That’s not an issue at all honestly. We need more nuclear power, it is clean power. Restarting existing reactors that weren’t decommissioned due to issues, is the fastest way to replace base load generation currently provided by things like coal and gas. Solar, wind, etc. are great but they don’t work 24/7/365, so there needs to be a base load to cover that. At the moment, that’s handled by coal and gas in most places.
Clean? It might not emit CO2, but there is still the nuclear waste.
And no, there is no solution to deal with all of it. If you disagree, my country hasn’t decided in decades where to put it and would like to offer it to you. No one has offered to take it yet.
Nuclear waste in general is easily stored, which is not true of ANY fossil fuel. Fossil fuels vent emissions directly into the atmosphere to spread through the environment. Coal plants are the single largest source of mercury pollution on the planet, which is neurotoxic and never decays, but I bet you didn’t know that Coal even produces mercury at all, and that doesn’t even get into the uranium that Coal burning plants emit into the atmosphere either. A coal plant releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere daily than a nuclear plant does in it’s entire lifespan.
The vast majority of nuclear waste (95%) is low level waste that is inert within as little as a few months and requires little to no shielding. This is the stuff like clothing, tools, papers, gloves, etc. The intermediate level waste usually decays within a few decades and needs shielding, but isn’t a long term issue and easily can be stored on site at the plant and is part of the decommissioning plan made before the plant is even built.
The actual amount of high level nuclear waste (the stuff that needs to be transferred to the cooling ponds before even being moved to any sort of storage) is very small (<1-3%). ALL of the high level waste ever created by every nuclear plant in the world would fit inside a football field sized space.
The only reason it hasn’t been dealt with well is NIMBYs that actively refuse to learn and protest because what they know is propaganda or cartoons (The Simpsons for instance) with zero factual basis. And politicians paid by fossil fuels to kill legislation to build and operate the storage facilities, with funds usually sourced originally through government subsidies.
“Easily stored” did not really work out in Germany and costs the tax payers billions more. #Gorleben
Your linked video starts with one of largest straw man argumentations I have ever seen in my life… “You have been manipulated!!! You think that [weird shit that is not true at all]!!! You are wrong!!!”…
But I’m glad that you have a “solution”. Our country gladly gives away the nuclear waste to you for free. When can you come take it?
Considering 99% of people go by what they see on shows like The Simpsons, movies, and games, with things like glowing oozing barrels… It’s a really good bet the average viewer is wrong. Of course an extremely small minority will have more education about it, but given the responses here and in other threads across social media, that’s almost never the case.
I also find it strange that the person always compares nuclear with coal, as if it was a “x or y” thing… Were renewables not yet invented when he recorded the video? Am I missing something?
There are more disadvantages like the fact the fuel rods in Europe usually come from Russia, which is technically sanctioned for transforming Ukraine (ironically, that also includes the area of Zaporizhzhia around their nuclear power plant 🙃) into a war zone. But anyway…
IMO, we should build renewables that are cheaper and invest in battery storage. I wish, my country would have done that instead of China, because both technologies currently generate lots of money for them.
IMO, the main argument of the person in the video does not make sense. He tells that “It’s solved, but people don’t accept it”.
Really? There are 195 countries on this planet and you want to tell me that none of them was like “Oh, I could bury other people’s waste and let them pay me. Easy…”.
We have globalization, we have lots of capitalism, there are even dictatorships that don’t care what the population thinks. Why is there no country on earth that has offered to take the nuclear waste of mine for money and deal with it?
Nuclear waste is a non issue, just dumpt it in deep old mines, in seismically stable places and then fill them in, the problem is politicians scared after watching chernobil in hbo.
It turns out that the region where this happened does not like that and sues and wins. We put it there and now have to put it somewhere else… Costs billions and guess who is gonna pay it… The same people who also pay in case of a disaster… The tax payers…
Furthermore, it just sounds like the climate change solution… Letting future generations deal with it…
Like we are putting it right were we found it a lot of times.
