It's a reasonable fraction of total roof area, I believe.

But the real problem with the UK and solar is not nighttime but seasonality. No, we need to keep going with the wind buildout and not drop the tidal energy programme.

We're getting there: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon...

The UK has a lot of unused land on a percentage basis.

Granted, half of that will be in Scotland and ideally your solar would be further south, but even then, you're probably talking about switching less than 5% of the arable land to solar.

Overprovisioning in the case of the UK really applies to wind rather than solar.

Does the UK not experience night time?

About a quarter of it is from Niagara Falls, ie: run of the river.

The amount that they divert varies by time: they want to keep the falls nice during the day, but divert more at night.

And a lot of dams are dual use: controlling water levels while generating electricity, so it really depends on weather. When it’s dry they can maybe do this, but when it’s wet, they gotta be careful. Or vice versa depending on which side it’s raining more on.

Pretty sure in overage situations the water runs over the dam and nothing is stored in Niagara but I may be mistaken.

Because they built a huge number of reactors with state subsidy and then stopped?

France is also having trouble with life extension due to cracked reactor vessels, and is unable to build new capacity cheaply - Flamanville is in project management trouble, like Hinkley Point C, and is projected to have higher energy costs than the existing reactors.

And nuclear power is ironically suffering its own climate change effects, it's dependent on cool water: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

Because there is no need to. The radioactive material wasn't a problem before it was dug out of the soil. It's not a problem if it returns to where it came from. The problem is that most government try to find an idiotic central storage location instead of simply distributing the spent fuel over many locations.

Yes. Launch vehicles sometimes fail. They may explode, or they may not make it all the way to orbit and have to re-enter. Either way, this would scatter the radioactive material over a wide area.

In my case geopolitical reasons, mostly. I prefer nuclear plants not be in what the US president lovingly calls shithole countries. Those tend to not yet have nuclear, but a drastically increasing need for energy. Many of them are also a lot closer to the equator than western countries with existing nuclear, making solar much more viable than e.g. in the UK.

> What's the manufacturing breakeven in carbon costs for a windmill or a solar panel?

This questions feels like you mostly try to justify your otherwise preexisting preference. A proper system would have external costs factored into the price, by the way.

The genuine answer to your question is that their news sources haven't been demonising renewables and green government initiatives for the last 20 years (in order to prop up their fossil fuel sponsors) so they don't automatically think "communist, hoax, inefficient, boondoggle, political correctness gone mad, end of civilization as we know it, bloody hippies, etc." when renewables gets brought up. Instead they think "cheap, efficient, distributed tech that keeps getting cheaper and that I can use for energy independence on multiple scales" so it's not that they have any great distaste for nuclear, they've just not been trained to hate and fear renewables.

They don't for example, wonder if no one has thought to calculate the carbon impact of renewables, because they assume the scientists and other authority figures they trust who recommend it would have taken that into account. And if they did wonder, it's a short Google away, and their usual info sources would provide facts, not scaremongering propaganda.

That's why you'll rarely see a defence of nuclear that doesn't quickly degenerate into attacking Californian hippies, or government interference, or the collapse of Germany into a solar powered Islamic no-go-zone, or flat out denial that climate change is even a problem anyway" that they've read about in their highly reliable news sources. Generally they're more anti-renewable than pro-nuclear.

Coal is strip mined too, and then burned. At least you don't burn batteries.

Lithium is evaporated from brine in ponds, not strip mined.

Externalizing environmental damage is not progress.

It's about 6000 Tesla Megapacks [1] for the entire US, roughly 20 square miles of land use.

"Using Megapack, Tesla can deploy an emissions-free 250 MW, 1 GWh power plant in less than three months on a three-acre footprint – four times faster than a traditional fossil fuel power plant of that size. Megapack can also be DC-connected directly to solar, creating seamless renewable energy plants."

We need more Gigafactories (regardless of manufacturer/owner), which needs demand to be proven (contracts with utilities), which allows for more capital to be acquired from capital markets to build more battery factories. Batteries are a known quantity though, versus nuclear where you can spend billions and a decade and still not produce a kWh of power.

Tesla built Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai in 190 days, from breaking ground to manufacturing validation of a Model 3. These are tractable problems.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-megapack-utility-scal...

> Don't blame the industry for a dysfunctional government.

The Utilizes got exactly what they wanted from the government in this case. Complete externalization of the problem for a nominal fee. The government also capped their liability so they could buy insurance. No insurance, no financing.

Someone has to deal with it, and everyone I've read who is a publicly recognized expert in the field says it is actually a hard problem. So blame government if you want, but ultimately someone is accountable for it and it's externalized cost until that is address by whomever.

Natural gas can always be a generator of absolute last resort, and is likely cheaper than keeping nuclear generators running for those rare occasions.

