With the ever-ongoing ‘progress’ of the proposed UK nuclear power plants, I wonder if this is the best course of action (not just in the UK, but across other nations also)?
With the ever-ongoing ‘progress’ of the proposed UK nuclear power plants, I wonder if this is the best course of action (not just in the UK, but across other nations also)?
Wind and solar. Pop up, pop down. Nuclear needs entrenched infrastructure. The future is always renewables.
Nuclear’s also too risky in case of a natural disaster (i.e., an earthquake or a flood).
Looks to the East
Isn’t it, Japan?
Ok wait what’s the plan for a cold still day? You need a base load supplier like nuclear for renewables to work
You use these things called “power lines” which make it easy to send electrical energy to different places
Yes, because Checks notes we should power Great Britain with massive undersea transcontinental cables. Did I get that right?
“Who unplugged the UK?”
Yeah they’re are a couple interesting HVDC lines specifically for that so that renewals can cover a wider range of sun and wind zones.
Honestly still less infra then uranium
Lmao ok
If I remember correctly, it’s about 5 million US dollars per kilometer of overhead high voltage DC lines you run. I’m going to assume that putting those cables under the English channel will cost three to eight times that much being generous.
It depends on the distance actually. It’s the conversion stations that are expensive so as you cover longer distances and able to go even higher in volts the costs per km goes down
Those cables already exist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
No those cables max out at 2GWh. The Britts would only need 45 times the current capacity that currently exists to function daily.
Cool, build them then
Could a sworn the other ends of those had to do something - but I guess if you can just get free power from cables, take advantage of that shit girl
Have you never heard of girl economics before?
and hopefully sea
Yet, it seems like there’s always this massive push in the UK to build more nuclear plants, so where (and why) does that idea come from? Is it about quick, cheap energy?
I don’t think anyone would ever describe nuclear energy as cheap nor quick
But it is tunable for grid power, regardless of time of day or weather.
True in terms of set-up, but afterwards, maybe?
Private equity attempting to capture profits. Much harder to do with renewables.
There is currently an absolutely massive buildout of offshore wind atm, (dogger bank a/b , Sofia, east Anglia 3, inch cape, hornsea 3) and solar to a lessor degree. Its just the right media like nuclear as a solution so its talked about more than action taken
China has long term planning so they were happy to give the UK cheap loan deals to build nuclear plants to create work for the Chinese nuclear industry. Then the US started doing an Iron Curtain against China, so to suck up to both the US and China the UK had to buy out all the planned Chinese-partnered nuclear plants. To avoid looking like losers UK politicians insist on trying to go through with building them without China at crippling expense while trying to pretend like it’s not a disaster.
You get a lot more energy for little resources, ignoring the upfront cost. Also the other comment