I’m not from the US, this is a worldwide problem.
But nuclear energy is such a good thing for the world, that letting it fade away from just the plain ignorance of people is Infuriating.
I had the opportunity to be at a (research) nuclear reactor not long ago, and is really an amazing technology lol, truly something that makes the world a better place.
Countries just should pass laws making NIMBYsm harder, and making information campaigns about how much the tech has gotten safer.
Sure, it’s a fascinating technology. I believe that. I only argued against the argument that is was “clean”.
I don’t know whether laws can change anything. We have a democracy here. When people go on the street and threaten to vote for others in the next election, laws don’t matter.
Safety is also a quite relative… When area around the nuclear power plant suddenly becomes a warzone, like in Ukraine, then it’s not that safe anymore for that country and those around it.
No, it’s NIMBYs protesting shit they don’t know. And fossil fuel bribes so politicians revoke funding for the multiple facilities that have been proposed or even partially built over the years, like Yucca Mountain.
All high level nuclear waste ever produced worldwide, from all reactors, would fit within a football field. It’s not physically hard to store. It’s just politically hard to get anything done because of propaganda and bribery.
That reactor is an OLD Babcock and Wilcox design that is at least two generations behind. The money and resources going into that pile of junk would be better spent on a new plant. Yes I’m well aware of the issues surrounding building new nuclear plants in the U.S. That’s a different conversation and not one I will enter into here. Sure in the short term, maybe even in the mid-term restarting that plant looks good on paper. However, that is still a reactor design that is over 60 years old and physically it is 50 years old. Not to mention the design has several documented short comings that require monitoring and processes that a new generation reactor would not need. Sure they’re not RBMK level of issues, but that reactor really should stay decommissioned.
It does not matter how many nuclear, solar, or wind plants that are built. The fact of the matter is that all of these resources, not just money, is being put into a technology, AI, that is of limited use at best at the present state of the technology.
With some light searching I found that the total amount of nuclear power capacity on Earth today adds up to 371.5 GW
Meanwhile, China built 315 GW of solar capacityin the last year. Solar panels don’t charge at night, obviously, which is why China is also installing base load in the form of grid-scale battery storage and already has 215 GWh online today with plans to surpass 721 GWh by 2027.
While we wait 10-15 years to build more nuclear power plants, China is just going to keep pumping out more and more solar panels and base-load battery stations faster and faster. I’m entirely soured on nuclear.
Solar is great, as is wind, and hopefully tidal sooner than later. Still, nuclear has a part to play. The cost is almost entirely due to over-regulation, as designed by the existing energy lobby. It’s the second safest source of power, including disasters, and including clean energy. Yes, that means it’s safer than wind. It’s about as safe as solar by this source, though I heard solar is worse at one time, though that must have changed. When it was smaller scale, and a lot was on houses, not in fields, solar was worse.
Nuclear is great for a 100% reliable source of power. It is a good foundation to build upon. Yeah, solar+wind with batteries is good, but it isn’t perfect. Nuclear is clean, safe, and reliable. There are also effectively zero hazards with a modern reactor, unlike what the media would like you to believe. The waste isn’t actually an issue, and it’s all accounted for. Also, the risk of meltdown is effectively zero.
The time to build a reactor also should not be 10-15 years. It should take ~5 years at most, and that should speed up with more reactors built. The reason it takes so long in the US (and other western nations) is regulations, once again. It’s explicitly designed to prevent nuclear from competing with coal/oil/dirty energy.
But China has twice as much base-load battery capacity 100% of the time and built three times as much solar capacity this year alone. In my other comment I highlighted how they plan to have a mere 200 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035 - they plan to have 6 times that much solar capacity by 2030! Nuclear is not a priority. Whatever part is has to play, it’s not the star of the show.
Do you think regulations are holding back nuclear in China too? Or do you think, maybe, it’s just an inferior power source?
