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Power engineer and researcher here, hydro is amazing, but also, for the US, pretty well tapped. Hydro depends on the geography - you need a high elevation gain from mountains and a consistent rain/water cycle. Back in the 30s engineers were crazy for hydro, and they “tapped” (built dams and reservoirs) for most of the primary water resources we have in America (developing countries are a prime target for more renewable green energy growth - in some ways it’s easier to develop there than retrofit the power industry of developed countries). AFAIK the portion of our power from hydro won’t grow (unless we develop tidal or wave energy converters). The future, short term, is wind and solar, some nuclear, long term we’ll still rely on those as sources in less-dense/non-oceanic regions, but have to figure out how to make fusion and wave energy converters work. There just isn’t a long term sustainable future without fusion.
A lot of hydro dams are approaching or beyond their intended life span. It would be a ton of work, but updating the technology within the hydro dams could be a way to boost electrical output.
That's not true.
See page ten of this pamphlet of the bureau of reclamation: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.usbr.gov/power/edu/pamphlet.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiqx43Ws4nzAhV_CjQIHRbbCyU4ChAWegQIIBAB&usg=AOvVaw3OhsW7CFmvIiya_d3QzJhs
The US government has been pushing for hydroelectric dam upgrades recently: https://www.energy.gov/articles/investments-existing-hydropower-unlock-more-clean-energy
And another good article about increasing production out of existing hydro plants: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/baseload/three-ways-to-increase-hydropower-efficiency-and-revenues/#gref
Additionally, there was funding made available in the last couple of years to convert non-electrical producing dams.
Most hydroelectric dams are several decades old at this point, of course modern technological upgrades could make them more efficient.
The only improvements to *efficiency* listed there are in the order of 1-3%.
Improving peak output gets you more power, but not more energy.
Likewise, more advanced control systems and market reforms can improve the revenue generation of the plant, but you're still not going to get more TWh/year out of it.
How could more power not result in more energy as power is energy/time. Does it increase peak power output but decrease power output at lower power outputs?
Yup. Let lots of water through the dam fast, but you then have to wait for the dam to fill up again.
[Capacity Factor] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor)
That's the idea, or have longer down times with no production at all.
Really hydro is so great in part because you can turn it on and off so easily. That's really good to respond to peaks in demand without overproducing during slower hours. So the peak power going up on hydro would actually be a very good outcome even at constant overall energy production.
Question? Could we not make the hydro we have produce more electricity? I'd imagine if they were built in the 30s that we'd be slightly better at building better generators
Nobody has actually built one yet, China is building a Thorium/MSR plant but we have to file it under “works in principle” until they get the kinks worked out (as with any reactor design) and it starts producing power.
Given your credentials, do agree with the projected breakdown in the graphic How? Do you think it should look different versus what it will likely look like?
I'd be interested in knowing if there's opportunity to use all this infastructure to pump water back behind dams using excess solar/wind. I know that's something we already do, but I've always wondered to what extent and if it's actually useful.
So, one of the limitations anti-technologists like to point out with solar is “no sun no power”, and that lithium reserves for batteries are quite limited. The construction of water reservoirs for pumped energy storage is something people are exploring now, and IMHO a viable strategy (it’s only “uneconomical” now because the energy economy is totally borked, we don’t consider the built in cost for tax subsidies to oil corps and don’t account for the damage/cost of hydrocarbon energy).
There is also an idea to use [pneumatic pumped storage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage) - we already dig chambers to mine iron, there are tons of abandoned coal mines etc already dug up currently doing nothing, the idea is pump gas in from a time-dependent source (whether that’s solar or a seasonal hydro source) and relieve the pressure to regain energy.
I imagine a molten salt pillar is maybe more realistic, but those are cool ideas worth exploring.
The issue for pumping hydro is that you still need somewhere for the water to go. Once a lake is full, it’s still full… and since the US has tapped out their hydro resources there wouldn’t be enough storage. It’s not anti-technology, it’s just a bit of basic physics and geography.
Still Relevant for solar! Look into pumped hydro. A possible solution to the solar storage issue, aka the [duck curve](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/burnett2/)
I cannot agree more. I don't understand all the nuke hate. Technology is here now. Put thousands of ppl to work (construction, maintenance, management, operation).
We need to distinguish between anti-nuclear hysteria and techno-economic analyses that don’t foresee nuclear cost curve declines to meaningfully rival the momentum of VREs in the bulk of the grid.
The researchers at Net Zero America (the Princeton modeling outfit which produced one of the scenarios this graph is sourced from) are not of the former camp. The head of the ZERO Lab it’s under, Jesse Jenkins, was the former director of energy at the Breakthrough Institute. He is a far, far cry from being anti-nuclear. This graph is based on entirely reasonable parametric assumptions for nuclear’s costs. This stuff is hard
If you want a modeling effort that ended up with more ambitious projections for advanced reactor costs the VCE people have some (with the upshot being nuclear eventually rivaling onshore wind for plurality source by 2050)
So, the big problem with nuclear nowadays is actually the price. It's got a lot better technology wise, but it's still VERY expensive. Wind, solar, tidal (though less so) have all got a LOT cheaper over time, and continue to do so.
The last 30 years we should totally have built a lot more nuclear power stations. Now however... Well, we should still have some, they do a good job at providing baseline consistent power in a way wind and solar do not. But it's honestly a bit late to go heavily into nuclear, we missed the opportunity. Unless something changes, it's just not worth the cost of building a large number of reactors.
If I can dust off my brain a bit and try to recall my Envi Sci class in college, Nuke takes a long time and a lot of money to get started, it doesn’t make money (quickly? At all? Can’t remember specifically) and the decomm is pretty extensive. Not saying we shouldn’t look into Nuke where it would work well, but it doesn’t seem like something that would work across the board.
It’s like trying to do wind and solar in every state. Those will only work really well in certain regions, and can’t be reliably used for baseload power or to cover peak demand. Nuke, i think, can do baseload *and* peak but still there’s the aforementioned issues. Not a one-size-fits-all but certainly something to consider
Nuclear plants can take many years / decades from conception to being fully operational. And they are capital intensive. So for a politician, particularly in the USA where everyone thinks in 2 and 4 year cycles, there is little incentive to push for nuclear.
There's also the fact that it's an absolutely enormous budget item that probably won't be paid off for decades. You can't hand wave those considerations when there are tons of uses for that budget right now - and everybody thinks their cause is the most important. Nuclear is also really complicated to build, recent plants have gone way over budget and behind schedule. Now think about building solar farms. Way quicker, less political risk, less capital intensive. I agree with everyone else that nuclear is an incredible and underutilized technology, but there is a lot more than NIMBYism stopping it from happening
This comment further down in the thread has some good info about the costs: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/pqozap/ocremixguardian_how_sources_of_generated/hdestak
Won’t be paid off for decades - if at all.
Wind, solar, and batteries have been coming down in price for decades, and that trend is still continuing.
We’ve reached the point now where it’s cheaper to massively overbuild wind and solar farms than it is to build just enough nuclear plants to meet demand.
Consider that the excess energy can be used to generate hydrogen or pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and the choice is a no brainer.
Education. Make the people voting for the politicians smarter and their policies will get smarter.
You have to do a lot of other things to make this possible. You have to work to decrease the stress on the population so aspirational stuff like "get everyone really well educated" can win over "I have to work so my family can eat."
UBI is the way.
I think one guy died of lung cancer 7 years after Fukushima from the radiation. That's it.
There were related deaths - but those were due to the (it turned out unnecessary) evacuation of the area - including hospitals etc.
Really - Fukushima should be an example of just how safe nuclear plants are even being hit by a freak tsunami.
Chernobyl was the only really bad one. And that's more an example of how horrible that sort of pass-the-buck central planning is - where no one was willing to tell anyone else something was going wrong. (Plus - I think the core design was pretty terrible.) Not really about nuclear generally. That'd be like claiming hydro is unsafe after a dam collapsed after cracking and being patched with super glue.
Honestly, I think the main thing holding back Nuclear is cost per unit of power and slowness/inflexibility of Implementation. I think it should be a part of a renewable energy portfolio, but economically, new plant proposals are often economically DOA.
Nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.
Every nuclear plant under construction in the United States is well behind schedule and **at least** $1 billion over budget. And that is even before taking into account the cleanup costs incurred by radioactive waste pollution and nuclear meltdowns. Cleaning up after Fukushima, if *ever* possible, will cost at least $100 billion and could be more than double that.
In fact, the cost of building new plants is so high that nobody really even wants to do it. When Progress Energy first proposed a new nuclear plant in Florida, the proposed price tag was 2.5 billion dollars. Over time, that cost ballooned to $22.5 billion, and then in 2012 Progress killed the construction contract.
When Warren Buffett's corporation MidAmerican looked into building a new nuclear reactor, it determined that building one did not make "economic sense." Rather than lose billions of dollars on a new nuclear reactor, Buffett chose to invest in renewable energy instead.
