Why do we need more of it? Since 1950 the USA has increased electricity usage 14x with slightly over 2x the population. With full electrification, our electricity demands are expected to increase by 90% in 2050 with only a ~10% population bump.

Surely we’ve gone beyond necessary consumption and hit diminishing quality-of-life returns. And all of this is considering just production, excluding the complications of replacing infrastructure, transportation fleets and upgrading the grid.

Those projections also don’t include gen-AI datacenters, which will consume ~12% of total usage by 2028. Electric trains are between 2-10x more efficient per passenger/kWh than BEVs. With a focus on more efficient transportation you could turn off those datacenters, skip the complex and expensive BEV infrastructure and come out with a much lower 2050 consumption.

This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening.

Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.

I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?

The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc…

Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn’t the solution. It’s not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.

Can anyone explain to me why cost matters in these conversations? Do shrinking populations need more energy for any sane reason? If so, do we need it scaled that rapidly?

Do we need electricity to be dirt cheap for any reason other than we want to consume it? Is it just capitalism-brain insisting that tricking the market with profit incentives will save our planet?

Anyways, the second amendment exists to combat tyranny.

Just want to step in here and say that no interpretation of the second would cover a civilian killing a foreign diplomat, no matter how tyrannical 😂

I have examined the goat entrails quarterly metrics and determined that gods markets require more human sacrifices corporate tax breaks

I assume it’s supposed to mean magically find the raw materials and production somewhere else? These people have no rational thought, they can’t even put 2 and 2 together and see why solar is cheaper.

Why do these people have such frothing opposition to nuclear? You’d think a meltdown killed their whole family, but somehow only at 2% coverage.

They bought the oil lobby’s ancient anti-nuclear propoganda hook-line-and-sinker and don’t care about any of the actual data. But I’m the shill 🙄

Lmfao holy shit you’re dense. You know you can’t just drop wind turbines in any location? That insolation and geography can limit effective solar usage? That nuclear has way more flexibility?

Do you know how to read that chart? Did you notice that the majority of emissions happen upfront during construction of those sources, unlike nuclear which is amortized over its whole life span?

Did you realize that might matter quite a bit when we need to halt/reverse emissions NOW to stop spiraling?

Ignoring all that and you even admit I’m right in the end. Someone here is coping and it definitely isn’t me.

Are you agreeing with me or did you just not read your source?

The best solar technology in the sunniest location has a footprint of 3gCO2/kWh, some seven times lower than the worst solar technology in the worst location (21gCO2/kWh).

Solar averages at 6gCO2/kWh compared to nuclear’s 4gCO2/kWh

Here’s another breakdown of the same data to make it more clear.

I believe it was this article. The main point was on how incredibly shitty coal is but I thought it was interesting how the others stacked up as well

By all means, enlighten me. Show me your sources. Everything I’ve looked at shows current gen solar having a larger construction impact and higher lifetime greenhouse gas emissions per unit electricity.

Or is this just your “common sense”? Surely if you have such a strong opinion it’s not based on sound bites and headlines?

It’s very telling that you think I should be more concerned about my backyard and neighbors rather than the billions of people who will suffer while we try to dig our way out of this pit with more palatable tech that can’t do the whole job.

Also funny that you think having a radioactive hole in the ground that loses the majority of its potency in less than 100 years is too high a price to keep our planet habitable. I’d rather be relocated out of my neighborhood than deal with billions of climate refugees moving in. Your NIMBY-ass logic is why our planet is fucked.

Did I miss something or are we moving the goalposts from dirty to hazardous?

The average operating age of nuclear plants in Germany was 30+ years old. Yes they’re not built to modern safety standards. Yes, operating with radioactive materials is more dangerous than not doing that. But they still ended with a minimal impact to climate change over their lifetime.

If you want sensational claims about energy saftey you can write a whole expose about working conditions in Xinjiang, which produces 45% of all of solar grade polysilicone. Are those deaths less important because they didn’t happen in your neighborhood?

So yes, it’s political because a handful of human deaths override an energy technology that is, mathematically, one of the best tools to save our planet. Throwing away nuclear energy because people can get preventable cancer is like throwing away wind energy because an aluminum blade can drop on your head.

Again, efficiency is not the same thing as scalability. You’re optimizing for investment cost (maybe build time? I can’t tell). If we planned/regulated our usage better that’s irrelevant because power usage is predictable.

People won’t need more tomorrow than today unless they make a drastic change. If electricity isn’t cheap and elastic by default, they just won’t buy that high watt GPU or electric car. Bitcoin isn’t such an important social good that it needs instant access to a continent’s worth of power, but it gobbled it up because nobody stopped it.

And even if you do need account for something unpredictable, you can still adjust with other sources. That doesn’t mean they need to be the foundation of your whole grid.

“After all, why wouldn’t we burn billions on a technology that requires destructive mining and large scale plastic waste production for a worse climate footprint? What a solar shill”

See, I too can make emotionally charged statements with no basis in reality. All energy solutions have more nuance than “radiation bad” or “cheap good”

What do people mean by “less efficient” in these conversations? Energy generated is energy generated, the number one efficiency we should talk about is using less of it. Past that you’re just choosing to optimize for cost, ecological impact, carbon footprint, etc…

Well if we’re talking about lifetime carbon footprint, renewables. The drawbacks for nuclear are almost entirely political and economical, but that doesn’t make the technology irrelevant.

IMO, any energy plan needs to have reduced consumption as priorities 1-10 and past that nuclear isn’t always worse than renewables.

Let’s bring back lead, CFCs and all the stuff we have band because we were careful

Lead, CFCs, Asbestos and the like have all been banned for consumer use, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Being unhealthy doesn’t mean they have no application and can’t be carefully used.

still has no real waste solution

At scale, neither do renewables. Solar panels are a sandwich of dozens of trace elements, heavy metals, plastic and everything else. Nitpicking nuclear here is silly because the amount of waste generated is the least by an order of magnitude. Keep waste generation under control and its management basically an afterthought.

Nucular is extremely expensive

These conversations always get bogged down in $/kW, which is not what we should be worried about. Nuclear has a lower lifetime carbon footprint than renewables, which is worth the extra spend in our current climate crisis. It’s an important tool for sustainable energy usage; you can’t use renewables as a drop in replacement for everything.

Here’s a wrench for you: the Luddites were 100% right

Marxist puppet? Are these “Marxists” in the room with you right now?

Who would be pulling the strings for Marxists in 2025? Uh… Cuba? Lemmy.ml? Lenin reanimated as a Communist Lich King?

The F sure as fuck doesn’t stand for Army you fucking ape.

The FBI has the authority to enforce laws passed through regular congressional channels by elected officials.

Here the commander in chief is declaring a policy and enforcing it directly with his own power. It’s the textbook definition.