I never said renewable+battery was bad. You said nuclear was. The fact of the matter is that well rounded energy infrastructure is the priority in China. Solar doesn’t just not generate power at night. It also doesn’t during storms, and other times. It’s sporadic. Yes, batteries can help with this, but so can nuclear. If you rely solely on solar, the infrastructure needed to support it is significantly higher.
Nuclear allows you to have a reliable baseline. It let’s you have a reliable load so you don’t need as substantial infrastructure to be able to capture 100% peak solar, and be able to discharge it quickly too.
Do you think regulations are holding back nuclear in China too? Or do you think, maybe, it’s just an inferior power source?
Again, you’re the one making claims about superiority. I don’t think either are superior. They both provide different kinds of utility, and clearly nations like China and Japan see this. Both can be invested in. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing like you claim. They have different roles to play and they both play them very well.
China also has over half of the world’s coal power generation. They are also still building more, just not as much as solar, but it’s still being added to. Coal power share in China fell in 2025 for the first time. But not because they reduced it, but it was the first time where they added enough solar/wind to outpace the adding of coal.
China also has quotas that require utility companies to buy a certain share of coal power. So you can’t get clean energy there by law, as individual or industrial user.
China also has the rare earths needed to produce batteries, from what I remember they sit on the largest reservers for them by quite a margin, but I don’t remember a source for that. So for them, adding battery based grid storage is easier than most of the world. Plus they are basically the only ones that even make any batteries anymore in the first place.
What this demonstrates is that China will use whatever the most efficient power generation is that gets electricity to the maximum number of people and industries for the lowest cost. They aren’t installing solar because they want to save the world, they’re doing it because it works. It’s better than anything else on the market and so they’re investing.
Notably, they are not installing nuclear power at the same rate. They plan to have 200 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035, but they’re installing more than that in solar capacity every year. That should tell you something.
The main issues with nuclear power are that it’s more expensive than renewables with battery storage, and that it’s very slow to build which makes it the go-to option for coal and gas supporters looking to delay the energy transition for a few more years and use up all the funding.
Hence why we’re talking about bringing existing reactors that have been shutdown back online
And that doesn’t even get into the newer reactor designs being worked on now. Light water modular reactors, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, etc. that all can be built faster than the old designs currently in use.
The designs from the 60s and 70s are monolithic behemoths, but a lot of work has been done in recent decades on technologies that were essentially abandoned outside academia back then simply because they couldn’t be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Modern battery storage still cannot guarantee a base load capability 24/7 without massive battery farms multiple times the size of standard usage. What storage is great at is evening out supply to stabilize the grid. Renewables and battery storage will never be base load capable for any sizeable grid region, you simply need too much to handle the modern power requirements of a city, including necessary expansion in the future.
Some people just don’t want to accept that fact, so we sit here with thousands of gas and coal plants still burning every day instead of taking any steps in the right direction, wasting valuable time that we don’t have.
As it is, a coal plant produces more radioactive material than the waste from a nuclear power plant, but it’s allowed to be exhausted into the atmosphere and ignored. And that doesn’t even get into the greenhouse gasses. If these plants were required to actually clean their emissions, they wouldn’t be nearly as “cheap” to operate.
Continuing to operate nuclear plants that we’ve already paid for and are on the hook for decommissioning costs is perfectly sensible. Building new ones is what isn’t.
There’s lots of newer designs we could use, but they’re still not going to be economically viable. A new nuclear plant isn’t about today, it needs to be viable over its expected lifespan: around 2036 to 2076.
The fancy new designs aren’t up against today’s batteries. They’re up against 2040’s batteries, and they can’t compete. For the price of a new nuclear plant, we’ll be able to buy those massive battery farms and have money left over. Not today maybe, but a new reactor isn’t going to start feeding power into the grid for ten years or so, so it’ll need to compete with 2036’s battery prices on day one and it’s only going to get worse from there.
Hydroelectric is great… Apart from the existing entire ecosystem behind the dam that is destroyed to create the lake used to store the energy it then uses.