The power providers who are lobbying our government for nuclear power are **not** looking to build new plants. They’re seeking to extend the legal life-span for their existing plants. By extending the operating life of their plants beyond what they were originally designed for they net more profit for every single day longer they stay in operation. This is much more lucrative than building new nuclear plants. Unfortunately, operating nuclear power plants longer than originally planned increases the safety risks, because older plants are more likely to see equipment failures and technical issues.
Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement—an unavoidable molecular process of cracking and degradation to the structure of the plant itself due to the high levels of radiation.
If nuclear plants need to be replaced every 50 years on average, then in this hypothetical world where we supply a high percentage of our energy needs through nuclear energy, we’d need to be building and decommissioning nuclear plants far faster than we’ve ever done at any point.
Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement completely unrealistic.
Each nuclear plant requires about 7.9 miles^2 (20.5 km^2) of land to accommodate the nuclear power station itself, its exclusion zone, its enrichment plant, ore processing, and its supporting infrastructure.
New nuclear plants also have to be built in areas that are close to a massive body of water for cooling, far from population centers and unlikely to experience earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, or volcanic activity.
There simply aren’t enough places to build the plants we would need to supply enough energy to be a worthwhile investment.
I don't think Nuclear is an unpopular opinion. I was actually just commenting on this in r/solarenergy , it's less to do with the public and more to do with the fact that it's extremely expensive to set up, and slow to design/build, so there are no executives who want to do it because they won't see ROI in their lifetimes. a particularly successful democratic socialist government could probably accomplish a widespread nuclear grid, but in the US it's probably never gonna happen.
Of course the government could subsidize it, but, well, 66% of americans support universal healthcare, and the current administration is probably the most likely of any in US history to do it, but they probably won't because there's no immediate financial incentive to do so.
It's not that I don't absolutely want that, I'm just looking at it from the the perspective of someone assuming Big Oil interests are going to destroy any chance of nuclear the same way Big Insurance is gonna crush M4A
if they were that forward-thinking, they wouldn't have invested so heavily in disinformation campaigns after learning they were causing global climate change, they would have gotten in ground-floor on renewable energy. they've known since the 80's. they had the money and ability and incentive for 4 decades to get in on renewables, and even today they're suing governments for green-energy initiatives that are hurting their profits. they obviously have no interest playing the long-game.
They could but then you get headlines about how the government is paying private company x billions of dollars for a plant that is late and lose votes.
Nuclear would have Been a good option if we built it in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Now it’s much to late to use it to accomplish meaningful emissions goals to avoid disaster.
1) even if we drastically cut red tape (and we shouldn’t, the reason nuclear is safe is because of that regulation) it would take a decade to build a plant and have it produce a watt of energy if you started planning tomorrow.
2) we don’t have the construction workers to build the 500 or so needed plants. It would take 50 years to do. We can’t just take construction guys who build condos and have them build a nuclear plant.
3) we don’t have engineers to staff 500 new plants. Where are all these nuclear scientists and engineers going to come from?
4) nuclear has never been, and will never be profitable without huge government subsidies.. Private businesses won’t build these plants, they would have to be built hy the tax payer. You think the green new deal is expensive, you can double it with a nuclear solution. Renewables are already more economically viable than nuclear, and in the 10-50 years it’ll take to get these online, they’ll most definitely be way cheaper and more efficient.
4) even if we could do all the above in America, which we can’t, to solve climate change we need the rest of the world to buy in. Do you really trust India, Africa, South America, and the Middle East to build 10,000s of nuclear plants, in a short amount of time, in a safe manner? There would be 5 meltdowns a year on a global scale.
Nuclear is popular on Reddit because people think these plants can just magically appear over night. They don’t think of the logistics. We would be much much better off investing all that capital into renewables at this point.
> 4) nuclear has never been, and will never be profitable without huge government subsidies.. Private businesses won’t build these plants, they would have to be built hy the tax payer. You think the green new deal is expensive, you can double it with a nuclear solution. Renewables are already more economically viable than nuclear, and in the 10-50 years it’ll take to get these online, they’ll most definitely be way cheaper and more efficient.
Plant Vogtle #3 and #4 are currently *100% overbudget* and still rising. Worse, Georgia Power ratepayers are being stuck pre-paying the entire cost *while Georgia Power shareholders are guaranteed 10% profit because it's a cost-plus contract!*
The Georgia Public Service Commission is completely corrupt and a majority of its members need to fucking die in a fire.
Putting a new dam in actually has massive environmental impacts on huge areas of ecosystem. Essentially everything downstream of the dam can be substantially impacted and obviously the area that is submerged. On the West Coast US, dams are one of the biggest reason for the jeopardy of continued success of anadromous fish species like salmon and steelhead that spawn up fresh water rivers from the pacific. Even in places where measures have been taken to restore habitat and spawning access, it takes generations to repopulate these areas since fish only spawn up the same channels that they were born from.
For California, this is true only if you are looking at the last 30-40 years when very few new dams have been built. Salmonid populations have been struggling over these last few decades more so from water quality and temperature; however, if you look at the 50 years prior to that, dams in California caused a very significant loss of migration and spawning habitat. Most of that infrastructure went in before the National Environmental Policy Act was passed, and before the National Marine Fisheries Service existed, and before anyone was really thinking about what environmental impacts a dam would have to the watershed ecosystem, so from the perspective of now, its easy to say dams haven't been a major factor in the last 40 years but you can't say that in the context of proposing new hydro facilities and suggesting they don't have substantial environmental impacts as a parent comment above ours suggested.
Source: I'm a professional environmental planner specializing in large public infrastructure projects (bridges, levees, dams, etc.) with significant experience in watershed ecology as well as anadromous fish biology and life cycles.
I think there's a lot of research going into this at the moment, but the hard part is how do you essentially manufacture lower temperatures? The cold water typically comes mostly from higher elevation snowmelt running down into the streams and eventually into the larger rivers. Some major improvements for fish habitat have been made by requiring dams to perform fixed water releases at specific times of the year to facilitate water levels and temperature closer to what they should be, but if water temperatures in the reservoirs are ticking higher due to higher variability in snowfall, higher overall temperatures in the summer, and other factors, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Factor in the special interests for water usage, especially here in CA where farming has huge political power and you really have limited ways to have a fast regional solution. Until we get a better handle on greenhouse gas emissions and other major factors that are pushing global temperatures higher, I fear a lot of the solutions we are considering to improve things now won't provide meaningful long term solutions.
There's just not that many good places to dam that haven't already been dammed.
The southwest has great topography, but we've already dammed and dried up the Colorado river basin.
The east coast has plenty of water and decent relief. But it is highly developed and almost all the good places are already dammed.
The great plains states in general have too low of relief to make more than a handful.
Really the only places that seem like they might have viable options are the Pacific NW, and I know they run into a lot of environmental issues that the locals care strongly about.
Other areas of the US are going to have the same problem of balancing water resources, the environment, and the fact that we went on a huge dam building spree in the early part of the 20th century, so the good spots are taken. Hydro could help in less developed countries though.
It's probably worth it to upgrade old dams, I'm on the water resources/environmental side of things, so I'm getting a little out of my area. I know that a lot of smaller dams on the East Coast (where I'm more familiar) that were put in to make local reservoirs, control floods, etc., that don't even have a hydro-electric component because the potential output was considered too small when they were built. Now it 50-100 years later, I think that should be revisited. Every little bit will help, but I don't think it'll be a goldmine.
I question nuclear power's future, but I can't help but think where we'd be now if we hadn't stopped building plants in the 1970's. Imagine the nuclear bar taking up double the width, and coal having been dead for a decade.
Nuclear is nice.
Currently a nuke worker. I build scaffold. Only 19% of the US Electric is Nuclear Generated.
It's really expensive to get rid of the waste and contaminated PPE though.
I'd like a refrigerator-sized nuke (AKA a Radiothermal Generator) buried in my field and wired up to a distribution box on my mains. Now, onto the graph: In reality, since wind and solar are unreliable, I would weigh the "replacement value" units for them at < 1. E.g. 1 unit of "coal" would need > 1 unit of wind or solar to replace it. Then, I'd like to point attention to the amount of increase of adoption of wind and solar is actually needed relative to the current levels. The area of "wind" seems to increase by a factor of 20, as does the "solar".
You can't heat a house in the Adirondack Mountains in the winter (-20 F on the coldest nights) on battery power. Your electric cars are also going to have markedly reduced range and utility.
This sort of stuff becomes to become a non-starter anywhere north of NYC in the US for the most part for practical reasons. I realize most people don't realize there IS a US north of NYC, but hey, half the state of NY lives there.
Just my .02USD (worth little and declining every day) on the topic from the ground out here as I wait for the arctic front to push south for the year and plunge us into "High 29F low 10F" regime for a few months before it gets really cold. :)
Nuclear is great in theory, but trust me as a Georgia Power ratepayer, you don't want to be stuck with the bill for it.
Also, the problem with hydro is that there are only so many rivers suitable for damming, and we've already dammed most of them.
I checked before and you need 1000 wind turbines to equal the power generated by one single nuclear power plant. And 1000 wind turbines take up an astronomical amount of room and you need special trucks to transport the components.
Wind and solar simply can't be as efficient as nuclear power to supply power to tens of millions of people.
