Waryle

Solar is the main source of interest, since it’s gotten so cheap. And solar is fundamentally a thin slice of silicon […] In sum solar has no problematic elements, and the amounts involved are minor on the scale of large construction projects.

Solar needs silver, tellurium, indium, gallium, cadmium and other things. Silver is already close-ish to become scarce, tellurium and gallium are for most part a China world-wide monopoly. Rare earth elements are needed in inverters and power conversion, and lithium/cobalt/nickel are needed for batteries needed by solar to be viable without a reliable power source. All of that will be in competition with EV and other applications.

And nope, the amounts involved are not minor if we talk about all country phasing out of both nuclear and fossil.

The only thing relevant for pollution, oil use, cost, supply, … in the constituent resources are the batteries

Nope. I mean as of today, and for decades to come the highly globalized production will be entirely dependent on oil. No oil: no ore mining, no manufacturing, no transportation, no installation, and therefore no wind turbines and no solar panels. And that’s before we even get to batteries and the power grid.

So in a world where peak oil has already passed, the price of everything that relies heavily on globalization will keep rising, including solar panels and wind turbines. And let me remind you once again that we’re still only at the very beginning of solar and wind power: competition among countries hasn’t even started yet.

So you might say that without oil, we can’t build nuclear power plants either, and that’s true. Except that with, say, 1 million liters of oil, we can generate far more megawatts through nuclear power than through solar and wind, because it requires far fewer resources and far less reliance on globalization.

The main issue of current grid batteries is thus lithium. Which is environmentally problematic to refine, and is expensive, but is readily available and does not depend on oil to my knowledge.

It’s entirely dependent on oil. Nothing get produced without oil, and oil will get costlier and scarce year after year.

Also, we would need most of the entire world lithium reserve just to convert our cars from oil to electricity. Powering entire countries with batteries, which necessitate magnitudes more storage, is just science-fiction.

And ofc there are many developments in battery tech. Lithium is not inherently necessary for all batteries, there will be alternate chemistries available not too far into the future. If you are thinking of building a nuclear plant now, then you need to consider what batteries you would need to buy in 10 years when it would be done, not which batteries are available now.

I mean, if I seriously start building gen II nuclear reactors in parallel, I’ll have a dozen by 10-15 years, and have almost entirely decarbonated my electricity by 20-25 years with more than 50 reactors. That’s feasible, France proved back in the 70-80’s, humanity is not not dumber and less capable than then.

But again, you can’t tell when/if you will ever find some storage technology that you can scale up to TWh for capacity, and GW worth of power input/output.

Loosely about 0.1% of current agricultural land.

Batteries are not up to scale and might never be, and you would need like 5 of the Europe biggest STEP to cover capacity, and 15+ for power output just for France’s needs in a windless night in winter. We’re talking about 60-70GW over 14h. And that’s assuming you somehow have enough solar and water the next day to pump all the water back in 10h, to be prepared for the next night.

Also STEPs can’t be built anywhere, it’s highly dependent of the geography of the country. Some countries will need to rely on batteries exclusively, which again, are just plain science-fiction as of today.

Overprovisioning

Overprovisioning does nothing when sun is down and wind is missing over most of the continent, which will happen even more often due to climate change. Once again, just to hold a single windless night of winter in France, you’ll need close to a TWh of storage capacity, and 60-70GW of power output. And that’s without accounting for the remaining 2/3 of energy consumption that is still fossil-based and needs to be converted to electricity.

So yeah, you need a baseline of controllable power production AKA fossils, nuclear, or hydro. Fossils are out for obvious reasons, as well as biomass which is just Germany coping for its bad energy policies, and not all countries have access to hydroelectricity. So we need nuclear in the end.

french power plants are getting old

Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them

can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves

Not this again… French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can’t handle heatwaves, that’s plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless

and regularly have major accidents

Also plain bullshit

source(german)

That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations

in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.

It’s not the age of wind and solar. We’re still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it’s even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you’re lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.

And that’s without taking into account a basic fact: we don’t have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don’t have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we’re actually talking about science fiction.

also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct

Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.

And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well

vs basically no risk with renewables

Except for:

• the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so if the world decides to seriously shift toward renewables, it will lead to competition for the metals and other materials needed to build them
• the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so it takes a huge amount of oil to extract them (oil that we’re running out of)
• the fact that they require an enormous amount of space, so current NIMBY issues will increase tenfold
• the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours, and therefore a 100% solar + wind scenario is science fiction

In comparison, nuclear has been proven to work reliably and cheaply for entire nations, its problems are political and therefore way easier and realistical to solve than the law-of-physics related problems solar and wind need to solve.

Reactors in France are shut down not because of lack of water, but as an ecological precaution because the effects of warming up rivers even more is not well known (even if it seems to have not much more impact than the heat wave in itself )

And even with these reactors shut down, France still exported 5-10GW of power at the time.

So yeah let’s not propagate the anti-nuclear propaganda trying to paint the situation as “nuclear can’t handle global warming and will cause blackouts”, when in reality it’s just us having so much decarbonated electricity that we can afford to produce less as an ecological precaution.

Hydrogen will never be a viable fuel and will never save the world. It leaks like hell, has a low energy density so it needs to be either highly compressed or highly refrigerated to liquify it to be even usable for something that is moving, which needs a lot of energy and induces a lot of constraints.

