Solar module prices reached a new low this week, says Leen van Bellen, business development manager Europe for Search4Solar, a European purchasing and selling platform for solar products. He tells pv magazine that prices will remain low in the short term.
Because there are nights there are winters there are cloudy and rainy days, and there are no batteries capable of balancing all of these issues. Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit. So we need to invest in nuclear and renewables and batteries. So we can start getting rid of coal and gas plants.
But Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven’t been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.
And… why give Russia more military target opportunities?
I’m not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it’s fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.
Another example that gets skimmed over or ignored is the massive cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant. It typically ranges from $280 million to $2 billion, depending on the technology used. More complex plants can be up to $4 billion. And the process can take 15 to 30 years to complete.
Those are less competitive, and salt reactor attempts have historically caused terminating corrosion problems. The SMR “promise” relies on switching extremely expensive/rare/dangerous plutonium level enriched fuel, that rely on traditional reactors for enrichment, for slightly lower capital costs.
Not an expert, but molten salt reactors are correct. MSRs are especially useful as breeder reactors, since they can actually reinvigorate older, spent fuel using more common isotopes. Thorium in particular is useful here. Waste has also been largely reduced with the better efficiency of modern reactors.
Currently, Canada’s investing in a number of small modular reactors to improve power generation capacity without the need to establish entire new nuclear zones and helps take some of the stress off the aging CANDU reactors. These in particular take advantage of the spent fuel and thorium rather than the very expensive and hard to find Uranium more typically used. There’s been interest in these elsewhere too, but considering how little waste is produced by modern reactors, and the capacity for re-use, it feels pike a very good way to supplement additional wind and solar energy sources.
If France can find space, surely Germany can.
If Finland could find space, Germany definitely can.
Idk, Finland has a much lower population density vs Germany. France is something like 1/2 the population density, but they also have >50 reactors, so surely Germany can find room for a few…
Finland smaller tho.
Where do you want to put your hazardous waste again?
Yup, but population density should be what matters, because that implies how much usable space there is for waste disposal.
Finland with it’s vast swathes of frozen tundra.
We don’t have vast swaths of Frozen Tundras. This isn’t Alaska.
And it’s actually stored south not north.
And Sweden.
You’re using factors of less than 10 to argue against a factor of 100.
The batteries needed are a lot less than you might think. Solar doesn’t work at night and the wind doesn’t always blow, but we have tons of regional weather data about how they overlap. From that, it’s possible to calculate the maximum historical lull where neither are providing enough. You then add enough storage to handle double that time period, and you’re good.
Getting 95% coverage with this is a very achievable goal. That last 5% takes a lot more effort, but getting to 95% would be a massive reduction in CO2 output.