@collectifission

> renewables vs nuclear

yeah this is dumb they are complements and both clean

> Pretending that, to borrow a phrase, renewable energy will be "too cheap to meter" really grinds my gears.

People don't understand the economics of energy markets. If it's "too cheap to meter" because of negative prices the company generating is losing money. They're paying you for the energy you're receiving. So who is gonna pay their bills? Who is going to shoulder the costs to maintain the infrastructure? *crickets*

> Nuclear energy is proven to be extremely cheap in the long run,

But that's the problem. The modern world does not entertain long term investments. Everyone demands short term returns. Energy companies *today* struggle with long term funding for their projects, and they're a mere fraction of a new nuclear plant. (note: the American model is likely quite different than EU which has more state intervention. In the USA because they're a natural monopoly the regulations mean they're only allowed to charge enough to recoup their infrastructure investment costs and they have to carefully figure out how to do this over a long period of time and weather the economic cycles)

If someone can show that you can deploy new nuclear plants without any government-backed loans or subsidies to cover its build out and long term maintenance I'm all for it. But that doesn't seem to be the reality which is why I'm hoping we get an SMR breakthrough and we can quickly deploy cheaper, smaller generation plants where they are needed most. We've gotta turn off the money printer and force the markets to solve this. Let Meta, Apple, Oracle, Amazon, etc throw their trillions of dollars at the problem privately. At least it's better they burn their money on this problem than other nefarious things.

> We will not, I repeat NOT, be able to power many countries in Europe with solar and wind alone.

oh yeah, Europe is in a bad situation. No doubt.

Meanwhile:

China:

>> New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.

and USA, slowly but surely:

>> The US power grid has recently undergone a significant transformation, adding battery storage equivalent to 20 nuclear reactors in just the past four years.

We just can't build reactors that fast.

Australia desperately wants nuclear too but they can't as they have almost zero trained engineers in the country to operate it.

so I just don't see it happening, but we absolutely need the stable base load that nuclear can provide.

I worked for a power company for a while FWIW.