. And the fact is wind and solar installations with batteries to make up for the gaps are infinitely cheaper than even well understood nuclear plant designs.

For something like 15 years now. There are plenty of dirt cheap battery solutions like those crazy sand batteries. You don't have to use rare Earth minerals to store energy there's plenty of other ways.

There really is no economic case to be made for nuclear power in America. The only reason we may see any new nuclear energy come online is people bringing up old plants that got shut down because AI has so much money right now.

Which isn't a good thing. I mean we're combining a weak regulatory environment with an old plant that was shut down because the cost of keeping it open was too high with a bubble economy heavily incentivized for low costs.

But even ignoring all that you're not going to see any new nuclear power come online.

I would be curious to get an honest answer from people why they are so obsessed with it. I really do think it's just that it was the cool thing when we were kids. Honestly solar punk isn't really all that cool.

But the cost of building this installation sounds like it would be prohibitive unless you're using slave labor and letting a lot of those slaves die.

Even then I don't know if you could pull something like this off. This sounds like a scam.

Keep in mind if you are in North America then nuclear is basically a scam right now anyway unless you're restarting an old reactor. That's because the investment cost for wind and solar even with the current administration interfering with your deployment is substantially cheaper than any nuclear reactor you could possibly build, again even with the administration looking the other way on safety.

Japan might have a reason to fire up their nuclear reactors because they have so little viable land. But the one thing America has a fuckload of is land. So it just doesn't make economic sense to build a nuclear reactor in America.

I'm not quite sure why so many people over 50 though are so hung up on nuclear. I guess it was the future when you were a kid and it's a future that never happened so I think a lot of old farts are obsessed with it. Libertarian types seem to be really really into nuclear too and I don't understand why. Maybe the small footprint size of the reactors seems more individualistic? I don't know but it's all kind of pointless when we can just build out solar or wind installations.

The problem with fusion is that until someone demonstrates a practical way to sustain it and produce energy, it's probably not going to get the kind of funding needed to demonstrate a practical way to sustain it and produce energy. At least not in less than several decades, and we don't have that long.

Like fossil fuels and nuclear, it is competing for funding with renewables. Renewables are mature, are cheap, and the market is growing. Because we are all capitalist societies, that's the only way we can address climate change.

I'd love to see fusion reactors in my lifetime, but nobody has a path to them that isn't full of huge challenges and unknowns.

It's not necessarily dangerous. We can start small, and anything you put up to block the sun is going to be pushed away from it by the pressure of the photons, or you can stick it in a decaying orbit so it has a limited lifespan.

As long as it is designed to have a limited lifespan and clear itself out naturally, like the tens of thousands of LEO satellites we are throwing up now without much care, the damage that can be done is negligible. Once proven safe we can look at scaling it up, in a way that means if we stop replenishing it, it just goes away by itself after a while.

Because there is no way car companies and airlines would ever allow it.

California tried and Elon Musk came in with a bucket of money and discredited transportation ideas and shut it all down. In fairness he also had help from airline CEO.

Like most things transportation problems are social problems in disguise.

The cost of electricity in the UK is dictated by gas prices, and despite having our own North Sea gas we pay the international market rate. That went up when Putin started his war in Ukraine. The faster we get off gas, the sooner the bills can come down.

Before then we really need to break the link between gas prices and electricity prices. Currently the way the auction works, everyone gets paid the amount offered to gas generators (nuclear has a special deal that is insanely expensive but doesn't set a price floor).

We don't have to make everything domestically. It would be nice, but right now we should just import the turbines we need and get them deployed. The climate can't wait, and we shouldn't wait to start raking in that cash.

Hmm, I think that book has been discredited. Either way, there is a massive amount of wind energy available to the UK. We have the best wind resources in Europe, we could be raking it in from exports.

We should have a sovereign wealth fund based on wind power.

https://claverton-energy.com/t...

It's actually much more than 20x for just all available offshore wind, but if you restrict it to just the most economically viable parts and including onshore, it works out at around 20x. I've lost the reference I had for that.

They exist to present to the public as a viable alternative to renewables and transitioning to renewable energy resources in general.

It lets you tell the public that the scientists will figure it all out so they don't need to make any changes to the way we do things today.

It's the exact same scam plastic recycling turned out to be and for the exact same reason.

Indeed, and the environmentalists are on board with it because although it will disrupt the local wildlife, it will create new habitats, and in the end the reduction in damage from not using fossil fuels to generate that energy far outweighs the downsides.

There has never been a point in recorded history when the British Isles and territorial waters were windless.

And yes, we have hydro, we have storage, and we could have a hell of a lot more.

Actually the former head of the National Grid said that. The guy running the UK's grid said that the concept of base load was obsolete, and he was right.