First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
About damn time! As a Georgia Power ratepayer, I’ve only already been paying extra for it for what, around a decade now?
This encapsulates the public response to building nuclear. I guess that is why it is the first in decades.
To be clear, my comment isn’t “the public response to building nuclear;” it’s “the public response to corruptly financing nuclear on the backs of ratepayers while guaranteeing zero-risk profit for shareholders, despite incredible incompetence and cost overruns building the thing.”
If you think that bullshit is inherent to building nuclear, I won’t dispute it, but I will say it makes you even more cynical than me!
I would’ve had no problem with it at all if it weren’t a fucking scam to gouge me for somebody else’s profit.
That’s the downside of nuclear. Cost and build time. Upside is it’s reliable and carbon-clean.
The best time to build a nuclear power plant was thirty years ago. The second best time is now.
They took the average of that and built it 10 years ago
The 1.3th best time to build a nuclear power plant was 10 years ago
You can’t live without nuclear? The downsides are more than the upsides
“If you wish to make a nuclear reactor from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
Inventing the universe is only a small part of it, you have to get regulatory permission first!
(Joking aside, I support regulated nuclear power plants.)
And Apple pie. You need that before you make a nuclear reactor.
Yay! Nuclear is the best!
Ah, i remember studying the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design when I was at Uni. It had just been approved, and numerous plants were expected, with the first expected to be online from around 2010.
It’s 2023, and this is the first one to go live in the US.
What’s the deal with it? The story also said Westinghouse had to pay billions to walk away from the project. I didn’t really understand that part…
They lied about their progress, and missed federal tax credits in South Carolina. That was the first domino. The Vogtle project wasn’t going any better, but nukegate is what started the collapse.
Wow, it seems kind of impressive that Georgia was able to get things up and running in spite of all the baggage. I wonder if this plant will help create other plants
Just in time for openheimer in IMAX!
14 years and 35 billion (combined with #4 which has not been finished) and didn’t generate a single kWh in anger until now. Put the same investment into renewables and it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.
The argument against nuclear now is not about safety. It is about money. Nuclear simply cannot compete without massive subsidies.
The issue is that right now renewables energy don’t reduce CO2 emissions by much. (Except for hydro)
Sure if we look at the energy produced it’s very clean. The issue is intermittence. As a society we decided to continue using electrical equipment even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. So we use fossil fuel to compensate and overall the electricity production still enjoy a lot of CO2. We could use batteries, but utility scale battery are not very developed yet.
Same issue with the price. Sure solar energy is very cheap, when it’s sunny. But what if I want to turn on the light at night ? The solar panel are not producing, the wind is not blowing, price is irrelevant if I can’t get power when I need it.
Nuclear can produce a reliable amount of energy all the time.
I hope we will see the development of utility scale energy storage because this is what we really need for the development of renewable energy.
We don’t necessarily have to use batteries. In mountainous regions we already have stations that use surplus power to pump water up a mountain and then drop it down to generate energy when needed. Its basically a potential energy battery. But this is usually location limited and more expensive to set up.
You’re describing dams, and basically all the good locations are taken already.
No, he’s describing a pumped storage facility.
Tbf that would be two dams and they did use the plural of dams, technically ‘dams’ could be a pumped storage facility.
To be even fairer, his central point that “all the good locations are taken already” only applies specifically to the regular type of dams that don’t use pumped storage. For traditional hydroelectricity you need an easily-dammed-off hilly basin containing a large/high hydraulic head river, but for pumped-storage you just need the hilly basin.
To be even fairerer, the body of water that gets pumped doesn’t need to be dammed; if you have a steady enough river, you can suck the water right out of the side of it. Also, the basin isn’t a prerequisite, you could build holding tanks at the top of a hill.
Hell, you could enclose the whole thing to control evaporation and use the same water over and over, no natural body of water necessary. Better yet, use a denser fluid to achieve the same result in a smaller space. You could probably fit the whole thing in a single building.
Yes, Pump Storage Hydroelectricity is a great option for storage. It’s not the most efficient but it allows to store massive amount of energy.
I think today it’s the main utility scale storage solution in the world.
There’s also compressed air and flywheels for energy storage.
The issue is intermittence. As a society we decided to continue using electrical equipment even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
And a lot of that can simply be solved with a larger grid.
Yes, in a small geographic area, you might run into a situation where the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. On the other hand, on a global scale, the sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing.