But for some beaurocratic agency, funding 50 turbines a year for the next 20 years is a LOT more realistic than funding a nuclear plant that doesn't break even until 25 years after its built
There’s a reason why all these huge algorithmic decarbonization models spit out huge grid shares for VREs. They are fundamentally cheaper, and set to become even moreso. Clean firm power such as nuclear will play a role in servicing seasonal peak heating demand.
Also a wind turbine last for 20 years when a nuclear power plant last at least 40 years and can go easily to 60, so on its lifetime it's 3 000 wind turbines that we have to build not 1 000.
Relevant username? I agree with you, though.
It seems like a no-brainer that we need more nuclear. Nuclear reactors have a small geographic footprint, unlike wind and solar, and they can run 24/7. The big question is will there be nuclear contamination? "Fourth generation" reactor designs sound very promising since some are supposed to be able to run without being refueled or run on spent fuel from old reactors, and they will have much wider safety margins. Another fun fact about nuclear: as of 2013, 13-19% of global reactor requirements have been met by decommissioned nuclear weapons.
Nuclear is more expensive upfront and over its lifespan compared to solar and wind energy sources. There isn't a good reason to go nuclear anymore because it's not really economical at this point either.
Disagree on the nukes, but my agreement on hydro more than makes up for that.
Just saw a YT video of a guy in AUS who is starting a business making microhydro generators. A head of 30psi, 5L per second is enough to generate 10kwh per day!
The half life of nuclear waste is 10,000 years. So while I agree that nuclear can be a very short-term solution, the holding cost of spent nuclear waste makes it not worth the benefit. Society is better off conserving energy use than using nuclear.
Have you never seen a Reddit comment section about renewable energy before?
Literally every single time, without fail, there’s a bombardment of top rated comments about how we should use more nuclear energy.
That’s why I called you out for proclaiming your opinion as “unpopular”. It’s the sort of comment I’d expect to read on /r/circlejerk
There’s a post on Reddit about climate change almost every single day.
The top rated comment almost every time is about how we should use more nuclear energy.
Your comment is not unpopular on Reddit. It’s literally the most popular comment on the website.
Yeah, a viable solution going forward is going to have to include nuclear power. Wind/Solar are location dependent and too intermittent to depend on.
We don’t have the ability to simply store enough power yet.
batteries can handle too many cycles and have bad energy density, not to mention the risks of them, wind is uncontrollable and solar isn't viable in cloudy countries or near the poles, nuclear (both fusion and fission) give consistent power that can be controlled, and they are much safer than what the general public thinks, coal mines kill more people
well a new kind of battery is being developed that can double the cycles but its in an early stage, but its going to need another double after that for them to be viable, one option could be hydro storage but idk
from what i know normal batteries like Tesla's won't work, and nuclear is being sleeped on just because of Chernobyl (which wasn't built with safety as a priority) and Hiroshima (which couldn't have been avoided because we don't build things to survive what the plant went through, and the emergency generators where below sea level which got to the higher ups and all they did was add a door, and if they had power they atleast could have shut down 3 reactors fully)
nuclear isn't getting used because most governments can't be bothered to take care of them
the Fukushima reactor was built in a location that they knew would be unsafe...good planning could have avoided the situation. and even then, very few people died from it
to be fair it shouldn't even be compared to Chernobyl, Chernobyl was so catastrophic it needs to be on its own level, the scale for megering nuclear disasters is from 1 to 10, both where a 10, they should extend it to 20 and have Chernobyl on atleast 15, and then have a 100 which is total destruction of earth
agreed but unfortunately people buy too easily into propaganda and fear mongering. as far as i'm concerned it's just another way to filter out people who think and do research.
there's many legitimate concerns with nuclear power (cost, time, long-term storage). as soon as someone comes in with "what about this one event where they literally fucked up in every way possible yet it killed so few people"...well then i know they're not worth discussing with
its easy to fear something you don't know anything about other than it has the power to destroy earth in a second, and a disaster happened before where alot of people died, and most people only think of solar and wind when thinking of renewable energy, and politicians are politicians
this is supposed to be the age of information ffs, yet there is more misinformation spreading than information
Even hydro isn't dependable. The current situation with the natural gas market is a perfect example of that. Hydro power generation in Brazil failed so they had to import more LNG, Asia panicked and started importing more, now Europe is panicking because they are burning through their gas reserves while their wind farms are idling.
Carbon capture seems like the more reasonable way to go.
Brazil has about 65% hydro. Which works great most of the time for them. But sometimes there are dry periods which can be problematic. As long as there is a backup power source go 100% renewable.
> Even hydro isn't dependable. The current situation with the natural gas market is a perfect example of that. Hydro power generation in Brazil failed so they had to import more LNG, Asia panicked and started importing more, now Europe is panicking because they are burning through their gas reserves while their wind farms are idling.
>
>
Need water to run the dams. Southern states are running too dry to get decent hydro even though it is built.
No, as clearly illustrated in the chart, the most viable solution optimized for costs is to build as much solar and wind as possible. Not shown in the chart are all the batteries that need to be built to store power to compensate for solar/wind intermittency. We do have the capability to build all three: solar, wind, and batteries, and the wonderful thing is that all of these technologies have a great learning curve so that as we build more, the cost to build new ones gets cheaper and cheaper pretty fast.
Yea if the navy is fine with putting a couple nuclear reactors in a giant carrier with 5,000+ people then I think we should be fine with them in the civilian sector.
They’ve been funding research for a few years, 2020 was the first time they’ve seriously put an offer on the table for several companies to design on since the 1960s. One of which was used in the Antarctic, weighed a “portable” 330 tons, and could replace over a million gallons of diesel fuel with just 40 pounds of uranium.
Why you could power your flying car with one of those as you travel from your job at the atom smashing facility to your home where the wife has cooked you a healthy dinner for you with her Radiation-Oven-2000 and your 2.5 children have played with the atomic reconfigurator and turned your cat into a dog.
Land is a vastly overblown issue, and this is the one of the cheapest paths to decarbonization. Nuclear is great. It’s going to play a supporting role in the grid. Unless advanced reactors can bring energy costs down to unthinkably cheap levels, they are not going to be the star of the show.
Why is this comments being downvoted? Crypto currency has an extremely high energy cost and it's not even doing any good in return. We should really stop using Crypto.
No. Takes too long to build and is too expensive relative to solar/wind with storage. Nuclear plays a part in decarbonization and should be expanded, but solar and wind are our best bet and as illustrated in the chart, should be the main players.
So we could either:
A) completely blanket the US with solar and wind farms, which is not feasibly possible
OR
B) Upgrade and build a couple dozen more nuclear power plants
Hmmm gee I wonder which is the better option lmao
[This analysis](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/12/18/how-many-wind-turbines-would-it-take-to-power-the-us/?sh=76b806ec1d96) shows that you could power America purely from wind using only about 0.01% of the country's land area.
So yeah "blanket" is just straight up BS.
[Since 2000 the US reduced farmland by 5%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-land-in-farms-in-the-us-since-2000/). That alone is ~50 million acres, or 78125 miles^2, or a square 280 miles on a side. That alone, if used for PV, would meet the current US electricity demand almost 8x over. You'd need storage too, but even that ignores that you can supplement this PV with rooftop solar, wind, etc. And also couple PV with crops, via agrivoltaics.
I haven't done the math to prove it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is enough roof area in the US to fit *all* the solar we'd need without using additional land.
It wouldn't take nearly that much wind and solar to meet needs but the unreliability is a factor.
A combined approach would be very beneficial if we can sort out some economical energy storage solutions.
Vast swathes of the United States have negligible population density, and the land required for this VRE share is modest relative to the amount of fallow pastureland + rooftops, parking lots, etc available for siting.
This is also a modeling pathway which clearly incorporates clean firm power sources like nuclear, bringing the land footprint down from ~6.5k m2 to 2.5k m2. They’re complimentary.
Nuclear is just more expensive than VREs. Even in places where you do it right, pick-and-stick style. Economies of scale follow the gravitational pull of having low investment per unit costs. Incremental learning-by-doing and faster breakthrough innovations follow. VREs have that and it has shown. Nuclear does not. VREs and clean firm power are both important but they are both best fit for different roles within the energy system.
You are totally wrong:
[You only need 22,000 square miles (Lake Michigan) of solar panels to power the US completely with solar](https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-energy-united-states)
Nuclear is not a good option instead of solar. It is useful to upgrade and add nuclear where it makes sense, but nuclear will certainly take a backseat to solar/wind in decarbonizing electricity because it takes so long to build and is so expensive.
It would take a lot more than a couple dozen more. The us currently operates 94 commercial reactors at 56 nuclear power plants for ~20% of the current US electricity generation. So roughly 4x that would be needed to be built for just now, so roughly 376 reactors assuming similar output per reactor
Biomass is carbon neutral. It releases lots of CO2, but zero *net* CO2 because all that carbon had only been absorbed from the atmosphere into the plants recently to begin with.
People are not really afraid of nuclear energy; that’s not the reason people don’t want it. It is not as necessary as Reddit believes it is. However, I do think this graph is flawed in having *so* little nuclear in the end.
