Random Renewables Thread

Ireland has absolutely no excuse for not being close to 100% renewables and EVs everywhere for the size of it…

So nuclear seems to be the way to go? That's how France are doing it.

Or the in between answer: no, because nuclear is simply far too expensive. Never mind anything else.

People keep forgetting about storage of the radioactive waste, that you simply cannot get rid of it for thousands of years.

Holy grail is fusion, I heard it's about 10 years away 🤣

I heard that 50 years ago 😂

Toyota says we will have solid state batteries next year though. They've been saying that every year for the last 10 years 😂

I've no issue with nuclear. Would have called myself in favour of it up until about 10 years ago. But it's now obsolete. It simply is far too expensive now, so it doesn't solve any problems. Better off investing the same amount of money in wind + battery, this is much easier and quicker to deploy, gives better grid stability, and is overall much cheaper per kWh

By all means keep the current nuclear plants going until they are end of life. But for Jaysus sake, don't plan to build any new ones. Particularly not in Ireland. Where a €200m children's hospital is turning into a €4000m one 🙄

I'd be of the same mindset, we could probably build 10GW of wind and solar plus another few interconnectors to France and the UK for the price of a single nuclear power station here

And they would all be ready in 5-7 years. Instead of in 20 years (maybe)

Here's one thing that irked me recently. I heard of a statistic that in 2018, approximately 60% of online content was generated by bots

It's probably a lot higher now given the continued rise of social media and AI generated content

What's this got to do with renewables?

Well something like 15% of our electricity generation goes to data centers. I know there isn't a 1:1 relationship between server power usage and web traffic, but it's pretty true to say less traffic would require significantly fewer servers and thus lower consumption

So probably somewhere around 7.5% of all of Ireland's electricity generation is going to bot farms and AI generated articles about halloumi

Yeah - nuclear gets a bad rap. The reasons behind it I get, 3 mile island, Chernobyl, etc but (money aside for a sec) would I want a great big dirty coal powered station beside me or a nuclear one. Well….

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh

The "waste thing" I also understand peoples reluctance, but the actual reality is that it's like a swimming pool volume wise a year and your done. Far easier to control/manage that than the gigatons of "waste" that people don't seem to mind spewing out of fossil plants. The science points to nuclear being generally pretty green.

That said, they are pretty expensive pieces of infrastructure. The new one they are building in the UK is billions over budget and years behind schedule. You'd wonder what they could have achieved by taking that same money and using it on wind/solar/storage. That's a known, workable, scalable path. It's not like "Ohh we'll try a wind farm and see if it works"… LOL

It's just a no-brainer from the money side, but that pesky base load in a cloudy/no wind doldrum can be a hard challenge at times.

You're right about the volume of waste from nuclear being much lower, but in terms of regulation and safety it's a nightmare

We'd have to setup all of the infrastructure ourselves, whereas many countries with running nuclear programs already have some kind of strategy (even if it is crap)

Last I heard the US still didn't have a proper waste disposal facility, they've been using the temporary one since the 70s and it's now full (and leaking)

If you thought the NIMBYs were bad about the wind turbines or 5G masts then imagine the protests to putting a nuclear waste disposal facility anywhere in the country

Most likely we'd just end up paying another country to dispose of the waste. Can't imagine it still being economical after all that

The last time Ireland built a coal-fired power plant was in 1984, so stop engaging a false equivalence.

And that is to be commended for Ireland, but not sure how relates to the point I was making that there are far less deaths from nuclear generated electricity than fossil fuels in general. I never mentioned Ireland as such, so when we last made a coal plant is superfluous. China on the other hand is developing two coal powered station a week!

https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-new-coal-power-plants-per-week-in-2022/

We're sharing the same air/planet. No?

Nuclear is a divisive topic. People get passionate about it on both sides. Few actually take the time to look at the science, the safety records (and accidents) how much of a REAL problem is nuclear waste …. and then formulate a well educated opinion on how nuclear might fit into a roadmap towards a greener world. If someone has done that and they still don't like it, fair enough - respect. But if people are basing opinions on watching too many Godzilla movies of nuclear Atolls in the south Pacific…..

Personally we're not a good fit for nuclear in Ireland - but the science is good.

I mean there was a plan to build a nuclear power station on Bear island around that time as I recall?

Whether it was unrealistic or not is something you'd only know with hindsight, at the time the plan was real

Also everyone was smoking weed in the 70s, let the people have some harmless fun

Carnsore Point down in Wexford, imagine the size of Ionity Gorey if this was built :()

The Nuclear for Ireland? thread is good craic, same recurring arguments so no need to read back the thread.