A realistic solution right now are therefore continent-wide grids that combine hydro, solar, wind and pumped hydro storage.
France was able to output 2 reactors per year at 1,5 billion of euros per 1000MW for more than 2 decades during the 70’s to 90’s. The whole French nuclear industry has cost around 130-150 billions between 1960 and 2010, including researches, build and maintenance of France’s whole nuclear fleet.
A 1000MW reactor, at current French electricity price and for a 80% capacity factor, generates 1,4 billion of euros worth of electricity per year, for a minimum of 60 years.
Nuclear is not costly, and can absolutely compete by itself, if you don’t sabotage it and plan it right.
I would be very interested to know why the trend has moved away from building reactors in time and within a reasonable budget. It seems that most projects after the turn of the millennium haven’t been cost effective.
Why did we manage to build reactors well before but not now?
Every year a reactor operates is a year of experiencing new ways they suck. The fixes and added complexities are rolled into the next reactor.
Thr grifters running the show also learn new ways to grift, so the small new delays and costs are amplified.
For older reactors the costs this imposes are rolled into operational budgets (and more often than not reactors are closed as unprofitable and the public or ratepayers are left holding the bag).
Additionally regulatory agencies keep finding new instances of fraud, stopping these adds costs to the regulator and regulatee.
This has happened since well before three mile island, so all misdirections to “scare mongering about meltdowns” are lies (the rate of cost escalation actually slowed significantly after three mile island).
Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.
For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.
Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.
We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.
Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.
This same fear has been enough to fund SLS and Ariane programs. Basically to avoid the loss of a capability in case it’s needed later on. For some reason it doesn’t seem to apply to nuclear. And now people are complaining that building new reactors is expensive, arguably at least partially due to the supply chains no longer existing in the same scale as before.
If loss of expertise were the cause, then there would have been a cost minimum in the late 80s when the maximum number of engineers had 5-15 years of experience.
Instead costs rose for each new reactor (including repeat builds of each model).
This theory has no explanatory power over reality and predicts the opposite of what happened.
Should the delays and subsequent costs overruns then be simply attributed to increased regulatory complexity or corporate greed?
I’m looking at the list of reactors in France, most of the builds during the last millennium were completed in more or less 10 years. Then there was a gap, and the new one is taking way longer than previous ones.
Same thing has happened in many other countries. Including finland, where at first we got 4 reactors in 6-10 years, and then after a gap of 25 years the next reactor was a clusterfuck that took almost 20years to build.
Both of these reactors are of the same design, and the issues are at least partially attributed to the company having forgot how to manage such large projects due to the years long gap in construction.
Part is the neoliberal economic model is really really bad at big projects. Part is the regulations and engineering complexity involved in not having them all shut down because they caught fire or the steam generators corroded (almost every program has “cheap” reactors at the beginning which have massive maintenance issues and leaks 10-30 years later, followed by expensive ones with massive delays). Part is corporate greed. Part is revealing and stopping rampant fraud and finding safety-compromising cost-cutting measures. Part is the lack of pressure from the military to make it happen as there is no longer a need for as much Plutonium. Part is that there actually are some semblance of environmental laws. Part is the fossil fuel industry interfering (as they do with all non-fossil-fuels).
Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction, €1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction, and overnight costs with free capital aren’t real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.
Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction
For French nuclear power, the lowest load factor ever recorded is 54% in 2022. The cause is the number of maintenance operations postponed because of COVID, plus a corrosion problem detected on several reactors of the same generation, which have since been repaired.
- This is an extremely unlikely combination of circumstances, on the one hand
- On the other hand, it wouldn’t have had any consequences if we’d had more redundancy, and hadn’t suddenly stopped building reactors for 25 years.
- Despite this, nuclear power still has a load factor 2x higher than French wind or solar power.
The rest of the time, the load factor of French nuclear power hovers around 70-75%, and that’s not due to bad design, it’s a strategy. I’ll let you read this link to learn more.
€1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction
Of course it does. But the fact is that french nuclear power has paid for itself dozens of times over. It’s factual, it’s historical.
and overnight costs with free capital aren’t real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.
Yes it was a “strategy” for EDF to go tens of billions into debt, and the other 30-50% of french power infrastructure is there just for fun. These mental gymnastics are incredibly tiresome.
Responding to sarcastic, disrespectful and immature one-liners from someone obviously ignorant on the subject is neither exciting nor productive, so I’ll just throw out a few points in response to your last comment without bothering to expand on them and then move on.