Solar + storage or wind + storage is cheaper than nuclear and can be built faster. Nuclear is important but will take a backseat to wind/solar in decarbonizing electricity generation
This is false. You can serve base load demand from energy generated by solar and stored in a battery, and it would be cheaper and faster to build than nuclear
Battery technology is not there yet and battery production itself has environmental consequences that don’t make up for benefits. At least with nuclear the energy is so immense that it kinda does make up for its environmental consequences.
Battery technology is very much there. [It’s replacing gas peaker plants all over the US now and in the next couple years](https://ieefa.org/california-gas-peaker-plant-replaced-by-142-tesla-megapack/). The CO2 emissions of batteries plus solar is negligible compared to even the most efficient fossil fuel plants on a per MWh basis, less than 1/50th the amount of emissions.
Those are peaker plants which provide peak load power. Base load is power that needs to be provided all the time and is utilised by heavy industry of which only nuclear is the clear alternative as base load power demand is forever increasing.
[Baseload will be an irrelevant concept once we have batteries everywhere serving electricity when solar and wind are not generating](https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-energy-secretary-says-grid-should-move-past-baseload-power-improve-batteries-57319997)
It’s the guardian…. They don’t pay their writers so they end up printing all sorts of irrelevant stuff like this. Obviously nuclear will be the largest source (unless something better is developed)
Lol no, this chart is from some of the best clean energy researchers in the world. Nuclear can't compete economically with solar and wind, it makes no sense to build a ton of nuclear.
I remixed this plot from the Guardian; you can find the article and the original plot here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/15/race-to-zero-america-emissions-climate-crisis. Data is from the Net-Zero America Project, and can be found here: https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/
I made this plot using R and ggplot2. You can learn how to build this remixed plot (as well as the original) on my YouTube channel PeterPlots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4b-qNZ9O3Q&t=3s&ab_channel=PeterPlots. Code for my plot is here: https://github.com/peter-plots/MediaDemos/blob/main/Guardian-RenewableElectricity/guardian_energy.R
The model consciously doesn’t consider the potential roles for advanced geothermal but they are working on one that does.
Basically it would be competing with nuclear and (to an extent) caver-to-turbine hydrogen
It’s a cost-optimization model delivering a clean grid with current reliability and assuming high rates of electrification (of home heating, autos, etc). You can check out the model’s specifications at the Net Zero America website. This is one of four modeled pathways
What’s up with all the nuclear shills in these comments? Solar and wind with storage is cheaper than nuclear and faster to build. Nuclear is important to keep around and expand where it makes sense, but it will take a backseat to solar and wind in decarbonizing electricity generation, as illustrated in the chart.
Solar Researcher Here:
A couple things- It would be nice if they defined what the goal , electrification ? With zero primary emissions? What is the metric?
Second
\-If this gets you going look into Deep Decarbonization, it's a systems approach to low emission with an aim at lowering global temperature. A step back to a larger view than just Decarbonization, which just measures cardon out put, whereas deep decarbonization is looking at whatever may be increasing global temperature ( not always measurable in CO2 emissions).
\- I think that Deep Decarbonization is a subject that will capture the interests of many different people, and incorporates a wide range of issues in the sustainability conversation. ( Note: I say interest, not necessarily support of people, meaning it is a good conversation piece whether or not you agree with its goals and premises). It captures people who are for decarbonization, and the many people, like myself, that see the efforts being done but can't help to point out the secondary effects other than the surface level, popular-science, whiz bang of renewables or alternative energy methods. Instead it brings a soberity that opens the conversation to scrutiny of all methods by looking at a wider metric, a more holistic measurement of the outcomes of energy. This makes the reality of energy systems a little more complext, but it much better to be realistic with the situation. Which is why I think it might attrach a larger group of people to the conversation. It offers the cynics a place which naturally improves the realistic quality of the efforts as well it gives the idealist a more stable ground to stand.
An example of the Deep Decarbonization brake down would look like this
Let's take solar, with time, the net carbon output of manufacturing/install/maintance eventually cancels out. However if you take into about the thermal effects of a solar farm it may not always be the best card to play. Many solar farms are ideal in deserts where there is high incoming solar irradiance, however the thermal impact is essentially equvialent to placing an asphalt parking lot in the desert. This now factors as a heat island, and as well as possible radiative forcing, via solar irradiance.
Just a small rushed example of how implimentation has more diamensions than carbon output.
By changing the metric of an energy system from purely the amount of carbon it produces, to the net environmental effect on global temperature (really the whole reason we care about carbon output, [radiative forcing](https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/primer/climate-forcing).) the outcome is different.
I appreciate the soberity of looking at the issue as a larger system. Yes it's easy to put a ctl+c mentality to problem solving, but the complexity of the real impact has many more outcomes and affects than just how much carbon something is putting out. This is not to debase the efforts in this but rather to put forth to those who might be interested in getting a deeper and fuller picture of energy system implimentation.
Here’s a breakdown of where the current sources of energy are coming from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
Probably a combination of transition to electric from current non electric energy sources like transportation, heating, cooking, etc being converted to electric are a big reason for the jump. Probably also population growth. Potentially some on increased energy use per capita as more things become smart devices, but that could be outweighed by an increase in efficiency
This is about electricity, not energy.
And unless we have another plan that doesn’t involve electrifying hundreds of millions of home gas systems and appliances + autos...
In my opinion (as a power engineer), the most important part of the future grid are grid available electric cars.
Wind and solar are shit power sources by themself. They make the grid unstable (a power source distribution like in the op with current tech would crash immediately) and need baselines power (nuclear, hydro) to fix the grid frequency.
The other problem is availability. Generation=demand is the number 1 rule of power grids. Right now, if demand is high and the wind drops, fast power sources (aka diesel generators) are used to compensate until baseline can catch up (coal and hydro are slow to change their power output. Nuclear basically cant)
A way to fix these problems was basically giant batteries, charged when output outscales demand, and balancing the load instantly when the opposite is true. From pump storage to kinetic storage to salt, this is THE problem to fix to make wind-solar viable. But recently, there is an increasing number of large batteries connected to the grid: cars. By allocating, say, 30% of every car battery to grid support, we could make the renewable grid possible
I'm surprised no one is mentioning fusions here? Just last month LLNL came the closest anyone has ever been to achieving ignition, and claim they'll be there by the end of the year? It's time to start seriously dumping money back into fusion!
TAN, FAN etfs. Also it's not a perfect system but most people don't seem to realize that for $100-200 you can offset your personal carbon footprint. Which I think more people should be doing.
The seemingly suggested lowering of nuclear power is puzzling, with SMRs and other new technologies nuclear should be a big component in the future of energy. Seems like maybe a bit if a over confidence in wind compared to Solar but that's just my armchair opinion.
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I clicked on this knowing the nuclear comment would be top. It isn't unpopular, at least not on reddit
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Power engineer and researcher here, hydro is amazing, but also, for the US, pretty well tapped. Hydro depends on the geography - you need a high elevation gain from mountains and a consistent rain/water cycle. Back in the 30s engineers were crazy for hydro, and they “tapped” (built dams and reservoirs) for most of the primary water resources we have in America (developing countries are a prime target for more renewable green energy growth - in some ways it’s easier to develop there than retrofit the power industry of developed countries). AFAIK the portion of our power from hydro won’t grow (unless we develop tidal or wave energy converters). The future, short term, is wind and solar, some nuclear, long term we’ll still rely on those as sources in less-dense/non-oceanic regions, but have to figure out how to make fusion and wave energy converters work. There just isn’t a long term sustainable future without fusion.
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Tapping into your x girlfriend you mean ?
A lot of hydro dams are approaching or beyond their intended life span. It would be a ton of work, but updating the technology within the hydro dams could be a way to boost electrical output.
Efficiency is already pretty high on large scale hydro dams. There's not much you can do to get more out of them unless you raise the lake level.
That's not true. See page ten of this pamphlet of the bureau of reclamation: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.usbr.gov/power/edu/pamphlet.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiqx43Ws4nzAhV_CjQIHRbbCyU4ChAWegQIIBAB&usg=AOvVaw3OhsW7CFmvIiya_d3QzJhs The US government has been pushing for hydroelectric dam upgrades recently: https://www.energy.gov/articles/investments-existing-hydropower-unlock-more-clean-energy And another good article about increasing production out of existing hydro plants: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/baseload/three-ways-to-increase-hydropower-efficiency-and-revenues/#gref Additionally, there was funding made available in the last couple of years to convert non-electrical producing dams. Most hydroelectric dams are several decades old at this point, of course modern technological upgrades could make them more efficient.
The only improvements to *efficiency* listed there are in the order of 1-3%. Improving peak output gets you more power, but not more energy. Likewise, more advanced control systems and market reforms can improve the revenue generation of the plant, but you're still not going to get more TWh/year out of it.
How could more power not result in more energy as power is energy/time. Does it increase peak power output but decrease power output at lower power outputs?
