No no, you don’t understand, these are alternative secrets

why I used the word "we",

Yes I understand what the word means. I used it as well. The point was the timing of your comment.

but I don't want to be accused of

You’re trying to make this problem about me again… I don’t think you’re actually trying.

any correction I'm making will seem like I'm assuming you don't understand basic concepts.

Nope. If you just discuss things normally and don’t act like you’re talking to a five-year-old that has to be taught what table salt is we be just fine. Again, I’m not the problem here. Your pedantic way of discussing with someone is.

A lower capacity factor doesn't necessarily indicate that an energy source is unreliable.

Of course you can turn many power plants down, it’s what we’ve been discussing. That being said, the capacity factor as they are used now, are indeed a measure of reliability. We have simply mostly been building wind and solar as we needed them and not building generators that were not needed anyway. Now as for the calculation for peak load plants, yes it leaves room for planned downtime. So in that sense it’s not a perfect measure of reliability. But the point is that for solar and wind, it basically is, which is the way I used it. So if you want we can also talk about other measures like effective load carrying capacity, but the reliability numbers won’t really change. Capacity factors are simple, not perfect, but that’s not really an issue in this discussion.

So I understand your point about gas turbines, but we are trying to get rid of those, so they’re kind of pointless to mention. NPP’s can also work in load follow mode as they already are doing in France. Sodium batteries haven’t been proven to be reliable through the decades or in all sorts of conditions because we have had so little of them to be able to do anything other than speculate. So unless you have some other kind of new green, reliable power plant that you can build quickly and easily switch on and off that you want to tell the world about, this is kinda it.

Reliability aside, there is also energy density. Comparing uranium to your example of sodium-ion batteries (which, incidentally we don’t have any production capacity for on any scale that isn’t a drop in a very salty ocean and have very little to do with table salt):

• Reactor-grade uranium (3.5% U-235): 3,456,000 MJ/kg
• Sodium-ion battery: 0.27-0.72 MJ/kg

Please correct my calculations if I made a mistake, but to get the same energy that only 1 kilogram of reactor-grade uranium provides, you would need sodium ion batteries with a total weight of 4.8 - 12.8 million kilograms. Even at millions of kilograms they don’t provide any power themselves, so you need even more solar cells to charge them. About 3-3.5 million for one NPP. Of course these calculations are rough and don’t take rechargeability into account (but I also didn’t factor in other things that make batteries even worse), but you get the idea.

So your:

already being used and doesn't need a decade of planning to get a single powerplant up and running.

Is simply wishful thinking, like I said.

And even then… the batteries will have run out on those quiet winter nights after an overcast day.

So unless you stop beating around the bush about the question I’m asking for the fourth time now:

Have you thought about how you would provide power on those windless winter nights after an overcast day?

…we are kinda done here.

True, but it’s also much more input, think having to keep up with your work, socialize, working out, social media, children who need to go from school to ballet to a friend’s house, etc.

Our downtime is simply much less

I don’t know about that. Lions hunt enough to sleep all day and humans would have been more effective.

We died younger on average, but that is because childhood death was so common and we couldn’t do anything about diseases. Not because we were burnt out from all the stress.

Exactly

Yes, but factories are expensive and cost a lot of time to build. So I’m not that sure about the financial picture of that either. Not to mention finding the space to put those factories + battery parks + more space for extra renewables to charge those batteries.

Nuclear also only makes Europe dependent on Canada or Australia, although Ukraine and Estonia have some too. The US has their own.

Not to mention batteries require a lot more resources. Whereas enriched uranium is only a few million tonnes per year, lithium- or sodium-ion battery technology requires resources that run in the trillions of tonnes. That’s because of the difference in energy density:

• Pure U-235: 144,000,000 MJ/kg
• Reactor-grade uranium: 3,456,000 MJ/kg
• Sodium-ion battery: 0.27-0.72 MJ/kg

So to put this in perspective: to get the same energy that only 1 kilogram of reactor-grade uranium (at 3.5% U-235) provides, you would need sodium ion batteries with a total weight of 4.8 - 12.8 million kilograms.