And that assumes a large enough body of water to pull energy from without depleting that source, especially with climate change shifting weather patterns. Many existing dams are operating at or near minimum levels because of ongoing drought conditions and similar issues.
In 2021, global installed hydropower electrical capacity reached almost 1,400 GW, the highest among all renewable energy technologies. source
If many are operating at minimum capacity, they’re still doing a lot. Not all hydroelectic are dammed type, tidal is picking up over time. However, I was merely refuting your not always on claim, not the rest of it. Nuclear is a good option too, when not operated by capitalists.
Everyone always brings up niche options that are highly dependent of the physical region like hydroelectric, tidal, thermal, etc. that massive portions of the country don’t have access to, as if they’re solutions to the base generation from coal and gas.
To be most effective hydro electric power dams are only opened when they have enough water in them to produce a hood amount of power.
You want as big of a fall height of the water as possible before going into the turbine.
Considering the large local environmental toll hydro electric power has, with disruptions to fish and other animals, it does make sense to keep it as efficient as possible.
Is efficiency really the reason behind dams being somewhat intermittent? Rather than just the fact that we might not need them on all the time (needs vary), or that we just can’t leave them on all the time (not enough water flowing in), and that yes, under these conditions, operators will direct power sources in the most efficient way possible.
What I mean is like, I get that leaving a dam off 50% of the time will have it generate more power once you turn it on. But over the whole period of time, assuming enough water upstream to replenish it in either case, is it actually going to generate more electricity than leaving it on 100% of the time?
I guess what I’m asking is, rather than them being more efficient, isn’t intermittent operation of dams due to the fact that we can’t just leave them on 100% in the first place?
The idiots are restarting Three Mile Island #1. All to power an AI data center.
Absolute insanity.
That’s not an issue at all honestly. We need more nuclear power, it is clean power. Restarting existing reactors that weren’t decommissioned due to issues, is the fastest way to replace base load generation currently provided by things like coal and gas. Solar, wind, etc. are great but they don’t work 24/7/365, so there needs to be a base load to cover that. At the moment, that’s handled by coal and gas in most places.
The issue is it being used for AI slop.
Clean? It might not emit CO2, but there is still the nuclear waste.
And no, there is no solution to deal with all of it. If you disagree, my country hasn’t decided in decades where to put it and would like to offer it to you. No one has offered to take it yet.
Yes there is, the fact you are trying to claim there isn’t proves you have done zero actual research on this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Nuclear waste in general is easily stored, which is not true of ANY fossil fuel. Fossil fuels vent emissions directly into the atmosphere to spread through the environment. Coal plants are the single largest source of mercury pollution on the planet, which is neurotoxic and never decays, but I bet you didn’t know that Coal even produces mercury at all, and that doesn’t even get into the uranium that Coal burning plants emit into the atmosphere either. A coal plant releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere daily than a nuclear plant does in it’s entire lifespan.
The vast majority of nuclear waste (95%) is low level waste that is inert within as little as a few months and requires little to no shielding. This is the stuff like clothing, tools, papers, gloves, etc. The intermediate level waste usually decays within a few decades and needs shielding, but isn’t a long term issue and easily can be stored on site at the plant and is part of the decommissioning plan made before the plant is even built.
The actual amount of high level nuclear waste (the stuff that needs to be transferred to the cooling ponds before even being moved to any sort of storage) is very small (<1-3%). ALL of the high level waste ever created by every nuclear plant in the world would fit inside a football field sized space.
The only reason it hasn’t been dealt with well is NIMBYs that actively refuse to learn and protest because what they know is propaganda or cartoons (The Simpsons for instance) with zero factual basis. And politicians paid by fossil fuels to kill legislation to build and operate the storage facilities, with funds usually sourced originally through government subsidies.
“Easily stored” did not really work out in Germany and costs the tax payers billions more. #Gorleben
Your linked video starts with one of largest straw man argumentations I have ever seen in my life… “You have been manipulated!!! You think that [weird shit that is not true at all]!!! You are wrong!!!”…
But I’m glad that you have a “solution”. Our country gladly gives away the nuclear waste to you for free. When can you come take it?
