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Cake day: April 19th, 2023

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  • abraxas@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlEvery third post on Lemmy
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    1 year ago

    What word would you prefer to someone who tells you to your face that they intend to “put you up against the wall” and then asks if you “know what that means, you fucking lib”?

    I mean, I’m a demsoc, and of the last 20 death threats I have received in my life, 15 came from people who identify as Communist-Leninist. PLEASE give me a better word for them.


  • abraxas@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlWhy must we be done this way?
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    1 year ago

    Well, by their teenage years, why not all the reasons adults need smartphones fully accessible? Looking up information from authoritative sources? Emergency contact? Coordinating schedules for office hours?

    Schools often simultaneously demand more from children than workplaces do adults, and give them less opportunity to excel.

    I’m not saying work-inappropriate phone use should be accepted, but taking them away entirely is downright irresponsible. Just like schools who still demand students write on a notebook instead of using a laptop. Raise your hand if you had RSI-related issues for a decade or more after high school? We old people tend to forget how bad school used to be (and can be) for physical and mental health AND for learning.


  • I’m not sure I agree with how you’d be able to execute on that level or organized construction safely, but I think we’re also reaching the “impossible-to-be-sure hypothetical” territory, so I’ll concede the point for now.

    I think my problems of cost and time still stand. It looks like adding rooftop solar with batteries to every building is still cheaper (on startup, and likely per MW) than nuclear plants. Regions that cannot support solar, onland wind, geo, or hydro can justify nuclear (at least unless shipping batteries or hydrogen conversion becomes cheap enough to compete), but I don’t think they amount to nearly 15% of the power needs in the world since they represent fairly distinctive regions with low energy demand.








  • Of course. That happens. Luckily, we have countries like China with less red tape to use to measure. They’ve been building a lot of nuclear and solar. Their end-to-end solar looks like around $750M per GW (possibly including storage? Not sure. About $2.2B for a 3.3GW plant). Looks like they’re spending about $5B per GW of nuclear.

    Sorry I don’t have the solar reference anymore. I was building a math equation for another comment and realized they weren’t talking price, so scrapped it without thinking.

    Since those numbers seem to match US figures, I think people in the Western World forget that a lot of bid cost increases or “escalations” are due to the fact that companies try to low-bid to win the contract, knowing every little inconvenience will require a cost increase. It evens out more than people want to admit.


  • Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).

    That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you’re right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can’t, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world’s construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems “10x increase world construction capacity” was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.

    Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can’t find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it’s dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.

    I won’t bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I’m still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones…




  • Strange. I must be mis-reading your numbers, because the chart I’m reading on your link shows an LCOS/LCOE between $88 and $98… The numbers I was quoting was probably conventional nuclear, and that’s a fair correction. I would really appreciate if you are able to address why my references disagreed with your reference, as I didn’t come out with my numbers off-the-cuff. Is it conventional vs advanced nuclear, or is it a different measurement entirely?

    Note also, however, that Advanced Nuclear still loses to Solar handily in every single chart presented in that document. In addition, none of that addresses the front-loaded cost of nuclear vs solar, which amounts to an entire order of magnitude.



  • You do understand that solving the world’s carbon energy crisis is not an individual person’s job, right? We’re not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We’re talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it’s pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.

    Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.