Basically, everywhere where electricity is a meaningful solution, hydrogen is just outclassed. Which leaves heavy industries and maybe cargo ships. The rest must either electrify, or just go.

No, you’ve been “downvoted” (actually you have been as much upvoted and ended up at a 0 points, not negative) for claiming Linux break every few days and that you must be “comfortable making your computer a hobby” to use it, which is clearly not at all representative of the general experience.

The proof is that the most upvoted answer to your comment exactly point that.

No, once again you’re inventing definitions, please have a read

Where do you even get the “media” part in it?

I’ll quote myself because I already answered that: « Media is the plural of medium, which means “intermediary” ». That’s the textbook definition of the word media, and the consensus about what it means.

Whatsapp is the middleman/platform, thus intermediary (= “medium/media”), between two people socializing. I don’t understand what you don’t understand.

A social network is social media that allows to form groups or communities. Two people communicating is not a network, the whole point of a network is interconnection between members of a group.

totally made up definition from your part

You forgot the “from your part” that is quite important. Language is a consensus, you just invented your own definition and pretend that it is the consensus.

And anyways, if “social media” and “social network” is the same, why have two different terms for it?

They’re not the same, it’s the square/rectangle thing. A social network is a kind of social media, all social medias are not social network. You could argue that Whatsapp is a social media but not a social network (but the frontier is getting blurry with groups and these kind of things).

That’s a totally made up definition from your part. Media is the plural of medium, which means “intermediary”. A social media is just the middleman that allows people to socialize. Lemmy is a social media, as well as a social network.

my take is that 1. you don’t need equal supply year-through because big consumers should be able to sleep and reduce their energy intake in the winter. yes i know that is complicated, but sleep is also complicated in nature and evolution still pulled through with it because it does pay off in the long term.

So you’re trying to advocate we should put millions of people on virtual unemployment during winter to save energy? Who will pay for that?

Do you think it’s honest to compare nuclear price all-included LCOE to the solar and wind LCOE* (* = not accounting for the tens or hundred of billions of unemployment subsides each year to account for forced shutdown because of power drought)?

secondly, storage can also be renewable biomass. i have some napkin math sitting around somewhere on my disk that says that about 5% of the yearly energy demand can be covered with basically non-cost “waste” biomass that’s basically being burned to get rid of it today. I actually wanted to write a longer post about it in the !bathtubthoughts@discuss.tchncs.de community, i just couldn’t figure out how to properly present my calculations yet.

First thing: biomass is about 200-250g of CO²eq per kWh. Burning biomass is polluting, and thus is not a viable alternative to nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and the other low-carbon power sources we should aiming for.

Even if your calculus are correct, if I take the example of a country like France which has a +30-50% increase in power consumption for 5 months during the coldest months than in the rest of the year. And it’s not because of industry, it’s because we heat up with a lot of electricity, even if we still need to convert a lot of fossil-based heating to low-carbon electricity heating.

But the solar production at the time has a -75% decrease. Wind is basically non-consistent through the year.

So when we need solar the most, to heat up in winter, a phenomena that will get even worse when we decarbonize heating, it just does not follows up. And wind drought during very cold weeks definitely happens regularly.

So we NEED interseasonal power storage to make full-renewable working, at least without huge capacities in hydro-electricity.

And we’re not even close to achieving this kind of gigantic power storage, which is why Germany, the biggest advocate for solar and wind with more than 40% of its electricity coming from it, and has no hydro, is still one of the dirtiest electricity in Europe. Because it still burns gas and coal to compensate for solar and wind lack of reliability.

But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?

Will solar with interseasonal storage ever be even feasible?

People like to throw LCOE around, occulting that running countries with solar (and wind) power is plain science-fiction and nowhere close to change, while nuclear (at least fission) is empirically proven to work reliably, even for cheap, costing less than 200 billions of euros in the span of 60 years in France for example.

When you don’t have enough sun (or wind), you either have sufficient backup in hydro or solar, or you burn coal and gas.

Loud pipes save lives.

They truly don’t

And one of the highest payers, Qobuz, is missing

You are so fucking dense. “Somebody did it first, it’s too late it’s already on the internet so now it’s open bar” is not an excuse. You use the same arguments as those who share revenge porn and child porn.

You all are repulsive fucks without any decency, and moron with the cognitive capacity and maturity of edgy teenagers.

Don’t

Post

Children

Faces

On the internet

Especially if it’s not yours

Don’t expose children to the internet, how is it that hard to understand

This is clearly a post putting a target on that man, let’s stop being obtuse here. I don’t care about shaming him publicly as he is a piece of shit, but don’t expose children to this, or you’re a piece of shit too. For fuck’s sake, have some decency, even if their father have none.

I’ve blocked Tiktok, Twitter and Instagram on my network and refuse to use them, so I won’t look at your link.

Don’t post children’s faces, what the hell, what’s wrong with you all

Wether you like it or not, some people don’t have the luxury to stop fighting, even more so right now with so-called democratic governments that brutalize, lock up and torture people for their opinions, their sexuality or their skin color.

Ignore these debates if you wish, and disconnect from social networks if you need to rest. But don’t call for people to stop fighting when their very existence is put at risk by people like DHH, that Framework decided to support.