Considering 99% of people go by what they see on shows like The Simpsons, movies, and games, with things like glowing oozing barrels… It’s a really good bet the average viewer is wrong. Of course an extremely small minority will have more education about it, but given the responses here and in other threads across social media, that’s almost never the case.
I also find it strange that the person always compares nuclear with coal, as if it was a “x or y” thing… Were renewables not yet invented when he recorded the video? Am I missing something?
There are more disadvantages like the fact the fuel rods in Europe usually come from Russia, which is technically sanctioned for transforming Ukraine (ironically, that also includes the area of Zaporizhzhia around their nuclear power plant 🙃) into a war zone. But anyway…
IMO, we should build renewables that are cheaper and invest in battery storage. I wish, my country would have done that instead of China, because both technologies currently generate lots of money for them.
IMO, the main argument of the person in the video does not make sense. He tells that “It’s solved, but people don’t accept it”.
Really? There are 195 countries on this planet and you want to tell me that none of them was like “Oh, I could bury other people’s waste and let them pay me. Easy…”.
We have globalization, we have lots of capitalism, there are even dictatorships that don’t care what the population thinks. Why is there no country on earth that has offered to take the nuclear waste of mine for money and deal with it?
Nuclear waste is a non issue, just dumpt it in deep old mines, in seismically stable places and then fill them in, the problem is politicians scared after watching chernobil in hbo.
It turns out that the region where this happened does not like that and sues and wins. We put it there and now have to put it somewhere else… Costs billions and guess who is gonna pay it… The same people who also pay in case of a disaster… The tax payers…
Furthermore, it just sounds like the climate change solution… Letting future generations deal with it…
Like we are putting it right were we found it a lot of times.
I’m not from the US, this is a worldwide problem.
But nuclear energy is such a good thing for the world, that letting it fade away from just the plain ignorance of people is Infuriating.
I had the opportunity to be at a (research) nuclear reactor not long ago, and is really an amazing technology lol, truly something that makes the world a better place.
Countries just should pass laws making NIMBYsm harder, and making information campaigns about how much the tech has gotten safer.
Sure, it’s a fascinating technology. I believe that. I only argued against the argument that is was “clean”.
I don’t know whether laws can change anything. We have a democracy here. When people go on the street and threaten to vote for others in the next election, laws don’t matter.
Safety is also a quite relative… When area around the nuclear power plant suddenly becomes a warzone, like in Ukraine, then it’s not that safe anymore for that country and those around it.
No, it’s NIMBYs protesting shit they don’t know. And fossil fuel bribes so politicians revoke funding for the multiple facilities that have been proposed or even partially built over the years, like Yucca Mountain.
All high level nuclear waste ever produced worldwide, from all reactors, would fit within a football field. It’s not physically hard to store. It’s just politically hard to get anything done because of propaganda and bribery.
I completely disagree that it’s not an issue.
That reactor is an OLD Babcock and Wilcox design that is at least two generations behind. The money and resources going into that pile of junk would be better spent on a new plant. Yes I’m well aware of the issues surrounding building new nuclear plants in the U.S. That’s a different conversation and not one I will enter into here. Sure in the short term, maybe even in the mid-term restarting that plant looks good on paper. However, that is still a reactor design that is over 60 years old and physically it is 50 years old. Not to mention the design has several documented short comings that require monitoring and processes that a new generation reactor would not need. Sure they’re not RBMK level of issues, but that reactor really should stay decommissioned.
It does not matter how many nuclear, solar, or wind plants that are built. The fact of the matter is that all of these resources, not just money, is being put into a technology, AI, that is of limited use at best at the present state of the technology.
With some light searching I found that the total amount of nuclear power capacity on Earth today adds up to 371.5 GW
Meanwhile, China built 315 GW of solar capacity in the last year. Solar panels don’t charge at night, obviously, which is why China is also installing base load in the form of grid-scale battery storage and already has 215 GWh online today with plans to surpass 721 GWh by 2027.