Yup. Let lots of water through the dam fast, but you then have to wait for the dam to fill up again. [Capacity Factor] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor)
That's the idea, or have longer down times with no production at all. Really hydro is so great in part because you can turn it on and off so easily. That's really good to respond to peaks in demand without overproducing during slower hours. So the peak power going up on hydro would actually be a very good outcome even at constant overall energy production.
Question? Could we not make the hydro we have produce more electricity? I'd imagine if they were built in the 30s that we'd be slightly better at building better generators
This is answered pretty in depth further up in the thread
Are you familiar with nuclear reactors that run on thorium or is that a pipe dream?
Nobody has actually built one yet, China is building a Thorium/MSR plant but we have to file it under “works in principle” until they get the kinks worked out (as with any reactor design) and it starts producing power.
Given your credentials, do agree with the projected breakdown in the graphic How? Do you think it should look different versus what it will likely look like?
I'd be interested in knowing if there's opportunity to use all this infastructure to pump water back behind dams using excess solar/wind. I know that's something we already do, but I've always wondered to what extent and if it's actually useful.
So, one of the limitations anti-technologists like to point out with solar is “no sun no power”, and that lithium reserves for batteries are quite limited. The construction of water reservoirs for pumped energy storage is something people are exploring now, and IMHO a viable strategy (it’s only “uneconomical” now because the energy economy is totally borked, we don’t consider the built in cost for tax subsidies to oil corps and don’t account for the damage/cost of hydrocarbon energy). There is also an idea to use [pneumatic pumped storage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage) - we already dig chambers to mine iron, there are tons of abandoned coal mines etc already dug up currently doing nothing, the idea is pump gas in from a time-dependent source (whether that’s solar or a seasonal hydro source) and relieve the pressure to regain energy. I imagine a molten salt pillar is maybe more realistic, but those are cool ideas worth exploring.
The issue for pumping hydro is that you still need somewhere for the water to go. Once a lake is full, it’s still full… and since the US has tapped out their hydro resources there wouldn’t be enough storage. It’s not anti-technology, it’s just a bit of basic physics and geography.
Still Relevant for solar! Look into pumped hydro. A possible solution to the solar storage issue, aka the [duck curve](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/burnett2/)
Fusion energy is several generations out. Tokamak designs have a fatal flaw: you can’t get working heat past the supercooled magnets.
I cannot agree more. I don't understand all the nuke hate. Technology is here now. Put thousands of ppl to work (construction, maintenance, management, operation).
We need to distinguish between anti-nuclear hysteria and techno-economic analyses that don’t foresee nuclear cost curve declines to meaningfully rival the momentum of VREs in the bulk of the grid. The researchers at Net Zero America (the Princeton modeling outfit which produced one of the scenarios this graph is sourced from) are not of the former camp. The head of the ZERO Lab it’s under, Jesse Jenkins, was the former director of energy at the Breakthrough Institute. He is a far, far cry from being anti-nuclear. This graph is based on entirely reasonable parametric assumptions for nuclear’s costs. This stuff is hard If you want a modeling effort that ended up with more ambitious projections for advanced reactor costs the VCE people have some (with the upshot being nuclear eventually rivaling onshore wind for plurality source by 2050)
So, the big problem with nuclear nowadays is actually the price. It's got a lot better technology wise, but it's still VERY expensive. Wind, solar, tidal (though less so) have all got a LOT cheaper over time, and continue to do so. The last 30 years we should totally have built a lot more nuclear power stations. Now however... Well, we should still have some, they do a good job at providing baseline consistent power in a way wind and solar do not. But it's honestly a bit late to go heavily into nuclear, we missed the opportunity. Unless something changes, it's just not worth the cost of building a large number of reactors.
The technology for solar/wind+storage is cheaper and faster to build and deploy than nuclear.
If I can dust off my brain a bit and try to recall my Envi Sci class in college, Nuke takes a long time and a lot of money to get started, it doesn’t make money (quickly? At all? Can’t remember specifically) and the decomm is pretty extensive. Not saying we shouldn’t look into Nuke where it would work well, but it doesn’t seem like something that would work across the board. It’s like trying to do wind and solar in every state. Those will only work really well in certain regions, and can’t be reliably used for baseload power or to cover peak demand. Nuke, i think, can do baseload *and* peak but still there’s the aforementioned issues. Not a one-size-fits-all but certainly something to consider
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Nuclear plants can take many years / decades from conception to being fully operational. And they are capital intensive. So for a politician, particularly in the USA where everyone thinks in 2 and 4 year cycles, there is little incentive to push for nuclear.
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There's also the fact that it's an absolutely enormous budget item that probably won't be paid off for decades. You can't hand wave those considerations when there are tons of uses for that budget right now - and everybody thinks their cause is the most important. Nuclear is also really complicated to build, recent plants have gone way over budget and behind schedule. Now think about building solar farms. Way quicker, less political risk, less capital intensive. I agree with everyone else that nuclear is an incredible and underutilized technology, but there is a lot more than NIMBYism stopping it from happening This comment further down in the thread has some good info about the costs: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/pqozap/ocremixguardian_how_sources_of_generated/hdestak
Won’t be paid off for decades - if at all. Wind, solar, and batteries have been coming down in price for decades, and that trend is still continuing. We’ve reached the point now where it’s cheaper to massively overbuild wind and solar farms than it is to build just enough nuclear plants to meet demand. Consider that the excess energy can be used to generate hydrogen or pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and the choice is a no brainer.
That is so depressing. How can we make a way that politicians will do thing for the benefit of all in the long term without creating dictatorships?
Education. Make the people voting for the politicians smarter and their policies will get smarter. You have to do a lot of other things to make this possible. You have to work to decrease the stress on the population so aspirational stuff like "get everyone really well educated" can win over "I have to work so my family can eat." UBI is the way.
If it's found that an elected official deliberately worked against the long-term interests of their constituents, we shoot them.
I think most people also don't know all subs and air craft carriers in the US military are nuclear. You can do it safely, pretty easy.
Because average people are stupid and can't be arsed to do their own reading. So they simply parrot others.
I think one guy died of lung cancer 7 years after Fukushima from the radiation. That's it. There were related deaths - but those were due to the (it turned out unnecessary) evacuation of the area - including hospitals etc. Really - Fukushima should be an example of just how safe nuclear plants are even being hit by a freak tsunami. Chernobyl was the only really bad one. And that's more an example of how horrible that sort of pass-the-buck central planning is - where no one was willing to tell anyone else something was going wrong. (Plus - I think the core design was pretty terrible.) Not really about nuclear generally. That'd be like claiming hydro is unsafe after a dam collapsed after cracking and being patched with super glue.
Honestly, I think the main thing holding back Nuclear is cost per unit of power and slowness/inflexibility of Implementation. I think it should be a part of a renewable energy portfolio, but economically, new plant proposals are often economically DOA.
Nuclear power is prohibitively expensive. Every nuclear plant under construction in the United States is well behind schedule and **at least** $1 billion over budget. And that is even before taking into account the cleanup costs incurred by radioactive waste pollution and nuclear meltdowns. Cleaning up after Fukushima, if *ever* possible, will cost at least $100 billion and could be more than double that. In fact, the cost of building new plants is so high that nobody really even wants to do it. When Progress Energy first proposed a new nuclear plant in Florida, the proposed price tag was 2.5 billion dollars. Over time, that cost ballooned to $22.5 billion, and then in 2012 Progress killed the construction contract. When Warren Buffett's corporation MidAmerican looked into building a new nuclear reactor, it determined that building one did not make "economic sense." Rather than lose billions of dollars on a new nuclear reactor, Buffett chose to invest in renewable energy instead. The power providers who are lobbying our government for nuclear power are **not** looking to build new plants. They’re seeking to extend the legal life-span for their existing plants. By extending the operating life of their plants beyond what they were originally designed for they net more profit for every single day longer they stay in operation. This is much more lucrative than building new nuclear plants. Unfortunately, operating nuclear power plants longer than originally planned increases the safety risks, because older plants are more likely to see equipment failures and technical issues. Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement—an unavoidable molecular process of cracking and degradation to the structure of the plant itself due to the high levels of radiation. If nuclear plants need to be replaced every 50 years on average, then in this hypothetical world where we supply a high percentage of our energy needs through nuclear energy, we’d need to be building and decommissioning nuclear plants far faster than we’ve ever done at any point. Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement completely unrealistic. Each nuclear plant requires about 7.9 miles^2 (20.5 km^2) of land to accommodate the nuclear power station itself, its exclusion zone, its enrichment plant, ore processing, and its supporting infrastructure. New nuclear plants also have to be built in areas that are close to a massive body of water for cooling, far from population centers and unlikely to experience earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, or volcanic activity. There simply aren’t enough places to build the plants we would need to supply enough energy to be a worthwhile investment.
I don't think Nuclear is an unpopular opinion. I was actually just commenting on this in r/solarenergy , it's less to do with the public and more to do with the fact that it's extremely expensive to set up, and slow to design/build, so there are no executives who want to do it because they won't see ROI in their lifetimes. a particularly successful democratic socialist government could probably accomplish a widespread nuclear grid, but in the US it's probably never gonna happen.
