I must underline, the winning wave of the rightwing peddle on increasing this dependency to cheap russian energy even more, while they're also criticizing Merkel and the others for building a dependency to cheap russian energy. Maybe I'm getting it wrong, but it's mind boggling.
If human labor is devalued, who will pay for the inference in the end? You might answer that some corporation will, but also that corporation must get their money from somewhere. And if "we the people" have no money to spend, at some point the corporation back scratching circle will break. Or am I wrong?
In Switzerland there's another solution: the streaming providers (Sunrise, Teleboy) insert their own ads if you choose to skip the channel ads. To be fair, Teleboy offers also a more expensive tier without ads at all, but like other commenters said, I reckon that public is gonna be milked more and more.
I'm not sure building their own furniture is an option for most of the people. I definitely won't do it, ew. Heck, even you aren't doing it, why even recommending it? Yes, flea markets are a budget friendly option, provided you can wait until something passable shows up, and you can arrange transport and putting it up.
I have indeed built my own desk, my own shelving system, my own kitchen layout.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to use a rotary or jig saw once you actually use one.
Of course, one would not have to be so antiseptic about, you know, doing stuff...
Oh, and, just for reference - middle Europe has tons of great second hand furniture opportunities, even still today, in all the major cities. Personal experience helps.
Huh??? The intent of the law is what the entire system and in the entire world is working nowadays, I mean in the real world - aka outside of the minds of the technocultists. This is exactly what the courts are doing everywhere, upholding the intent of the law, and also why legal AI is continuously failing at it - it can't figure out the intent among all edge cases and yeah technicalities.
I don't know why you must underline all that "first world" thing, it doesn't make your argument stronger. Please actually verify it, instead of blindly repeating slogans. Namely the courts may start with the letter, find subsequently the letter doesn't apply 100% because things and humans, then proceed to apply the spirit of the law the way they interpret it.
The problem with 100% solar+batteries is that you need to massively overbuild for the system to meet demand. It's far more cost-effective to have some portion of generation come from a firm, weather-independent source. The main options are fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Since fossil fuels emit carbon and hydro and geothermal are geographically limited, nuclear is the best option in a lot of places.
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
Natural gas and hydro are firm power. You're correct that nuclear is not a good backup power source, but that's not the suggestion. The question is whether adding high-capacity-factor firm generation reduces total system cost. In regions where hydro and geothermal are unavailable, nuclear is the next best low-carbon option. I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 100% renewables, especially transmission capacity between regions.
I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 99.99% renewables and/or using it as a straw man against the highly inexpensive and achievable 95% renewables.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
>in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
If you're using nuclear as a backstop in that way, you're using the same statistical techniques that let you use cheaper, less reliable sources of power for backstop.
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
I am very dubious of any energy policy coming form Germany because they have managed to make their electricity among the most expensive in the world while STILL being high carbon.
> You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Just one word change needed:
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal or greater than your peak load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing any nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
base load demand does not mean it has to be met with a constant matched source, and in fact that no longer works economically.
Natrium has an interesting design for a 345MW reactor that has thermal storage that can boost output to 500MW for 5.5 hours. This lets it increase output during peak prices.
I mean, sounds kinda cool. But that 2023 idea is very clearly not going to happen in the current US political environment.
We’re in an era of brutal capitalism, and nothing else matters but price. Not even emissions sadly. Green compacts like this have no chance, and neither do nukes. Unless they pay the right bribes for some subsidies.
The Trump admin is actually very pro-nuclear power. They are ending the "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) standard in favor of fixed limits which is actually a good idea, possibly the only one the Trump admin has ever had.
i know they are (or claim to be). Im extremely unconvinced that meaningfully changes the flawed economics of nuclear power. I would love to be proven wrong and a wave of innovative economically competitive nuclear technology emerges... possible, but seems vanishingly unlikely.
I think we'll see a few companies and projects connected to the administration get grants and tax breaks and favors, pull a few headlines, seem like there's movement. Maybe even build something! but ultimately be a meaningless footnote in the energy transition. Just another grift for the most corrupt admin in US history.
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely due to the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
thats, not true at all. Safety costs a little, but they are fundamentally massively complicated, huge, specialized, EXPENSIVE things to build. They require 100s of staff to run at all times. The insurance is so expensive only nation states can back them. The economics are flawed because on modern grids with cheap renewables, they will never pay back the ridiculous up front capex. Relaxing regulations changes very little about this situation.
China and Koreas are massively state subsidized (koreas 51%, chinas 100%). Which obscures the real cost, and these state enterprises dont have to pay insurance or decommissioning. Which is the only way you can make them work today - massive state subsidies.
if your argument is "well without regulations someone could build a reactor that somehow avoids all these economic constraints" . Maybe, but today thats a fantasy.
