That’s great news! One thing I just remembered is that the nuclear power plants (Diablo Canyon, Palo Verde) usually shut down for maintenance in the spring when demand is lowest. Otherwise they normally run 24/7 and there wouldn’t be any time during the day when it would be 100% renewables. California exceeds 100% of energy
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In the “Original Series” chapter this very interesting Wikipedia article talks about the “hearing aid computer” that used the OC-71 germanium transistors which were used in hearing aids and could go only up to 25kHz clock rate. That was quite slow – tube computers could clock at 500kHz. Later models used faster transistors and could
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In order to get the costs down enough to be competitive, the number of SMRs built will have to be in the thousands. That many will not be built in the next decade, and SMRs will be too expensive and unlikely to succeed. The companies building SMRs are now requiring expensive government subsidies just to
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There is one issue that all nuclear plants have and that Sabine didn’t address, and that’s the huge consumption of water that all thermal plants have. Building nuclear or any thermal plants near a source of coolant water is necessary, and that can become a major conflict when most populated areas are also near water.
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Sam the Electric Viking’s 12.5 min. YouTube video explains SMR and other nuclear power have had massive cost overruns. The costs of solar and wind are still falling. The cost of solar or wind is about doubled when battery storage is added. But it is still 3 to 5 times less than the costs of
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This technical report from NREL dated 2003 discusses the water consumed by thermoelectric power plants. It’s a .PDF available online from the US government.
Michael Barnard says the following quote in this article. Quote: “”No country globally has the conditions for success for nuclear generation in the 21st Century.”” Another quote: “”The vastly majority of the 450 or so nuclear reactors in the world that are generating electricity that gets put into the grid are gigawatt scale. That’s because
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The article was disheartening – but understandably the reality is renewables plus storage is so much cheaper that SMRs can’t compete The utilities will not contract for a nuclear power plant when they can get solar, wind and battery storage for a fraction of the cost per MWh. What I saw no mention of so
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Yes, it’s all about money. New nuclear power plants are economically infeasible and the utilities won’t buy them. The new nuclear power plants have had multi-billion dollar cost overruns and decade long construction delays. New nuclear and thermal power plants require a huge amount of water for cooling and have to be located near a
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Adam Dorr of RethinkX 16.5 min. YouTube video. His book is Brighter Main reason: “”Cost – Nuclear power makes no economic sense. It really is that simple: it’s an open and shut case.”” “”We don’t need nuclear, or coal power or any other conventional power for base load. Research shows … Batteries make base load
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