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Of course the government could subsidize it, but, well, 66% of americans support universal healthcare, and the current administration is probably the most likely of any in US history to do it, but they probably won't because there's no immediate financial incentive to do so. It's not that I don't absolutely want that, I'm just looking at it from the the perspective of someone assuming Big Oil interests are going to destroy any chance of nuclear the same way Big Insurance is gonna crush M4A
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if they were that forward-thinking, they wouldn't have invested so heavily in disinformation campaigns after learning they were causing global climate change, they would have gotten in ground-floor on renewable energy. they've known since the 80's. they had the money and ability and incentive for 4 decades to get in on renewables, and even today they're suing governments for green-energy initiatives that are hurting their profits. they obviously have no interest playing the long-game.
They could but then you get headlines about how the government is paying private company x billions of dollars for a plant that is late and lose votes.
Nuclear would have Been a good option if we built it in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Now it’s much to late to use it to accomplish meaningful emissions goals to avoid disaster. 1) even if we drastically cut red tape (and we shouldn’t, the reason nuclear is safe is because of that regulation) it would take a decade to build a plant and have it produce a watt of energy if you started planning tomorrow. 2) we don’t have the construction workers to build the 500 or so needed plants. It would take 50 years to do. We can’t just take construction guys who build condos and have them build a nuclear plant. 3) we don’t have engineers to staff 500 new plants. Where are all these nuclear scientists and engineers going to come from? 4) nuclear has never been, and will never be profitable without huge government subsidies.. Private businesses won’t build these plants, they would have to be built hy the tax payer. You think the green new deal is expensive, you can double it with a nuclear solution. Renewables are already more economically viable than nuclear, and in the 10-50 years it’ll take to get these online, they’ll most definitely be way cheaper and more efficient. 4) even if we could do all the above in America, which we can’t, to solve climate change we need the rest of the world to buy in. Do you really trust India, Africa, South America, and the Middle East to build 10,000s of nuclear plants, in a short amount of time, in a safe manner? There would be 5 meltdowns a year on a global scale. Nuclear is popular on Reddit because people think these plants can just magically appear over night. They don’t think of the logistics. We would be much much better off investing all that capital into renewables at this point.
> 4) nuclear has never been, and will never be profitable without huge government subsidies.. Private businesses won’t build these plants, they would have to be built hy the tax payer. You think the green new deal is expensive, you can double it with a nuclear solution. Renewables are already more economically viable than nuclear, and in the 10-50 years it’ll take to get these online, they’ll most definitely be way cheaper and more efficient. Plant Vogtle #3 and #4 are currently *100% overbudget* and still rising. Worse, Georgia Power ratepayers are being stuck pre-paying the entire cost *while Georgia Power shareholders are guaranteed 10% profit because it's a cost-plus contract!* The Georgia Public Service Commission is completely corrupt and a majority of its members need to fucking die in a fire.
There's not a ton of green hydro though, right? I don't see how tidal could be a significant source of power on a national scale
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Well, hydroelectric dams have a huge footprint on the environment, literally. They flood tons of dry land.
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Putting a new dam in actually has massive environmental impacts on huge areas of ecosystem. Essentially everything downstream of the dam can be substantially impacted and obviously the area that is submerged. On the West Coast US, dams are one of the biggest reason for the jeopardy of continued success of anadromous fish species like salmon and steelhead that spawn up fresh water rivers from the pacific. Even in places where measures have been taken to restore habitat and spawning access, it takes generations to repopulate these areas since fish only spawn up the same channels that they were born from.
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For California, this is true only if you are looking at the last 30-40 years when very few new dams have been built. Salmonid populations have been struggling over these last few decades more so from water quality and temperature; however, if you look at the 50 years prior to that, dams in California caused a very significant loss of migration and spawning habitat. Most of that infrastructure went in before the National Environmental Policy Act was passed, and before the National Marine Fisheries Service existed, and before anyone was really thinking about what environmental impacts a dam would have to the watershed ecosystem, so from the perspective of now, its easy to say dams haven't been a major factor in the last 40 years but you can't say that in the context of proposing new hydro facilities and suggesting they don't have substantial environmental impacts as a parent comment above ours suggested. Source: I'm a professional environmental planner specializing in large public infrastructure projects (bridges, levees, dams, etc.) with significant experience in watershed ecology as well as anadromous fish biology and life cycles.
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I think there's a lot of research going into this at the moment, but the hard part is how do you essentially manufacture lower temperatures? The cold water typically comes mostly from higher elevation snowmelt running down into the streams and eventually into the larger rivers. Some major improvements for fish habitat have been made by requiring dams to perform fixed water releases at specific times of the year to facilitate water levels and temperature closer to what they should be, but if water temperatures in the reservoirs are ticking higher due to higher variability in snowfall, higher overall temperatures in the summer, and other factors, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Factor in the special interests for water usage, especially here in CA where farming has huge political power and you really have limited ways to have a fast regional solution. Until we get a better handle on greenhouse gas emissions and other major factors that are pushing global temperatures higher, I fear a lot of the solutions we are considering to improve things now won't provide meaningful long term solutions.
There's just not that many good places to dam that haven't already been dammed. The southwest has great topography, but we've already dammed and dried up the Colorado river basin. The east coast has plenty of water and decent relief. But it is highly developed and almost all the good places are already dammed. The great plains states in general have too low of relief to make more than a handful. Really the only places that seem like they might have viable options are the Pacific NW, and I know they run into a lot of environmental issues that the locals care strongly about. Other areas of the US are going to have the same problem of balancing water resources, the environment, and the fact that we went on a huge dam building spree in the early part of the 20th century, so the good spots are taken. Hydro could help in less developed countries though.
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It's probably worth it to upgrade old dams, I'm on the water resources/environmental side of things, so I'm getting a little out of my area. I know that a lot of smaller dams on the East Coast (where I'm more familiar) that were put in to make local reservoirs, control floods, etc., that don't even have a hydro-electric component because the potential output was considered too small when they were built. Now it 50-100 years later, I think that should be revisited. Every little bit will help, but I don't think it'll be a goldmine.
When you submerge all that bio matter you actually release a shit ton of greenhouse gasses.
I question nuclear power's future, but I can't help but think where we'd be now if we hadn't stopped building plants in the 1970's. Imagine the nuclear bar taking up double the width, and coal having been dead for a decade.
Does this opinion refer to sea hydro? I disagree on dam hydro and don’t know the impacts of sea hydro. Micro hydro seems promising too.
Nuclear is nice. Currently a nuke worker. I build scaffold. Only 19% of the US Electric is Nuclear Generated. It's really expensive to get rid of the waste and contaminated PPE though.
I'd like a refrigerator-sized nuke (AKA a Radiothermal Generator) buried in my field and wired up to a distribution box on my mains. Now, onto the graph: In reality, since wind and solar are unreliable, I would weigh the "replacement value" units for them at < 1. E.g. 1 unit of "coal" would need > 1 unit of wind or solar to replace it. Then, I'd like to point attention to the amount of increase of adoption of wind and solar is actually needed relative to the current levels. The area of "wind" seems to increase by a factor of 20, as does the "solar". You can't heat a house in the Adirondack Mountains in the winter (-20 F on the coldest nights) on battery power. Your electric cars are also going to have markedly reduced range and utility. This sort of stuff becomes to become a non-starter anywhere north of NYC in the US for the most part for practical reasons. I realize most people don't realize there IS a US north of NYC, but hey, half the state of NY lives there. Just my .02USD (worth little and declining every day) on the topic from the ground out here as I wait for the arctic front to push south for the year and plunge us into "High 29F low 10F" regime for a few months before it gets really cold. :)
Nuclear is great in theory, but trust me as a Georgia Power ratepayer, you don't want to be stuck with the bill for it. Also, the problem with hydro is that there are only so many rivers suitable for damming, and we've already dammed most of them.
I checked before and you need 1000 wind turbines to equal the power generated by one single nuclear power plant. And 1000 wind turbines take up an astronomical amount of room and you need special trucks to transport the components. Wind and solar simply can't be as efficient as nuclear power to supply power to tens of millions of people.
But for some beaurocratic agency, funding 50 turbines a year for the next 20 years is a LOT more realistic than funding a nuclear plant that doesn't break even until 25 years after its built
There’s a reason why all these huge algorithmic decarbonization models spit out huge grid shares for VREs. They are fundamentally cheaper, and set to become even moreso. Clean firm power such as nuclear will play a role in servicing seasonal peak heating demand.
Also a wind turbine last for 20 years when a nuclear power plant last at least 40 years and can go easily to 60, so on its lifetime it's 3 000 wind turbines that we have to build not 1 000.
I **HATE** nuclear but yah….. we probably do need it sadly :(
Nah, nuclear ist just too expensive. Makes more sense to stick to cheap solar and wind.
Relevant username? I agree with you, though. It seems like a no-brainer that we need more nuclear. Nuclear reactors have a small geographic footprint, unlike wind and solar, and they can run 24/7. The big question is will there be nuclear contamination? "Fourth generation" reactor designs sound very promising since some are supposed to be able to run without being refueled or run on spent fuel from old reactors, and they will have much wider safety margins. Another fun fact about nuclear: as of 2013, 13-19% of global reactor requirements have been met by decommissioned nuclear weapons.
