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Comment by boringg

2 days ago

Nuclear will save the day in combination with clean tech.

Clean tech on its own is too slowly to be meaningfully impactful by the time we need it.

9 comments

boringg

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triceratops  2 days ago

I think you have that backwards. Building nuclear is slow slow slow. I can have new solar on my rooftop this year.

  • boringg  2 days ago

    While that is true that there is a lag time to deploy nuclear - that is a vestige of the last 40 years of regulating it out of existence. That has changed - technology has improved and regulatory is under scrutiny. The difference is that once nuclear starts to roll out, as it will in the next 3-5 years, we will be seeing large deployments of clean dedicated load ripple through our electrical system in a product assembly line.

    Solar and storage are great assets - and will continue to grow but they have other sets of constraints and deploy at small scale (relatively). The large scale deployments have long time horizons.

toomuchtodo  2 days ago

It takes ~ten years to build a nuclear generator. In that time, 10TW of solar PV will be deployed at current deployment rates (1TW/year), a bit higher than total global electricity generation capacity currently (~9TW).

Fusion is solved, at a distance, with solar, wind, and batteries. Half an hour of sunlight on Earth can power humanity for a year. Long duration storage remains to be solved for, but look how far we’ve come in 1-2 decades.

(at this time, short duration storage will likely be LFP, sodium, and other stationary friendly chemistries, but this could change as the state of the art advances rapidly and the commodities market fluctuates)

  • boringg  2 days ago

    Fusion isn't in our lifetimes. Its been 10 years away since the 50s - only to get more R&D grant funding for budget building.

    If it happened it would be a huge game changer for our economies but it is far away from deployment let along lab proven. It still requires more energy to start/maintain the reaction then it can produce - which is fundamental to success.