[graeme]

What's wrong with steam?

It's better than carbon. And solar + battery requires more carbon to produce than nuclear energy as there's a lot of mining and physical construction involved + you must overbuild to supply power or rely on non solar sources.

All for building solar. Do not understand the constant need to denigrate nuclear in favour of carbon sources while doing so.

(If carbon sources were at zero this would be a different conversation)

[epistasis]

Nothing inherently wrong with steam, just as there's nothing inherently wrong with spinning rust hard disks or punch cards.

We are at the end of the tech curve for steam, we have pushed it hard and made some super impressive technology, but it's not advancing anymore. Supercritical CO2 might have some advantages, or other fluids.

We have zero-carbon tech that uses non-steam principles, and is currently on a tech curve that's getting cheaper than any thermodynamic cycle. We have storage tech now which is an even bigger revolution for the grid than cheap solar, because a huge limitation of the grid has always been the inability to store and buffer energy.

I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.

(BTW denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources, because they use the same mechanism, except for some natural gas turbines)

[fc417fc802]

What is this, the hipster approach to technology evaluation? Steam conversion efficiency doesn't make sense as a metric for nuclear because (AFAIK) fuel consumption per watt isn't the primary driver of cost for that technology. Or am I mistaken?

> I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.

I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?

> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources

I doubt name calling is a sensible basis for policy decisions.

[Fazebooking]

Wind appears to be similiar than nuclear.

Nuclear has a few other major flaws: Uranium aka nuclear weapons risk, Dependency on uranium (yes china finally solved the Thorium issue but that happened this year?), geopolitical/terrorism risks (see ukraine).

And because i'm from germany: do you know that in bavaria, you still have to check certain meat for radioactivity?

[hvb2]

> What's wrong with steam?

> It's better than carbon.

Steam isn't occuring naturally (except for geothermal etc) so you first have to put in energy to produce it

> you must overbuild to supply power or rely on non solar sources

True for every source of power because demand isn't flat across day/year

[croes]

It’s an inefficient way of producing energy. Only 30-35% results in electricity

[ai_critic]

If you believe that figure, that's still comparable to solar's best ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency ).

Optimal steam plants can get do better, exceeding 50% in some configurations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant#Eff... ). Steam is awesome.

[graeme]

Could you please provide comparable figured of EROI for solar vs Nuclear?

For a useful comparison you have to compare both sides, not give a stat in isolation and assert it is worse without comparing.

[ethmarks]

What alternative do you propose that's more efficient?

[fc417fc802]

30-35% of what? What are the inputs here? What is driving the cost? What are the externalities? And what is the end result in price per kWh?