There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.
Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.
Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)
80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.
The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.
We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.
But we do have to choose, there’s only so much money available. Of course nuclear is better than fossil fuels but there’s just no point in wasting all that money on it that could have instead gone into renewables. I also don’t get your argument about the quantity of energy needed because that was exactly my point, with a set amount of money, you get way more energy out of renewables than fossil fuels. And building renewables is way faster than building nuclear power plants. It takes 15 years, at best, to build a nuclear power plant.
Here’s a chart of the cost of different energy sources from wikipedia:
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Money isn’t the limiting factor though.
There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.
Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.
Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)
80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.
The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.
We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.
But we do have to choose, there’s only so much money available. Of course nuclear is better than fossil fuels but there’s just no point in wasting all that money on it that could have instead gone into renewables. I also don’t get your argument about the quantity of energy needed because that was exactly my point, with a set amount of money, you get way more energy out of renewables than fossil fuels. And building renewables is way faster than building nuclear power plants. It takes 15 years, at best, to build a nuclear power plant.
Here’s a chart of the cost of different energy sources from wikipedia:
Here’s how Germany is doing after shutting down all nuclear power plants.
Here you can see how fast Germany is currently building renewable energy, so apparently it is possible to it this fast.
France is a country that uses a lot of nuclear power. Here’s an article that shows how expensive that is.