Less than a Dam

Both Moltex Energy and Elysium Industries are developing fast waste burners, and both are privately funded. Neither operates in the USA, though, because that's where the government gets in the way. The US government defunded the IFR project completely back in 1994. (It was too close to building a demonstration plant.)

> I think government is doing their part

This incompetent government declared in 1987 that there is exactly one solution to "the waste problem", and that's Yucca Mountain, categorically ruling out any sane solution (i.e. recycling). Now even Mt. Yucca isn't funded anymore. What part is this government doing exactly?

> When the facts change, I will change my mind.

Bullshit. You will continue to claim that the cost of waste disposal, which is implied to be approximately infinite, was externalized, when in fact it's neither.

Apparently this is less true for newer reactors, or older reactors with upgrades. I'm not an expert, but https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...

Even if reactors aren't as fast to react as a gas peaking plant is, perhaps batteries will soon be able to bridge that gap. The economics of batteries change greatly if you only need them to carry the load for tens of minutes for reactors to ramp up, vs needing to carry the load until the sun shines again.

The power supply and the energy supply will not have a single solution. It is analogous to the levels of caching in a Von Neumann cpu. L1 will capacitors, L2 batteries, bulk storage is pumped hydro and other GWh energy stores.

The duck curve is a smoke screen and should only exist for a region that doesn't have solar to the west of it. Those solar farms in CA should be feeding users a timezone over to the east.

Any source can then feed into those stores, wind, solar, hydro.

If your power solution is involves hydrocarbons, it should be a closed cycle.

> like hydrocarbon fire.

Or batteries and other storage methods. It looks like battery solutions could get cheap enough in the next 10-20 years to smooth things out and take care of storage for a few hours (see for instance http://news.mit.edu/2018/metal-mesh-membrane-rechargeable-ba... .. Donald Sadoway has some good talks on YouTube)

But yeah, for days that happen to have less wind/solar, I think the best thing is just keep gas power plants around. The CO2 impact for that will be minimal, the power plants are already built, and over time you could replace the fuel with synthetic gas made from renewables, which would basically be another energy storage mechanism. Cheaper renewable gas is something we need to make the world sustainable anyway.

The only unsolved problem is seasonal variations in colder climates. But those areas could import more trash and burn it (for both electricity and heat), like Sweden does. Norway has a ton of hydroelectric power, and is building more HVDC power lines to other areas of Northern Europe which will help with that area. Not sure what the solution for North America is though. But it's not nuclear. Having a nuclear power plant idle for half a year is the exact opposite of what you want. The plant is expensive and the fuel is cheap - if you build it you want it to run 24/7.

> the extreme afternoon demand curves when solar capacity drops and demand jumps

Does the hourly schedule variate day by day or can it be predicted?

If you can predict when and how much power you will need to produce then it can be ramped up slowly, I assume.

So make a big enough nuclear plant for those peaks.

Or deploy storage to make the curve smoother

...or hydro.

Source for the latency of nuclear concerning spikes in electrical demand? > 70% of France electricity is made from nuclear and they don't seem to have the issue you claim.

You're a victim of a common misconception. Nuclear reactors can ramp up and down as quickly as the control rods move. Check out the Borax experiments (from shutdown to full power in seconds) and the TRIGA reactor (from shutdown to gigawatts and back to shutdown in milliseconds).

What can't ramp quickly is the steam turbine connected to the reactor, but that's more of a design decision than a technical limitation. The German nuclear plants ("Konvoi" series) can in fact ramp faster than the German gas turbine plants, because that was a design requirement.

Doesn't scale. Not enough sites.

Mind, where it does work, it's phenomenally effective, efficient, and responsive.

There are a few sites at which seawater-based systems might be possible, in which the ocean forms the "lower reservoir". These are dependent on suitable terrain. Matching terrain to consumption patterns is difficult: the Netherlands and much of Britain are sorely lacking. Some of the best potential sites are along the Balkan coast in Serbia and Croatia. Chile's Atacama Desert, along the Pacific coastline, is nearly ideal geographically, but is far from most use (North America, Europe, Asia). Portions of the US West Coast might be suitable, though would all but certainly face major political resistance for environmental impacts.

And: working with seawater is complex from an engineering standpoint: it's corrosive and sea life has a pronounced tendency to foul large-scale water-handling systems, though this may be tractable. There've been several pilot projects, though those have since been decomissioned, excepting Rance in France, designed as a tidal power plant, though capable of working as a pumped-hydro facility.

> What does the Itaipu Dam's installed power have to do with stored energy?

Nothing. Was there something to suggest otherwise? I listed two weak points for hydro: Terrible energy density, massive land use.

My first reference supported the first point and my second reference addressed the second point. Land use: 1,350 square kilometres were flooded. The installed power was to give context of how big the plant is.

And that comment responded to "Energy storage isn't really feasible".

And was followed up, by the same author, with another post specifically about pumped storage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21479576

That we're still discussing this over 24 hours later may strike someone as amusing, but the jokes gone rather stale.

Cheers.