Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
Because it doesn’t help. Renewables want to be paired with something that can easily be spun up and down as needed. Nuclear doesn’t fit that model. It tends to make it worse, because cheap energy we could be getting from solar or wind has to give way to the nuclear baseload instead.
It’s something of the opposite problem of the sun not shining at the same time the wind doesn’t blow. At times where you have tons of both, you want to store them up for later. Nuclear forces a situation where you have to do that even more.
Except we don’t have a practical way to store any of this energy and there is always a constant baseline demand that can be met in part by techniques that don’t need to be constantly spun up and then back down and work day and night, rain or shine.
There are several technologies that are out of the lab and are being spun up for mass production. Flow batteries are particularly promising, but a big advantage here is that it’s much easier to pursue multiple paths at once. A single tech can be a dead end, but multiple possibilities means it’s likely at least one will work out.
Nuclear has a problem doing that. It’s expensive to fund just one possibility, so you tend to see the industry try one new thing at once. If it fails, the cycle repeats and takes years to try something else. 10 years ago, it was the AP1000 design. Now it’s SMRs, where the recent cancelation of NuScale’s project looks like more of the same.
Ammonia believe it or not.