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210

Anon questions our energy sector (slrpnk.net)

submitted 4 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (46 children)

Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 hours ago (25 children)

Sometimes the sun doesn't shine, sometimes the wind doesn't blow. Renewables are great and cheap, but they aren't a complete solution without grid level storage that doesn't really exist yet.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (3 children)

Thats a chicken/egg peoblem. If enough renewables are build the storage follows. In a perfect world goverments would incentivice storage but in an imperfect one problems have to occure before somebody does something to solve them. Anyway, according to lazard renewables + storage are still cheaper than NPPs.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Imagine this (not so) hypothetical scenario:

Yellowstone or another supervolcano erupts and leads to a few years of volcanic winter, where there is much less sunshine. This has historical precedent, it has happened before, and while in and of itself it will impact a lot of people regardless of anything else, wouldn't you agree it would be better to have at least some nuclear power capacity instead of relying solely on renewables?

Sure, such a scenario is not probable, but it pays to stay safe in the case of one such event. I would say having most of our power from renewables would be best, having it supported by 10-20% or so nuclear with the possibility of increase in times of need would make our electric grids super resilient to stuff

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Nature catastrophes are the top 1 danger to nuclear energy. See Fukushima.

And the real question here would be a comparison between risk of a nuclear accident event and a renewables-impacting climate event.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago

Yeah let me imagine a supervolcano explosion of that scale to effect global weather patterns. What do you think will happen to your reactors? No, they are not indestructable just because they can handle an earthquake of normally expected proportion.

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