You can't compare wind and solar to nuclear you have to compare wind and solar with enormous amounte of battery storage which is extremely expensive and it would be hard to make enough storage
That is soft on timeline, skills and expertise, sourcing to make it happen, etc. All the things that caused the Australian scientific body's energy feasibility report to conclude that nuclear in Australia (no existing reactors, staff, etc) wasn't economic or rational given so much can be done with the upfront cost of nuclear that immediately begins with returning energy compared to an uncertain timeline and blowouts not returning energy for ???
> Australia is the best case scenario for solar power.
Yes. (and no - it's a big country)
The USofA is also a large country with the same land area (mainland USofA at least) and many places suitable for solar and wind.
The South Australian capital, Adelaide, is on the 35th parallel (South), what works there likely works in the US at or below the 35th parallel North.
The essential point is that nuclear isn't a flat parameter free answer to all that ails - some places it makes no economic sense, other places it makes good economic sense ... and there's a world in between.
You just keep moving the goalposts and not responding to arguments. Until you have some idea of how nuclear is ever going to be cost competitive on today’s grids, good day to you.
If solar becomes 2 times cheaper, it will be economical to capture nitrogen from atmosphere and produce ammonia and use that for long-term energy storage and fuel. And with that one does not need massive solar overbuild.
This does not require any magic technology, just scaling up what is available today is enough and will definitely happen within the next 20 years, before small nuclear will have any effect.
If I recall correctly solar panels are already so cheap that to halve the installed cost again will require most of the efficiencies to be found in other costs like manufacture of associated hardware and equipment and installation. I don't know if those costs will be so easy to reduce.
It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.
Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it require temperatures over 600 Celsius to get to 70% percent of efficiency and not exactly small, with cheap way to produce ammonia they would provide energy dense batteries that could run for months if necessary.
> Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it
OK, so it requires a plant of fuel cells. And the cost per kW (i.e. discharge capacity) is? And it requires some facility to produce the ammonia; what is the cost per kW of electricity consumed, and at what efficiency?
Numbers would help to assess the proposal, given the claim that a halving of the cost of electricity from solar would make all the economics for ammonia work.
Solar + battery is very land inefficient, that's basically the main argument.
Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.
Land is cheap. Even in Europe, the cost of land onto which renewables are put is small compared to the cost of the renewable energy equipment itself. Here in the US, it's common for the land to be just a few percent of the project cost.
But batteries can be very distributed and stabilize and prop up the grid in ways a huge plant can't without building out distribution. (Situation dependent of course.)
> In March 2025, the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced US $900 million in grants to support the deployment of SMRs. One year later, the European Commission said it would invest up to €200 million (US $228 million) in the construction of SMRs.
How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.
"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.
Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.
Sodium batteries are cheaper for storage and does not require any rate/expensive minerals, just scaling up production. Then in Scandinavia the main problem in winter is heating and using heated water as a battery is already a thing. Then producing amonia or even carbon fuel from atmosphere for energy-dense storage will be viable option in 10-20 years. And of cause Norway and Sweden can have massive hydro for energy storage.
That 12 day event was a regional event in Germany, there was still lots of wind in the North Sea. And sun & wind didn't drop to 0, it dropped below 10%.
Dunkelflaute's are a German phenomenon: the standard pattern in most of the world is that the high pressure systems that suppress winds are generally sunny. And the high elevation areas in Germany are sunny during a dunkelflaute.
IOW, batteries aren't the only answer required to cover a dunkelflaute.
Hydrogen is one possibility for a 100% grid to cover Dunkelflauten and seasonal leveling (the former for wind, the latter for solar). To see the effects on overall cost per MWh, explore at https://model.energy/
Fission reactors in multiple European countries had to shut down due to heatwaves. And in Scandinavia (Sweden), they are "routinely" stopped for scheduled and most importantly unscheduled maintenance.
But those don't have scary sounding German names, I guess.
boy am i tired of hearing that Dunkelflaute word as if its some kind of gotcha. Even ignoring the fact that you can continue to source power from other geographies during a localized phenomenon..... Just burn gas in peaker plants for the few days a year that this happens. That small amount of emissions wont matter for the next 50 years of decarbonization, after which we'll likely have plenty of other options.
The absolutism in all these arguments is so tiring, as if its not 100% perfect solution for 100% of every imaginable scenario than its no good. 95% reduction over a year would be astounding, we would have won the climate battle.
That's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.
The latest figures from ember etc are not only “sun shining”, they’re talking about 24hr firmed solar-storage costs, and they’re still mostly cheaper than fossil in most geos. It is true that we will have to pay for having gas fill the gaps - how much exactly is a very complicated function of market economics and real time power auctions. Depends on so many variables, how big is the shortfall, how long, what competition does the gas have locally and extra-geographically, many other things. For connected countries in Europe you are never going to get to a situation where you need an 80% sized backup to your production, there will always be varied other sources. And perhaps you just choose to load shed in truly black swan scenarios, rather than paying for enough backup for every possible rare scenario. Life does go on.
Though I confess predicting it is beyond me and I’m not sure how you would model it to achieve conclusions generally applicable to every country / market .
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