The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.
Lemmy most of the time: Makes fun of people always bringin up “the economy” as if that’s what’s really important
Also Lemmy when it comes to nuclear: “But the economy!”
What happens in case of a sudden abnormal weather event that blocks out most of the sunlight? Picture a super volcano eruption covering the sky in ashes for thousands of miles. Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth the sun was blocked by dust for several years. Or just think about northern European countries that barely get any light in winter; Portugal is a very sunny country, we have invested a lot into solar, and sometimes we still get energy from Spain (who use nuclear btw).
Also, I’ve been hearing this whole “it takes too long to build nuclear plants” since at least early 2010s; imagine where we’d be if we’d just started building plants then. I can picture the same thing being said in 2035-2040, while fossil fuels still have not been completely dropped.
I’m not sure what kind of sudden weather event covers all the sun for Australia. Seems a little farcical
I already mentioned 2.
Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth the sun was blocked by dust for several years.
Picture a super volcano eruption covering the sky in ashes for thousands of miles
Here’s a quote from the wiki on super volcanos:
Large-volume supervolcanic eruptions are also often associated with large igneous provinces, which can cover huge areas with lava and volcanic ash. These can cause long-lasting climate change (such as the triggering of a small ice age) and threaten species with extinction. The Oruanui eruption of New Zealand’s Taupō Volcano (about 25,600 years ago) was the world’s most recent VEI-8 eruption.
Also, you wouldn’t need it to cover all of Australia to be disastrous, just enough to block a significant amount of solar farms.
If you’re talking about an extinction level event like that which caused the death of the dinosaurs then I think we have bigger problems.
I think if a planet killer asteroid hits it won’t exactly matter our solar panels don’t work mate
I don’t think anyone mentioned the economy here in this thread, so I’m not sure what the relevance of that is unless I’m misunderstanding your criticism there.
For my comment specifically I’m not worried about the economy, but the unit cost of energy. Simply put if nuclear has a higher unit cost that means we can’t replace as much fossil fuel generation vs other lower unit cost sources of energy for the same price.
I agree with your criticism of folks complaining about the build time, back in 2010 it was probably worth building nuclear. That’s no longer the case and the fact that people (imo incorrectly) used this criticism in 2010 doesn’t mean that it’s invalid now in the mid 2020s.
Disasters is an interesting perspective to take and to be honest I haven’t really thought much about it before. You have, however, picked a very specific and unlikely event here and I’m wondering why you went with that. There are a great many potential disasters that can impact a power grid from earthquakes, extreme weather and even deliberate attacks or acts of sabotage. I think for most of these, having a more distributed grid is likely more resilient and these are much more realistic scenarios than a civilization ending level event like you described.
At the end of the day, we need to decarbonise immediately using the whatever technology is at hand. My criticism of nuclear is that it’s no longer the cheapest or fastest way to achieve that, but I’m open to being wrong. Your disaster scenario wasn’t particularly convincing though at least for me.
For my comment specifically I’m not worried about the economy, but the unit cost of energy. Simply put if nuclear has a higher unit cost that means we can’t replace as much fossil fuel generation vs other lower unit cost sources of energy for the same price.
I’ll put it another way so you might better understand my point: what would you have said 10 or 15 years ago when someone mentions that solar is a bad idea because it would cost more? Because up until recently it did cost more, and people did use it as an argument against it. And now your (and other people’s) main criticism of nuclear is that it’s not as cheap as an energy source that we’ve been heavily investing into for a decade.
You have, however, picked a very specific and unlikely event here
I showed several examples. The ones you mentioned, such as earthquakes, are not likely to affect one source more than another, but events which block out the sun obviously disproportionately affect the production of solar energy.
it’s no longer the cheapest or fastest way to achieve that
Neither was solar when we started to invest in it, as I mentioned earlier. That came from improving and investing in the technology - which also bumped solar into the safest energy source, right after nuclear, which used to be the safest.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at here to be honest. When nuclear was the fastest, cheapest option we should have been deploying that. Now that it’s not, we should still be deploying the fastest cheapest thing. Solar, wind and batteries continue to be on a rapidly declining cost curve, even back in 2010 but it was still too early to roll them out at huge scale. It’s unlikely nuclear will be catching up any time soon barring major breakthroughs like fusion.
I also strongly disagree with your statement that disasters would impact nuclear and renewables equally. One of these things is certainly much harder to clean up and recover than the other if there is significant damage from an environmental disaster.
We should be rolling out the best available technology at the current time and continuing to improve our generation technologies, including nuclear, as we always do. I’m not sure why we would do anything else.
Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth
We now have the technology to alter the trajectories of asteroids (tested on the DART mission), and have a fairly comprehensive catalogue of the big ones. I don’t expect this to be an issue.
What happens in case of a sudden abnormal weather event that blocks out most of the sunlight
The neighbor has sun then. Buy it there. Or store the power.
Always the same old platitudes.
