Ryan
@ryanfmason
What’s the pro/con here @kaufman if we’re further on wind and solar what’s the need for nuclear
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Alexander C. Kaufman
@kaufman
They don’t behave the same way. All those renewables are backed up with gas. And we aren’t building nearly enough transmission capacity to bring all those weather dependent renewables online. The better thing for taking the place of new nuclear in a future energy mix is next-generation geothermal, which (mostly) uses fracking technology to make it possible to tap the earth’s molten heat in more places than before. But the efficiency and abundance of nuclear makes it vital all the same.
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Ryan
@ryanfmason
So nuclear can be not contributing to Co2 from day one (wind and solar not being 100% reliably detracting, and if they prove unreliable would be backed up with Co2 additive energy) Don’t know if I get the transmission part of it…is it that we don’t have enough ability to capture the energy vs fossil or nuclear?
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Alexander C. Kaufman
@kaufman
Wind and solar have low capacity factors, meaning the majority of the time they’re not generating power, and are very inefficient and require vast areas of land. This means to have generation at scale you need panels and turbines covering vast areas of land, which tends to be far from population centers. Bc of that distance and bc they’re not on most of the time you need a hugely expanded network of transmission lines to get them hooked onto a grid that was built for more energy dense, centralized plants that are on 80-95% of the time like nuclear and coal.
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