While we wait 10-15 years to build more nuclear power plants, China is just going to keep pumping out more and more solar panels and base-load battery stations faster and faster. I’m entirely soured on nuclear.
China is also building nuclear power plants faster than anyone else, with 113 million kilowatts of capacity (100% of the time).
Solar is great, as is wind, and hopefully tidal sooner than later. Still, nuclear has a part to play. The cost is almost entirely due to over-regulation, as designed by the existing energy lobby. It’s the second safest source of power, including disasters, and including clean energy. Yes, that means it’s safer than wind. It’s about as safe as solar by this source, though I heard solar is worse at one time, though that must have changed. When it was smaller scale, and a lot was on houses, not in fields, solar was worse.
Nuclear is great for a 100% reliable source of power. It is a good foundation to build upon. Yeah, solar+wind with batteries is good, but it isn’t perfect. Nuclear is clean, safe, and reliable. There are also effectively zero hazards with a modern reactor, unlike what the media would like you to believe. The waste isn’t actually an issue, and it’s all accounted for. Also, the risk of meltdown is effectively zero.
The time to build a reactor also should not be 10-15 years. It should take ~5 years at most, and that should speed up with more reactors built. The reason it takes so long in the US (and other western nations) is regulations, once again. It’s explicitly designed to prevent nuclear from competing with coal/oil/dirty energy.
But China has twice as much base-load battery capacity 100% of the time and built three times as much solar capacity this year alone. In my other comment I highlighted how they plan to have a mere 200 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035 - they plan to have 6 times that much solar capacity by 2030! Nuclear is not a priority. Whatever part is has to play, it’s not the star of the show.
Do you think regulations are holding back nuclear in China too? Or do you think, maybe, it’s just an inferior power source?
I never said renewable+battery was bad. You said nuclear was. The fact of the matter is that well rounded energy infrastructure is the priority in China. Solar doesn’t just not generate power at night. It also doesn’t during storms, and other times. It’s sporadic. Yes, batteries can help with this, but so can nuclear. If you rely solely on solar, the infrastructure needed to support it is significantly higher.
Nuclear allows you to have a reliable baseline. It let’s you have a reliable load so you don’t need as substantial infrastructure to be able to capture 100% peak solar, and be able to discharge it quickly too.
Again, you’re the one making claims about superiority. I don’t think either are superior. They both provide different kinds of utility, and clearly nations like China and Japan see this. Both can be invested in. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing like you claim. They have different roles to play and they both play them very well.
China also has over half of the world’s coal power generation. They are also still building more, just not as much as solar, but it’s still being added to. Coal power share in China fell in 2025 for the first time. But not because they reduced it, but it was the first time where they added enough solar/wind to outpace the adding of coal.
China also has quotas that require utility companies to buy a certain share of coal power. So you can’t get clean energy there by law, as individual or industrial user.
China also has the rare earths needed to produce batteries, from what I remember they sit on the largest reservers for them by quite a margin, but I don’t remember a source for that. So for them, adding battery based grid storage is easier than most of the world. Plus they are basically the only ones that even make any batteries anymore in the first place.
Source for most of the info.
What this demonstrates is that China will use whatever the most efficient power generation is that gets electricity to the maximum number of people and industries for the lowest cost. They aren’t installing solar because they want to save the world, they’re doing it because it works. It’s better than anything else on the market and so they’re investing.
Notably, they are not installing nuclear power at the same rate. They plan to have 200 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035, but they’re installing more than that in solar capacity every year. That should tell you something.
The main issues with nuclear power are that it’s more expensive than renewables with battery storage, and that it’s very slow to build which makes it the go-to option for coal and gas supporters looking to delay the energy transition for a few more years and use up all the funding.
Hence why we’re talking about bringing existing reactors that have been shutdown back online And that doesn’t even get into the newer reactor designs being worked on now. Light water modular reactors, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, etc. that all can be built faster than the old designs currently in use.