- With the exception of 2010, EDF made a net profit of 2 to 5 billions a year between 2005 and 2021.
- EDF and its predecessors were public bodies, and were forced by the State to take over unprofitable activities.
- ARENH
- Tariff shield + European gas-indexed electricity market
More deranged doublethink.
ARENH can’t be causing losses if the price it sets is profitable (so by citing it you are claiming that the french nuclear fleet has never broken even).
It also can’t be causing a production shortfall requiring buying expensive hydro if the reactors are off because of a “strategy”.
Your debt doesn’t go up every year if you’re making a profit.
Deferring maintenance doesn’t make costs magically vanish.
Decomissioning, waste management and hundreds of billions for license extensions are also completely unfunded. So the french people were just bilked another €10 billion for taking on a larger share of a half trillion dollar liability.
The nuclear lobby kids never seem to accept going renewable over nuclear as a possible reality. They refused to acknowledge it in the online circles of the mid to late 90s on News Groups, early 00s on Slashdot, didn’t want to see it in the 00s on Digg, attacked any questioning nuclear the 10s and early 20s on reddit. It has been a consistent online turf protection war in comment sections for decades.
Every nuclear post turns into a circle jerk and a handful of people trying to ‘in before renewables’ to make sure to drown out anything that isn’t waving the nuclear flag with little reservation.
We need both in some respects to maintain current electrical needs, but money and time to deploy is quantifiably much more efficient with renewables in practice vs nuclear on paper. Having a much larger renewable system spread all across the country would be of a greater short and long term benefit. Solar on every home, a small solar cell on every light pole along with low wattage monitoring systems for power distribution optimization, large desert solar installations, agrivoltaic farming (if it’s not just bullshit), wind farms in strategic areas with low impact to birds, etc.
Doing all those things would cost hundreds of times what it costs to build a reactor. There are reactors already engineered and that exist elsewhere in the world capable of powering entire cities for over a hundred years that are easily decomissionable unlike the older 1970s reactors that we have. Also renewables are unable to produce power on demand when load demands spike suddenly. U need fossil fuel for that currently. Not to mention the process of creating solar panels is one of the most environmentally damaging manufacture processes and the only country that possesses the materials to make them is China… Oil receives metric assloads of government subsidy. Why should nuclear not get the same? Nuclear power is the only thing we know of that has rhw ability to fill all of the functions that fossil fuel power plants have.Idf theres actually other options then cool but iv looked at every alternate energy source and rhw big thing that sticks out is a couple things. If the weather gets too cold, or too hot, theres a natural disaster or other condition that necessitates a very sudden and high increase in kilowatt hour demand renewable energy sources buckle. And then your left having to fire coal to meet the energy need.
Renewables and nuclear are in the same team. It’s true that nuclear requires a greater investment of money and time but the returns are greater than renewables. I recommend checking this video about the economics of nuclear energy.
That video completely ignores decommissioning costs for nuclear power plants and long-term nuclear waste storage costs in its calculation. Only in the levelized cost of electricity comparison does it show that nuclear is by far the most expensive way of generating electricity, and that it simply can’t compete with renewables on cost.
People love to look at nuclear power plants that are up and running and calculate electricity generation costs based just on operating costs - while ignoring construction costs, decommissioning costs, and waste disposal costs.
Does that video talk about how wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable at all so they end up in landfills? Solar panels are 75% recyclable which is excellent but that still means 25% is going into the ground. Nuclear is the only way forward.
That sound like addressable design challenges
The cost of storing nuclear waste for a running plant is only a few hundred thousand a year; basically just just salary for a few people to transport it to a big hole in the ground.
Decommissioning costs a few hundred million, which sounds like a lot, but for a project that lasts for decades it’s basically nothing.
You could probably fit all of the nuclear waste America produces in few trucks. It’s not as much as people think.
Or even less if we – gasp, shock, horror! – reprocessed it.
(We don’t do that because of overblown fears about nuclear weapons proliferation.)
The Department estimates that continued operation of the current fleet of nuclear power reactors could ~70,000 metric tons of uranium * increase the total inventory of spent fuel from 70,000 metric tons of uranium to 140,000 metric tons of uranium. Nearly all of this spent fuel is being stored at the reactor sites where it was generated, either submerged in pools of water (wet storage) or in shielded casks (dry storage). The Dept of Energy
Those must be some big fucking trucks. And as far as I know, only Finland has actually developed any long-term storage which could be considered safe.