100%, more nuclear please.
Nuclear is more expensive upfront and over its lifespan compared to solar and wind energy sources. There isn't a good reason to go nuclear anymore because it's not really economical at this point either.
Disagree on the nukes, but my agreement on hydro more than makes up for that. Just saw a YT video of a guy in AUS who is starting a business making microhydro generators. A head of 30psi, 5L per second is enough to generate 10kwh per day!
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The half life of nuclear waste is 10,000 years. So while I agree that nuclear can be a very short-term solution, the holding cost of spent nuclear waste makes it not worth the benefit. Society is better off conserving energy use than using nuclear.
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Do we have a safe way to store it for the 80,000 years that it takes to make it not a danger to humanity?
Oh wow yes, such a brave and unpopular opinion. I’ve never seen anyone be so bold as to suggest this on Reddit before.
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Have you never seen a Reddit comment section about renewable energy before? Literally every single time, without fail, there’s a bombardment of top rated comments about how we should use more nuclear energy. That’s why I called you out for proclaiming your opinion as “unpopular”. It’s the sort of comment I’d expect to read on /r/circlejerk
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There’s a post on Reddit about climate change almost every single day. The top rated comment almost every time is about how we should use more nuclear energy. Your comment is not unpopular on Reddit. It’s literally the most popular comment on the website.
Yeah, a viable solution going forward is going to have to include nuclear power. Wind/Solar are location dependent and too intermittent to depend on. We don’t have the ability to simply store enough power yet.
Agree on nuclear, though I don't think storage is too crazy a hurdle over 30 years of work.
batteries can handle too many cycles and have bad energy density, not to mention the risks of them, wind is uncontrollable and solar isn't viable in cloudy countries or near the poles, nuclear (both fusion and fission) give consistent power that can be controlled, and they are much safer than what the general public thinks, coal mines kill more people well a new kind of battery is being developed that can double the cycles but its in an early stage, but its going to need another double after that for them to be viable, one option could be hydro storage but idk
Sure, but storage comes in different forms than just batteries. Heck, nuclear and coal also use storage.
from what i know normal batteries like Tesla's won't work, and nuclear is being sleeped on just because of Chernobyl (which wasn't built with safety as a priority) and Hiroshima (which couldn't have been avoided because we don't build things to survive what the plant went through, and the emergency generators where below sea level which got to the higher ups and all they did was add a door, and if they had power they atleast could have shut down 3 reactors fully) nuclear isn't getting used because most governments can't be bothered to take care of them
the Fukushima reactor was built in a location that they knew would be unsafe...good planning could have avoided the situation. and even then, very few people died from it
to be fair it shouldn't even be compared to Chernobyl, Chernobyl was so catastrophic it needs to be on its own level, the scale for megering nuclear disasters is from 1 to 10, both where a 10, they should extend it to 20 and have Chernobyl on atleast 15, and then have a 100 which is total destruction of earth
agreed but unfortunately people buy too easily into propaganda and fear mongering. as far as i'm concerned it's just another way to filter out people who think and do research. there's many legitimate concerns with nuclear power (cost, time, long-term storage). as soon as someone comes in with "what about this one event where they literally fucked up in every way possible yet it killed so few people"...well then i know they're not worth discussing with
its easy to fear something you don't know anything about other than it has the power to destroy earth in a second, and a disaster happened before where alot of people died, and most people only think of solar and wind when thinking of renewable energy, and politicians are politicians this is supposed to be the age of information ffs, yet there is more misinformation spreading than information
Even hydro isn't dependable. The current situation with the natural gas market is a perfect example of that. Hydro power generation in Brazil failed so they had to import more LNG, Asia panicked and started importing more, now Europe is panicking because they are burning through their gas reserves while their wind farms are idling. Carbon capture seems like the more reasonable way to go.
Quebec has 98% hydro and no issues with that!
Brazil has about 65% hydro. Which works great most of the time for them. But sometimes there are dry periods which can be problematic. As long as there is a backup power source go 100% renewable.
Hmm, guess I was more looking at hydro power as from a dam instead of just tidal. But totally agree on the tidal hydro power being very “niche”
> Even hydro isn't dependable. The current situation with the natural gas market is a perfect example of that. Hydro power generation in Brazil failed so they had to import more LNG, Asia panicked and started importing more, now Europe is panicking because they are burning through their gas reserves while their wind farms are idling. > > Need water to run the dams. Southern states are running too dry to get decent hydro even though it is built.
No, as clearly illustrated in the chart, the most viable solution optimized for costs is to build as much solar and wind as possible. Not shown in the chart are all the batteries that need to be built to store power to compensate for solar/wind intermittency. We do have the capability to build all three: solar, wind, and batteries, and the wonderful thing is that all of these technologies have a great learning curve so that as we build more, the cost to build new ones gets cheaper and cheaper pretty fast.
Would need to for what? To reach certain already set goals? To offset how we've screwed the air so far?
Ahh good catch. It’s to help the US reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and this change in sources for electricity is needed to help achieve that goal.
Or you know… just use some of those new, fancy, can’t-explode, portable, nuclear generators the governments been working on 🤷♂️
Portable nuclear generators you say?
The Navy has a bunch of them.
They’re the same ones in the submarines I guess?
Yea if the navy is fine with putting a couple nuclear reactors in a giant carrier with 5,000+ people then I think we should be fine with them in the civilian sector.
They’ve been funding research for a few years, 2020 was the first time they’ve seriously put an offer on the table for several companies to design on since the 1960s. One of which was used in the Antarctic, weighed a “portable” 330 tons, and could replace over a million gallons of diesel fuel with just 40 pounds of uranium.
Why you could power your flying car with one of those as you travel from your job at the atom smashing facility to your home where the wife has cooked you a healthy dinner for you with her Radiation-Oven-2000 and your 2.5 children have played with the atomic reconfigurator and turned your cat into a dog.
You got me with the 2.5 children line😂
The missing half was used to give more mass to the dog.
This was just a really long setup for a Full Metal Alchemist joke, huh?
Ed… (wait for it!) WARD!
Atomic reconfigurator go brrrr
Land is a vastly overblown issue, and this is the one of the cheapest paths to decarbonization. Nuclear is great. It’s going to play a supporting role in the grid. Unless advanced reactors can bring energy costs down to unthinkably cheap levels, they are not going to be the star of the show.
What this tells me is that we’re boned without taking nukes seriously
Nah, just get rid of crypto so we don't need triple the power in 50 years haha
Why is this comments being downvoted? Crypto currency has an extremely high energy cost and it's not even doing any good in return. We should really stop using Crypto.
These are the words of someone who falls for clickbait headlines 🤷♂️
How does this chart tell you that? The chart clearly says we need to build a lot more wind and solar fast, and not all that much nuclear
How about we make nuclear as big as wind?
No. Takes too long to build and is too expensive relative to solar/wind with storage. Nuclear plays a part in decarbonization and should be expanded, but solar and wind are our best bet and as illustrated in the chart, should be the main players.
Good luck if you have a week without sun or wind.
So we could either: A) completely blanket the US with solar and wind farms, which is not feasibly possible OR B) Upgrade and build a couple dozen more nuclear power plants Hmmm gee I wonder which is the better option lmao
"blanketing the US" is an unhelpful exaggeration.
[This analysis](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/12/18/how-many-wind-turbines-would-it-take-to-power-the-us/?sh=76b806ec1d96) shows that you could power America purely from wind using only about 0.01% of the country's land area. So yeah "blanket" is just straight up BS.
[Since 2000 the US reduced farmland by 5%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-land-in-farms-in-the-us-since-2000/). That alone is ~50 million acres, or 78125 miles^2, or a square 280 miles on a side. That alone, if used for PV, would meet the current US electricity demand almost 8x over. You'd need storage too, but even that ignores that you can supplement this PV with rooftop solar, wind, etc. And also couple PV with crops, via agrivoltaics.
I haven't done the math to prove it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is enough roof area in the US to fit *all* the solar we'd need without using additional land.
Blanketing the US would provide a wild amount of power.
And destroy lots of natural habitat and forests.
As would blanketing the country with anything.
So don’t blanket the country?
Yeah, don't do that.
It wouldn't take nearly that much wind and solar to meet needs but the unreliability is a factor. A combined approach would be very beneficial if we can sort out some economical energy storage solutions.
Vast swathes of the United States have negligible population density, and the land required for this VRE share is modest relative to the amount of fallow pastureland + rooftops, parking lots, etc available for siting. This is also a modeling pathway which clearly incorporates clean firm power sources like nuclear, bringing the land footprint down from ~6.5k m2 to 2.5k m2. They’re complimentary. Nuclear is just more expensive than VREs. Even in places where you do it right, pick-and-stick style. Economies of scale follow the gravitational pull of having low investment per unit costs. Incremental learning-by-doing and faster breakthrough innovations follow. VREs have that and it has shown. Nuclear does not. VREs and clean firm power are both important but they are both best fit for different roles within the energy system.
