Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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I'm not sure if that's an unpopular opinion so much as a completely incorrect one.
The simple truth is that nuclear is fucking expensive and takes a long time to build.
Renewables and storage are much cheaper and take way less time to start producing energy.
Given this, why would you be in favor of nuclear? Please don't try and tell me about base load (not needed), SMRs (even more expensive) or fusion (not going to happen in our lifetimes)
Peak-load scaling. The major advantage that fossil fuel generators have is that you can spin them up faster to react to higher demand. You can't do that with solar or wind, but you can with nuclear.
If we had grid-scale storage solutions, dealing with peak load would be easier but it's still more cost effective to build pumped hydro storage than large battery arrays. Most electric grids have to produce electricity on-demand which means they have to be highly responsive.
We don't have good grid-scale storage yet. We need demand-responsive energy production. Fission is better than burning coal.
That's why I said renewables and storage. There are lots of storage technologies such as pumped hydro and various kinds of battery that can react very quickly to increased demand. You categorically cannot do that with nuclear, where did you learn this?
Firstly, nuclear needs to run 24/7 as it's not economically feasible to do anything else given how much these things cost. Secondly, you're still heating water to create steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. All of that takes time to ramp up and means that nuclear is not used to generate in response to increased demand.
Yes, but your assertion that renewable is cheaper completely ignored the cost of grid scale energy storage suitable to remove fossil fuel generation.
No, it's cheaper than new nuclear with storage included.
Your statement disagrees with what I could turn up on duckduckgo. Can you provide your sources, I'm not a subject matter expert.
Sure:
"Later this month the LA Board of Water and Power Commissioners is expected to approve a 25-year contract that will serve 7 percent of the city's electricity demand at 1.997¢/kwh for solar energy and 1.3¢ for power from batteries. ... Conventional nuclear often benefits from optimistic estimates in the range of 12¢/kwh."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/?sh=1e2355a25971
I mean, it's speculation. Current estimated completion is November this year, and the battery power price was already raised to 4c in 2020 estimated https://www.capdyn.com/news/capital-dynamics-and-8minute-solar-energy-partner-on-breakthrough-400mwac-eland/
This would still be cheaper than nuclear. But it's not a true comparison. I am asking the cost to replace fossil generation. Which means some degrees of over provisioning and redundancy. The bank of America paints a very different picture in its 2023 report (https://advisoranalyst.com/2023/05/11/bofa-the-nuclear-necessity.html/) but I hardly trust them.
Either way your evidence from anecdote makes it clear you have as little understanding as I do. So I am still none the wiser if solar + generation is a solution today that makes nuclear irrelevant. If it's not we can't just keep burning coal till it is though. People have been saying for 30 years let's just use renewables. But the world would look very different today if we had transition to nuclear energy back then.