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Politics - Quarantine Thread
- Thread starter steve841
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IIRC, those are expansion units. And they aren't online, nor will they compensate for the pending retirements.
It's what happens when you throw an industry in the closet for 20+ years.
ℬête Noire
Active Member
Coal and nuclear along for the ride. In such a way that it implicitly excludes all other fuel alternatives.
Purposely.
Even if nuclear power will never be economically viable when compared to natural gas (which is displacing coal as we speak), it's not only a GHG emitter, it can lead to huge environmental problems. See Aliso Canyon.
However, I believe nuclear electricity costs are an engineering problem waiting to be solved when the handwringers all die off.
I believe air and rivers are known to cross state boundaries without permission. For example, we in CO sometimes breathe wildfire smoke that comes from CA and people in CA drink water that comes from Colorado river.Why do you need the EPA when every state I've been to has their own environmental protection departments? So my tax money does to support two government agencies tasked with the same purpose.
ℬête Noire
Active Member
They were new reactors and it was a lifeline and a chance the industry hadn't been given in a long time. And of course it was about the GHG, for the reasons you give in other posts.
Largely it was economics that threw them in the closet. *shrug* The "cheap power" promise has yet to pan out, ever. At least in a competitive sense in the US. There's a number of reasons for that, historically a lot of which are rooted in coal and oil. France made it mostly work but they had no HC based energy reserves so they could bear down. Culturally, too, they don't have the virulent anti-intellectual sentiment to the extent you find prevalent in the US. That was a huge barrier for nuclear in the US.
I happen to think nuclear has a lot of future potential (especially the further up in latitudes that you go) but it just hasn't panned out yet. *shrug*
EDIT: I'd even go so far as to say nuclear has a bright future save for the potential for battery tech + renewables to outrace them to a solution.
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Well, have a 90 day supply onsite and you're included, simple. It's not easy to have 90 days of coal onsite. there are very few facilities that can even do that. My local coal plant burns 36,000 tons of coal a day, if they wanted to be included in that they'd have to find a way to store 3.25 million tons of coal on site. That's 4.6 Million cubic yards of Coal, not happening. That rule applied to less than 100 power plants of the 8,000 in the US. That's a stretch to say that this was targeted at coal only.
ℬête Noire
Active Member
Call me when you can store 90 days (or one day for that matter) of sunlight or wind onsite. It's nearly as nonsensical for NG (which uses a very long tank called a "pipeline" for delivery). It makes no economical sense to store NG like that for a power gen site.
Come on, don't act daft here.
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insaneoctane
Well-Known Member
Way too much partisanship in this thread. You should realize that when you make some partisan attack, about half the people will disagree with you, right?
I think Tesla has done an excellent job preparing for the end of the tax credit. During the time that Tesla has enjoyed the advantage of the credit, they have built a gigafactory to allow them to drive the $/kWh down which allows them to be competitive without the tax credit. Additionally, they have built out a phenomenal charging infrastructure, second to none, which also allows them to be more competitive without the tax credit. Lastly, they will be in the middle of high production output for 3 car lines (one of which is wildly popular) allowing them to squeeze out more discounts than most companies due to the phase out approach that the tax credit works under. I say Tesla has prepared well for this day. Nissan.... not so much.
Now if only we could get rid of the oil subsidies....
I think Tesla has done an excellent job preparing for the end of the tax credit. During the time that Tesla has enjoyed the advantage of the credit, they have built a gigafactory to allow them to drive the $/kWh down which allows them to be competitive without the tax credit. Additionally, they have built out a phenomenal charging infrastructure, second to none, which also allows them to be more competitive without the tax credit. Lastly, they will be in the middle of high production output for 3 car lines (one of which is wildly popular) allowing them to squeeze out more discounts than most companies due to the phase out approach that the tax credit works under. I say Tesla has prepared well for this day. Nissan.... not so much.
Now if only we could get rid of the oil subsidies....
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Chopr147
Active Member
Actually reported Trump owned a Tesla but I am having trouble finding a photo of it. Either way, I don't think Trump did much driving before being elected anyway.
I suppose that's like saying in 1990 that the battery problem with electric cars can't be solved if we work on it. Both occurred at about the same time.
Economics STILL favor the ICE propulsion systems found in cars. But that won't be true forever.
About the US vs France when it comes to intellectualism? I think you are mistaking cultural differences for scientific focus. I was talking with a lot of middle class French folk a couple years ago. If you think Americans are bigots, wait until you visit France.
Chopr147
Active Member
I totally agree here and I sincerely hope the investigation is based on FACTS. If it is , HRC may be in cuffs
ℬête Noire
Active Member
We didn't get this far in solving the battery problem by building lots of uneconomical batteries. They did lab work and built batteries for where they could be commercially successful. The Tesla Roadster used roughly off-the-shelf batteries repurposed from a very different application, it was able to because laptops and cellphones, where the batteries had been successful since the 90's, had advanced it tech over time in that commercially successful application.
Nuclear currently has a huge problem in that you have to plunk down $B with a capital B and spend several years to build a commercial plant. That's a natural barrier that makes solving one a lot easier than the other.
Again, I do think we should be investing in figuring out nuclear. Starting with figuring out how to make the "commercial scale" smaller so we can iterate a lot cheaper and faster.
Pretty sure now only in some climates. ICE has about a century of engineering and infrastructure buildout to fill all sorts of niches and application. We're on the cusp of scale of production advantage falling. Another decade of concentrated working the engineering (and battery chemistry) towards those niches will greatly expand where BEV at least matches ICE.
About the US vs France when it comes to intellectualism? I think you are mistaking cultural differences for scientific focus. I was talking with a lot of middle class French folk a couple years ago. If you think Americans are bigots, wait until you visit France.
That's something different than what I'm talking about.
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I saw the distress that the massive tax cut to the wealthy caused. The middle class tax cut is practically a rounding error (and one that expires, no less).
It's only cleanest until an accident happens. Think Chernobyl. Fukushima accident btw resulted in huge amounts of radioactive water released into the ocean, which I'm sure we consumed a little bit with any wild-caught seafood. But those amounts are negligible compared to effects of a blown reactor next door. We in CO had Rocky Flats Plant (former nuclear weapons production facility) which had couple of fires during its existence with radioactive fallout from those fires on top of NW Denver (Arvada). Gov agencies said don't worry it's ok, but I excluded that area from my consideration when looking for a house just in case. Btw, they also had bunch of leaking radioactive waste containers on-site, which contaminated area's creeks and lakes and required cleanup decades later (people didn't know about this until 2nd fire and investigation that followed). So much for the safe atomic energy.
That's exactly the point, if you don't have it on site for continued use, you can't generate power. Did you read the letter you linked to, twice?
The whole point is that storing 90 days of fuel onsite doesn't make the grid more resilient. The order was just an excuse to subsidize coal plants.
We'll soon be installing solar and Powerwalls and will have at least a week's worth of solar in reserve.
ℬête Noire
Active Member
A ruse. To sell to the rubes and to try rationalize/loophole around law.
You read the link explaining how it was so, and how it was died because of that? Once at least?
ℬête Noire
Active Member
But that's not fuel for the panels! LOLWe'll soon be installing solar and Powerwalls and will have at least a week's worth of solar in reserve.
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