Nuclear is fine, but nuclear fanboi takes are similar to weed fanbois, it’s not a perfect solution.
You seem to think a big number means a big pile of green goo. But actually…
All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since the late 1950s would cover a whole football field to a height of approximately 10 yards.
The question of nuclear waste, hammered home by the anti-nuclear crowd, has long since been answered. And the answer is: it’s far from being a problem.
As for the cost of storage and decommissioning, it makes no sense if we do not give a financial order of magnitude.
At French current electricity price, a 915MW reactor will produce 1.1 billion euros of electricity over one year. A 1500MW reactor will produce 1.8 billion euros of electricity over one year.
When you sell 60 billions of euros worth of electricity per year for 60 years, even if you pay 50 billions for storage and 2 billions to decommission an entire plant, it’s still quite profitable.
Estimated total cost of decommissioning in the UK is £120bn. But it’s going to take 100 years to do it… so yay lots of rotting radioactive buildings for the next century.
The nuclear waste storage facility cost 53bn to build, let alone run… so way off your ‘few hundred thousand a year’.
Estimated total cost of decommissioning in the UK is £120bn.
That’s for way more than just one plant, and there’s a lot more going on that resulted in such a high price tag. That isn’t normal.
The nuclear waste storage facility cost 53bn to build, let alone run
It’s a reinforced hole in the ground, designed to last a long, long time after humans forget it exists. Of course it cost money to build, but now it’s just there. It doesn’t cost anything for it to continue to exist. Maybe there’s a little security or staff for some purpose, but I don’t know what they would even do.
That’s for way more than just one plant, and there’s a lot more going on that resulted in such a high price tag. That isn’t normal.
No, that’s pretty normal. Current experience with decommissioning German nuclear power plants show that the cost is about $1.2 billion per power plant, and that decommissioning takes about 20 years.
Of course it cost money to build, but now it’s just there.
That doesn’t mean you simply get to ignore the $53 billion it cost to dig that hole.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/UC_BCz0pzMw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
There’s also a reliability element too. Nuclear can reliably output a given amount of energy, at the cost of being slow to alter. Many renewable sources have sporadic amounts of power throughout each day. Either is better than fossil fuels at least.
Nuclear isn’t entirely reliable though. During the big heatwave last year at least 1 and iirc at leat a few French reactors had to be shut down because the water levels in the rivers they were on were not high enough to get sufficient water to cool them. Which is a problem that’s only going to get worse as climate change progresses.
That’s a limitation of the secondary power conversion side and is true for any power generation methodology that relies on steam generation. That said, there’s alternatives to the traditional Rankine cycle that could be deployed without modifying the nuclear side of the plant.
there are a bunch of new reactor designs that don’t use water.
I don’t recall them being shut down (that would be a drastic step). They were forced to reduce output, though (making the energy more expensive).
Good point but that is not insurmountable. There are many ways to achieve predictability (batteries, hydro, tidal) that also come on stream much quicker than any nuclear plant.
Ah I’d not consider these! That gives some hope too then :) I hope we get the battery advances we need asap, the urgency from the climate crisis is strong lately.
Yea you’re right.
People make stupid arguments about base load (nuclear doesn’t match supply demand so it’s meaningless argument) or renewables only being built out for maximum output = highest demand (in reality you need to build minimum output as a function of highest demand. Highest total power will far exceed highest demand and still be cheaper than fossil or nuclear. But people can’t grasp that).
Finally. Huge interconnectors like what China and Europe are doing/ done never come up.
It’s just the same old. We built 10% of renewables we need yet we are still using gas. Proof renewables don’t work!
Renewables and nuclear play different sports.
Renewables are better for most of our needs but there is a backbone need of base power. Nuclear is an expensive but clean way to provide that.
By my very very very rough calculations, you could build a large scale solar farm with 3x power output and have enough money left over to build a 33GWh battery. That would more than cover a continuous supply of 1GW.
Absolutely, and we should. We should have both. Nuclear has a very long lifespan and very consistent power. Ideal battery setups do to buy long term lithium battery storage is less of a thing, but it’s growing. There are some other battery techs that use other chemistries which are also attractive.
Multiple eggs in multiple baskets.
Not the guy you responded to but I totally agree. Plus I think countries like Canada, with lots of snow and less direct sunlight, would appreciate an energy source they can rely on in the winter
or we could do both
Also I would like to see the enviromental impact of building your 33GWh battery.
