this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo... then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?

Installed Wind Capacty - Germany

German Wind Capacity

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago (26 children)

All this debate and nobody brings up that, thanks to climate change, cooling nuclear power plants will become a roll of the dice? Same as it already happened in France?

Droughts are really, really bad for nuclear power. Solar and wind don't give a shit.

Doesn't even matter much which technology is better on any other point. If you cannot run it, it's worthless. Especially at times with increased power demand for example due to AC usage spiking thanks to the same heat that just poofed your cooling solution into oblivion.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've seen another video article instead that basically says sure nuclear is good on paper if:

  • power plans should be 4th gen... which are non-existent at the moment (if not at the prototype stage only) and which construction in case will take decades and which costs are huge and also hard to estimates, even for France who has built a lot of nuclear power plans along the years and has probably the better know-how resources on the matter
  • not everyone should go nuclear at the same time, because if everyone does:
    • fuel material market price will increasingly raise due to its demand making nuclear energy production inherently less convenient as time passes and the fuel stock gets depleted, in turns shrinking the offer
    • all known stock of fuel material at the current usage are estimated to run dry in 120 yrs (so immagine if you wanted to convert today a country to full nuclear power it will probably require 50 yrs and last only 70 at best), but the remaining stock will surely last a lot less if suddenly everyone should convert to nuclear energy production

The article and the video are in Italian, so I'm afraid at best you can only translate the written article to your language of choice
https://www.corriere.it/dataroom-milena-gabanelli/ritorno-nucleare-pulito-sicuro-cosa-vuol-dire/f9d58b1c-b200-11ed-8c7f-0f02d700e67e-va.shtml

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Great post and nice to see those 4th gen plants mentioned including the current project development state. Those plants were always a top comment as 'the solution' in discussions on Reddit. Just build 4th gen or molten salt or fusion - energy problems solved with just a few keystrokes.

Posts explaining the problems or the current state of those projects often ended up in flames.

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