The designs from the 60s and 70s are monolithic behemoths, but a lot of work has been done in recent decades on technologies that were essentially abandoned outside academia back then simply because they couldn’t be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Modern battery storage still cannot guarantee a base load capability 24/7 without massive battery farms multiple times the size of standard usage. What storage is great at is evening out supply to stabilize the grid. Renewables and battery storage will never be base load capable for any sizeable grid region, you simply need too much to handle the modern power requirements of a city, including necessary expansion in the future.
Some people just don’t want to accept that fact, so we sit here with thousands of gas and coal plants still burning every day instead of taking any steps in the right direction, wasting valuable time that we don’t have.
As it is, a coal plant produces more radioactive material than the waste from a nuclear power plant, but it’s allowed to be exhausted into the atmosphere and ignored. And that doesn’t even get into the greenhouse gasses. If these plants were required to actually clean their emissions, they wouldn’t be nearly as “cheap” to operate.
Continuing to operate nuclear plants that we’ve already paid for and are on the hook for decommissioning costs is perfectly sensible. Building new ones is what isn’t.
There’s lots of newer designs we could use, but they’re still not going to be economically viable. A new nuclear plant isn’t about today, it needs to be viable over its expected lifespan: around 2036 to 2076.
The fancy new designs aren’t up against today’s batteries. They’re up against 2040’s batteries, and they can’t compete. For the price of a new nuclear plant, we’ll be able to buy those massive battery farms and have money left over. Not today maybe, but a new reactor isn’t going to start feeding power into the grid for ten years or so, so it’ll need to compete with 2036’s battery prices on day one and it’s only going to get worse from there.
Nuclear Is Not The Solution
Hydroeletric doesn’t work 24/7/365?
Hydroelectric is great… Apart from the existing entire ecosystem behind the dam that is destroyed to create the lake used to store the energy it then uses.
And that assumes a large enough body of water to pull energy from without depleting that source, especially with climate change shifting weather patterns. Many existing dams are operating at or near minimum levels because of ongoing drought conditions and similar issues.
If many are operating at minimum capacity, they’re still doing a lot. Not all hydroelectic are dammed type, tidal is picking up over time. However, I was merely refuting your not always on claim, not the rest of it. Nuclear is a good option too, when not operated by capitalists.
Everyone always brings up niche options that are highly dependent of the physical region like hydroelectric, tidal, thermal, etc. that massive portions of the country don’t have access to, as if they’re solutions to the base generation from coal and gas.
Coal usage increased by 1% in 2024, up to a total of 10,700 TWh of power globally.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/coal
Natural Gas produced 6,529 TWh as of 2022.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels/natural-gas#tracking
That’s the base generation that nuclear targets. 1,400GW (or 1.4TW) is a large number but with context, it’s a drop in the bucket.
Actually, no it doesn’t.
To be most effective hydro electric power dams are only opened when they have enough water in them to produce a hood amount of power.
You want as big of a fall height of the water as possible before going into the turbine.
Considering the large local environmental toll hydro electric power has, with disruptions to fish and other animals, it does make sense to keep it as efficient as possible.
Is efficiency really the reason behind dams being somewhat intermittent? Rather than just the fact that we might not need them on all the time (needs vary), or that we just can’t leave them on all the time (not enough water flowing in), and that yes, under these conditions, operators will direct power sources in the most efficient way possible.
What I mean is like, I get that leaving a dam off 50% of the time will have it generate more power once you turn it on. But over the whole period of time, assuming enough water upstream to replenish it in either case, is it actually going to generate more electricity than leaving it on 100% of the time?
I guess what I’m asking is, rather than them being more efficient, isn’t intermittent operation of dams due to the fact that we can’t just leave them on 100% in the first place?
If we left them on 24/7 they would quickly run out of water turn the turbine
different flow rates.
It’s better to use it as a backup to solar and wind. And if there’s enough excess in energy production, pump the water back to another dam.