What price per kw generation are you using?
Unless there are a few cloudy days in a row… My panels produce a lot less than normal during cloudy days.
Remember that blanketing the world with solar panels isn’t exactly great for the environment. Rooftops makes a lot of sense, but the cost goes way up, an maintenance becomes a nightmare. The footprint of nuclear is much smaller
The footprint of solar is significant, but still nothing compared to agriculture. E.g. The area used to grow corn to make ethanol in the US is ~ 3x what you’d need to fully power the US on solar.
~96000000 acres used for corn, ~40% of that is used for ethanol. That makes 38.3e6 acres. First estimate I found for area of solar panels to fully power the US on solar alone was 14.08e6. That makes corn for ethanol 2.7 times the area of solar panels if all that was used was solar.
Yeah agriculture isn’t great for the environment either, but that doesn’t actually make solar any better
But what I’m saying is that the land used by solar isn’t all that significant, and it’s also costed into the price of solar farms. To power the US purely off solar would require significantly less land than is currently used for ethanol production alone. I’d say the environmental good of solar (cheap, renewable power) significantly outweighs the cost of it.
For the transition off fossil fuels to happen quickly it needs to be economic, and solar is a big part of making it economic. Nuclear is just too expensive
I guess it depends on perspective. On one hand, it’s an enormous amount of land - on the other hand, the USA is extremely big. I personally think the footprint is significant. It’s not like we’d tear down suberbs to make solar farms, we’d tear down nature (undeveloped land).
The cost being the motivator that makes solar better than nuclear I don’t believe to be accurate. Short term, solar is cheaper, but also we’re making panels as fast as we can. It takes a lot of materials and is hard to scale quickly, so we can’t just decide we want to switch the USA to solar and think we’ll have enough panels in a decade even.
Additionally, nuclear isn’t expensive in the long run. It’s quite profitable and low maintenance. Nuclear waste is blown up by people who don’t understand it. And our grid is ready to be powered by nuclear. Our grid can’t yet handle the quick variablility of solar. If that weren’t a problem, we still need additional power from events where there isn’t a lot of sun for a while. Batteries may get us through the night someday (also another enormous manufacturing feat) but they won’t get us through the week.
If both can be profitable, it’s really a question of what we want to build. I argue that we can’t even run off solar yet without some new technologies being made. Nuclear is the quick fix we need. The only reason we don’t have it already is because of attitude towards it (“not in my backyard”), which I think would be different if people understood it.
Nuclear is a waste of time and money.
Yeah, well, that’s just like, your opinion, man
His username checks out!
That said, you might share his opinion if you were a Georgia Power ratepayer who’s been paying extra on their power bill for years and years now even though it’s only now just come online (and while the Georgia Public Service Commission has allowed the high profit margins for Georgia Power stockholders to be maintained even despite all the cost overruns).
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Base load my friend. We also need steady, reliable, clean power when it’s dark and calm. Until we can accomplish seasonal grid storage of renewables, this is the less expensive option.
There are plenty of firming options (battery, pumped hydro, flywheels etc) which deliver reliability for a fraction of the price of this boondoggle. Not to mention a diverse portfolio of renewable technologies spread over a large geographical area is actually quite stable. When the sun isn’t shining in one area, the wind may be blowing or the sun shining in another area.
- pumped hydro -> not exactly something that can be built anywhere and also not very cheap
- battery -> huge environmental impact until we can get something like sodium based batteries
- Flywheels, not exactly something that gets you through the night is it.
Those can only hold enough power for minutes or hours.
We need to be able to store power from the summer until the winter. Months. We need to store energy from when the sun is shining in July until it’s not in December.
The only possible way to do that now is to store it as hydrogen or hydrocarbons. That infrastructure is currently very lossy, expensive, and only hypothetical.
This idea they can only hold for minutes or hours is simply not true not to mention the entire premise is false. Only the cloudiest of days the solar panels produce 20% what they do on the sunniest days that means you only need to build out 5 times the expected output to always be able to produce what you need during sunny hourse. That means you only need to have battery backup for 16 hours. Something that’s completely feasible. The idea batteries can’t hold power for months isn’t true it’s that it’s not currently economical. How long do you think your electronics take to get from the plant to the store till you buy it and turn it on. If we’re talking about cost then let’s look at this plant. 1.1GW nuclear reactor costs 35 billion and 15 years. A solar farm built out to 5 times capacity would cost roughly 6 billion. Now triple that for battery costs if you want 24/7 electricity were on the order of 18 billion. That’s nearly half the cost and this is being very conservative assuming you want this to be a baseload supplier but will output way more most of the time. Now you will have nearly free electricity during most of the year that other industries could take advantage of like aluminum processing or something like that.
