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mirko22 | 2 years ago

What do you mean by poor learning effects?

I was assuming that by history mean nuclear is not safe so I brought up coal.

From the sources I can find it shows nuclear being as expensive as offshore wind.

And I can’t find any sources on how expensive is to store energy produced by solar to provide base loads over night…

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pfdietz|2 years ago

You assumed wrong. I was talking about history of nuclear's economics. It has failed to show good learning effects (that is, getting cheaper as more units are built.) If anything, it has shown negative learning effects -- getting more expensive as more units are built.

Contrast this to photovoltaics, which have declined in cost by something like a factor of 300 since they came on the market. PV has shown a robust learning rate of 20% cost reduction per doubling of cumulative production.

It should be no surprise that nuclear is sputtering to extinction with such poor cost trends. In contrast, all the competing technologies -- solar, wind, storage -- are showing excellent learning. So, it's only a matter of time until nuclear dies.

mirko22|2 years ago

So it cheaper and faster to build, however I still see no solution for base loads and land usage, which as far as i can tell nuclear is a minute fraction of land usage as opposed to solar and specially wind. Some estimates put this at 1/400 for nuclear vs solar and 1/2000.vs wind where nuclear produces constant power supply as opposed to “renewables”.

So there seems to be natural bounds as to how much these can grow and how much land surface they take and thus damage.

Plus, we haven’t put as nearly as much time last 30 years coming up with better nuclear devices as we did in renewables.

So even if you are right about the current prices I don’t see that as a nuclear problem but populist problem, since people are scared of nuclear waste but seem to be ok with destroying the marine and land habitats.

Hey, let’s wait for another decade and see where it takes us.