Now of course batteries are reusable and nuclear fuel rods are only partly recyclable, but batteries don’t generate any energy by themselves. They need to be recharged with extra solar or wind power, on top of the ones directly feeding into the grid that you also have to build in even more factories, place onsite and individually connect to both the grid and the battery parks, etc.

This is a more rough estimate: but here they did the math:

A rough estimate suggests that about 3 million to 3.15 million solar panels may be needed to match the annual output of a large nuclear power plant

And even then you still haven’t solved what to do on all those quiet winter nights after an overcast day.

Betting it all on one horse it what’s stupid. Especially one that needs a mind boggling amount of resources. Yes we need to make batteries, but we also need to diversify and reduce dependency by expanding our nuclear power capacity.

LOL I doubt it, but who knows!

Simpler times back then. We had to hunt, gather, navigate and keep our children safe and fed and that was about it.

Having an LLM make you a grocery list is stupid unless it’s like a really difficult recipe, but technology in general has been crucial to offload some of the cognitive load. Nowadays we really have to share some of that cognitive load with something else or else we will get burnt out. We can’t keep overclocking a brain that was made for the tasks I mentioned in the first paragraph.

That’s not necessarily true. There is less need for them if NPPs are there, sure, but the price tag is always king. If renewables are simply much cheaper they will proliferate.

And we will always have to fill in the gaps for when renewables aren’t available. Betting it all on battery tech mostly coming from China is a dangerous game in this geopolitical era.

I don’t understand why people are so anti nuclear. It doesn’t have any emissions. The US, Canada and especially Australia have massive uranium reserves. It provides grid stability. Except for being expensive there is almost nothing going against it. And life cycle costs are likely coming down substantially in the near future with emerging technologies.

Well maybe because of your assertion that renewables and nuclear are a bad combination. Renewables are notoriously unstable sources of energy and you need grid stability or you will have power outages.

This has traditionally been achieved by coal, gas and oil plants. Nuclear power plants are a non GHG emitting way to replace this stability. Countries that have a larger share of renewables but much less nuclear than France still have to fire up their coal and gas powered plants on quiet winter nights after an overcast day. Which means more GHG emissions.

What I meant by “France is already doing just that” is that they are running their NPPs in load following mode, which means they have the ability to adjust their energy output capacity based on the share of renewable energy available.

So while I don’t know exactly why you are being downvoted (not by me in any case), it could be because you’re attacking an ally of the fight against GHG emissions. The goal is not simply to have as many solar panels or wind farms, but to reduce GHG emissions. And that’s what we have to keep in mind. So while, yes France moved to more nuclear there are more ways to look at the same news item: they are still going for 60% electrification of the nation by 2030, up from 30% right now and still going for massive expansion of renewables.

What? We didn’t start the fire…

Could be aftermath of a C-section. Husband takes picture while wife gets sutures and baby is momentarily away getting initial check-up.

Probably not their first rodeo either.

I had the same idea. The fluffiness on the fur (especially top right photo) looks off too. The letters on the packaging are Chinese / Japanese too and I believe it is or was a trend there for a while. Poor cat…

Either that or it’s AI slop getting better.

You’re looking for emission intensity. The emissions per unit of work, that can be KWh of electricity or GDP of a nation.

Apparently France has one of the lowest gr CO2 / kWh in the world. The Nordic countries seem to do better because of their massive hydro infrastructure (which also has major implications on water-based ecosystems, but that’s another discussion).

Countries with more solar and wind are faring much worse, because wind and solar are so unpredictable. So what do they do on quiet winter nights after an overcast day? Fire up the coal and gas powered plants…

France has less wind and solar than for example Germany, but the same can be said for the Nordic countries, who hardly have any. In fact France has a very ambitious plan to electrify the nation. That includes renewables, but also new NPPs.

Nuclear waste is also really no pollution. We can store it safely and it’s only dangerous to the immediate surroundings, something which can be nullified by proper shielding.

Hey now, that’s a nice view

I thought they were skin heads too (which they are) but didn’t know about the ska and the sharps either

France is already doing just that

Wololo!

Nonsense, they don’t even wear ties! They’re scientists, not hedge fund managers!

No they don’t!