Being generous with a 16h battery you already spend half overnight. What would happen in your scenario if it’s cloudy for longer than 8 hours? If it wouldn’t even last for a day it’s not a realistic plan that accounts for normal weather
You are simply incorrect. I don’t know why you think that there are any actual technologies that can store terawatt hours of electricity for months at a time. You can’t pump storage the entirety of lake Mead. You can’t have flywheels that have such low friction at such high mass and speed. And the batteries…you can’t be serious.
You are also under the incredible misapprehension that the market is going to build excess capacity such that they will need to give away “nearly free” electricity. The need to be able to store it to sell when the price is better or be funded for some kind of (as yet hypothetical) carbon sequestration project.
You don’t need power storage for months, if you combine different renewable sources and have power lines connecting different areas. Wind and solar complement each other usually.
You need to be able to bridge a few weeks though, because there will be gaps, but you don’t need to store solar power for half a year to make it. It is still a big issue, but no need to exaggerate.
it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.
That’s not really accurate. There are endless lawsuits when it comes to getting windfarms going because people claim it will ruin their view or the rare redheaded blue-eyed pigeon will be hurt or some other bogus nonsense. These lawsuits can go on and on for ages.
To your point:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/30/its-got-nasty-the-battle-to-build-the-uss-biggest-solar-power-farm
https://vaenergyconsumer.com/lawsuit-aims-to-stop-massive-solar-array/
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/energy-water-summit/2017/04/21/environmentalist-just-killed-wind-farm-near-las-vegas/305796001/
https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-environment-and-nature-las-vegas-nevada-9bf3640dfefbc6f7f45a97c6810f5ff7Wind and Solar struggle greatly with “not in my backyard”. Of course, so too with Nuclear, and even more extreme with Nuclear, but you are correct that solar and wind have challenges with getting going.
These days EVERYTHING has like 10 lawsuits attached to it before anything can happen. Then we wonder why everything is always at a stand-still. We had a local brwery and pub in a perfect location get sued because the restuarant next door (which is kind of run down) was afraid of the competition. Now the Brewery is actually considering pulling out. Such BS especially the influx of people coming to the area would probably end up helping both businesses.
Nice!
Goated energy source, hope the stigma lessens over time
I’m just stoked that lemmy as a whole and I agree on. Go team.
I want to do more research in Thorium reactors. They are much safer than uranium.
On meltdown issues maybe, but if it’s one of the molten salt types, they generate way more waste. Old school rods make long term storage of waste actually pretty easy
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And “more” is relative. All the nuclear waste ever created worldwide could be stored in a single specialized facility if we were inclined to do so.
Compare against the waste generated at a single coal plant.
Now I am not suggesting this… but what would happen if you just dropped it into deepest part of the ocean?
I’d be more happy if they just dug a really big borehole and then just filled it up where no one lives
A billionaire will implode going to look for it.
Burning all actinides is pure scifi. Nothing close to it has ever happened.
Nor has a full fuel cycle of a thorium reactor burning the primary fuel (U233) to similar burnup levels as a traditional U235 reactor hecause the waste is so much harder to handle and the salts are so corrosive.
Whoa. Finally a state in the US that isn’t doing something completely ass backwards. We need more of this.
It’s Georgia, though. This is a positive development but it barely begins to make up for how much other ass-backwards stuff there is.
This is the state that elected Marjorie Taylor Greene, keep in mind.
Hopefully Georgia steps up and sticks to their guns with prosecuting people who attempt to convince election officials “to find 11,780 votes”.
This is the state that brought you Biden in 2020. And two democratic senators. Granted there’s a lot of back ass districts here, but we’re working on it I promise.
A single congressional district within that state elected Marjorie Taylor Greene lol
Hmm if we had a giant solar array in space that could continuously capture sunlight, we could connect it to the Jewish Space Laser™ and beam it down to Earth, hopefully to a collection panel and not to the California forests to cause wildfires.
Wait… is this the USA’s first Gen III+ reactor?
Good to see industrial self sufficiency coming back to the US
About fucking time.