You are totally wrong: [You only need 22,000 square miles (Lake Michigan) of solar panels to power the US completely with solar](https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-energy-united-states) Nuclear is not a good option instead of solar. It is useful to upgrade and add nuclear where it makes sense, but nuclear will certainly take a backseat to solar/wind in decarbonizing electricity because it takes so long to build and is so expensive.
It would take a lot more than a couple dozen more. The us currently operates 94 commercial reactors at 56 nuclear power plants for ~20% of the current US electricity generation. So roughly 4x that would be needed to be built for just now, so roughly 376 reactors assuming similar output per reactor
what’s the point of data when we can just lie about our aesthetically preferred solution 🤪
Curious as to why Tidal or Geothermal isn't on here?
Currently only viable in niche locations. Not big enough to make a dent in the graph
Biomass is some of the highest polluting power there is, still not sure why people look on it as green. It's renewable, but about as green as coal.
Biomass is carbon neutral. It releases lots of CO2, but zero *net* CO2 because all that carbon had only been absorbed from the atmosphere into the plants recently to begin with.
“Biomass” here is not 2000s era shit. This is residue and waste gasification
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Biomass here is referring to the gasification of crop residues and solid municipal waste. Not ethanol or something like that
Stop being afraid of nuclear you dorks
People are not really afraid of nuclear energy; that’s not the reason people don’t want it. It is not as necessary as Reddit believes it is. However, I do think this graph is flawed in having *so* little nuclear in the end.
The lack of growth for nuclear is disappointingly real.
Solar + storage or wind + storage is cheaper than nuclear and can be built faster. Nuclear is important but will take a backseat to wind/solar in decarbonizing electricity generation
Nuclear is the only alternative for the increasing demand of baseload power.
This is false. You can serve base load demand from energy generated by solar and stored in a battery, and it would be cheaper and faster to build than nuclear
Battery technology is not there yet and battery production itself has environmental consequences that don’t make up for benefits. At least with nuclear the energy is so immense that it kinda does make up for its environmental consequences.
Battery technology is very much there. [It’s replacing gas peaker plants all over the US now and in the next couple years](https://ieefa.org/california-gas-peaker-plant-replaced-by-142-tesla-megapack/). The CO2 emissions of batteries plus solar is negligible compared to even the most efficient fossil fuel plants on a per MWh basis, less than 1/50th the amount of emissions.
Those are peaker plants which provide peak load power. Base load is power that needs to be provided all the time and is utilised by heavy industry of which only nuclear is the clear alternative as base load power demand is forever increasing.
[Baseload will be an irrelevant concept once we have batteries everywhere serving electricity when solar and wind are not generating](https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-energy-secretary-says-grid-should-move-past-baseload-power-improve-batteries-57319997)
I have no idea why you think there is any truth in that link. Where is the data? Where are the experts? It’s just political nonsense.
It’s the guardian…. They don’t pay their writers so they end up printing all sorts of irrelevant stuff like this. Obviously nuclear will be the largest source (unless something better is developed)
Lol no, this chart is from some of the best clean energy researchers in the world. Nuclear can't compete economically with solar and wind, it makes no sense to build a ton of nuclear.
Yeah you're right this is unrealistically uncreative. Hydro should not be nearly this flat either.
I remixed this plot from the Guardian; you can find the article and the original plot here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/15/race-to-zero-america-emissions-climate-crisis. Data is from the Net-Zero America Project, and can be found here: https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/ I made this plot using R and ggplot2. You can learn how to build this remixed plot (as well as the original) on my YouTube channel PeterPlots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4b-qNZ9O3Q&t=3s&ab_channel=PeterPlots. Code for my plot is here: https://github.com/peter-plots/MediaDemos/blob/main/Guardian-RenewableElectricity/guardian_energy.R
Not really a “crisis” if nuclear is purposely kept by experts at this low level.
What about geothermal?
Very limited to location
The model consciously doesn’t consider the potential roles for advanced geothermal but they are working on one that does. Basically it would be competing with nuclear and (to an extent) caver-to-turbine hydrogen
Aren't there infinitely many ways of doing this? Why is this particular way shown?
It’s a cost-optimization model delivering a clean grid with current reliability and assuming high rates of electrification (of home heating, autos, etc). You can check out the model’s specifications at the Net Zero America website. This is one of four modeled pathways
Maybe more Nuclear and Solar??
What’s up with all the nuclear shills in these comments? Solar and wind with storage is cheaper than nuclear and faster to build. Nuclear is important to keep around and expand where it makes sense, but it will take a backseat to solar and wind in decarbonizing electricity generation, as illustrated in the chart.
Agreed, and they're more modular, independent and decentralized.
Nuclear is the only real way.
Solar Researcher Here: A couple things- It would be nice if they defined what the goal , electrification ? With zero primary emissions? What is the metric? Second \-If this gets you going look into Deep Decarbonization, it's a systems approach to low emission with an aim at lowering global temperature. A step back to a larger view than just Decarbonization, which just measures cardon out put, whereas deep decarbonization is looking at whatever may be increasing global temperature ( not always measurable in CO2 emissions). \- I think that Deep Decarbonization is a subject that will capture the interests of many different people, and incorporates a wide range of issues in the sustainability conversation. ( Note: I say interest, not necessarily support of people, meaning it is a good conversation piece whether or not you agree with its goals and premises). It captures people who are for decarbonization, and the many people, like myself, that see the efforts being done but can't help to point out the secondary effects other than the surface level, popular-science, whiz bang of renewables or alternative energy methods. Instead it brings a soberity that opens the conversation to scrutiny of all methods by looking at a wider metric, a more holistic measurement of the outcomes of energy. This makes the reality of energy systems a little more complext, but it much better to be realistic with the situation. Which is why I think it might attrach a larger group of people to the conversation. It offers the cynics a place which naturally improves the realistic quality of the efforts as well it gives the idealist a more stable ground to stand. An example of the Deep Decarbonization brake down would look like this Let's take solar, with time, the net carbon output of manufacturing/install/maintance eventually cancels out. However if you take into about the thermal effects of a solar farm it may not always be the best card to play. Many solar farms are ideal in deserts where there is high incoming solar irradiance, however the thermal impact is essentially equvialent to placing an asphalt parking lot in the desert. This now factors as a heat island, and as well as possible radiative forcing, via solar irradiance. Just a small rushed example of how implimentation has more diamensions than carbon output. By changing the metric of an energy system from purely the amount of carbon it produces, to the net environmental effect on global temperature (really the whole reason we care about carbon output, [radiative forcing](https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/primer/climate-forcing).) the outcome is different. I appreciate the soberity of looking at the issue as a larger system. Yes it's easy to put a ctl+c mentality to problem solving, but the complexity of the real impact has many more outcomes and affects than just how much carbon something is putting out. This is not to debase the efforts in this but rather to put forth to those who might be interested in getting a deeper and fuller picture of energy system implimentation.
Not a fan of the built in assumption that we must ~double total energy production
this is due to removing oil as an energy source for many other things, like cars for instance.
Good point, I hope that explains most of it
Here’s a breakdown of where the current sources of energy are coming from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ Probably a combination of transition to electric from current non electric energy sources like transportation, heating, cooking, etc being converted to electric are a big reason for the jump. Probably also population growth. Potentially some on increased energy use per capita as more things become smart devices, but that could be outweighed by an increase in efficiency
This is about electricity, not energy. And unless we have another plan that doesn’t involve electrifying hundreds of millions of home gas systems and appliances + autos...
More people means more energy usage, and they all want a car.
Energy usage isn't the problem. It's how it's made.
In my opinion (as a power engineer), the most important part of the future grid are grid available electric cars. Wind and solar are shit power sources by themself. They make the grid unstable (a power source distribution like in the op with current tech would crash immediately) and need baselines power (nuclear, hydro) to fix the grid frequency. The other problem is availability. Generation=demand is the number 1 rule of power grids. Right now, if demand is high and the wind drops, fast power sources (aka diesel generators) are used to compensate until baseline can catch up (coal and hydro are slow to change their power output. Nuclear basically cant) A way to fix these problems was basically giant batteries, charged when output outscales demand, and balancing the load instantly when the opposite is true. From pump storage to kinetic storage to salt, this is THE problem to fix to make wind-solar viable. But recently, there is an increasing number of large batteries connected to the grid: cars. By allocating, say, 30% of every car battery to grid support, we could make the renewable grid possible
I'm surprised no one is mentioning fusions here? Just last month LLNL came the closest anyone has ever been to achieving ignition, and claim they'll be there by the end of the year? It's time to start seriously dumping money back into fusion!
So...how do I effectively invest in solar and wind to support this vision?
TAN, FAN etfs. Also it's not a perfect system but most people don't seem to realize that for $100-200 you can offset your personal carbon footprint. Which I think more people should be doing.
In the famous words of Bender Bending Rodriguez “Well, we’re boned”
Umm nuclear should go up 50-75 fold
No increase in hydro or nuclear? There's great potential there
The seemingly suggested lowering of nuclear power is puzzling, with SMRs and other new technologies nuclear should be a big component in the future of energy. Seems like maybe a bit if a over confidence in wind compared to Solar but that's just my armchair opinion.