The thing about nuclear which drove us to large plants in the first place is that bigger reactors have significant economies of scale. Even with big reactors, nuclear has been very expensive to build, and hasn’t really come down in cost in a long time, and takes a very long time to actually build.

By contrast, wind, solar, and storage are cheap and can be deployed rapidly in small increments with much more site flexibility.

So what’s going on is a false promise of future nuclear being used to prevent the deployment of renewables now.

In the US, yes. Other countries do installers competing against each other over install price, which ends up dropping cost to about 1/4 of what it is in the US.

Yeah, the chrome console shows one error about not being able usen an icon from the manifest.

Same issue in other instances too though, not just lemmy.world

Is it just me, or when you specify a thumbnail URL on a link post, is it not displayed by other lemmy instances?

For example, compare https://lemmy.world/c/climate@slrpnk.net?dataType=Post&sort=New

With https://slrpnk.net/c/climate?dataType=Post&sort=New

And I see thar the post with the NYT article about the EPA removing human-induced climate forcing from their website doesn’t have a thumbnail on lemmy.world but does on slrpnk.net

Basically they have a financing deal for the rooftop solar that’s designed to have a lower monthly payment than the utility bill it displaces

Its been a longstanding issue. Lots of people care, but its not at the top of their priority list.

I don’t expect any kind of physical object to be free as in beer…but they definitely have a lot of room for technical improvement to make batteries cheaper

The Los Angeles Times ran a map of just the ones in California. Most browsers will let you access it if you edit this URL to put a . after the .com and before the /

https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-oil-well-drilling-idle-cleanup/map/

Somebody will always try, but this looks like its going to last at least a generation

Thats sounding a lot more like what I remembered

Got sources for an AMOC shutdown happening in the past few thousand years?

They’re mostly not set up as a backup system, but to time-shift wind and solar so that it isnt necessary to use more expensive fossil fuel generation. For example, here is what utility-scale battery use looked like on Dec 5 in California

Not really; there are real reasons people don’t want large-scale storage near populated areas, and it’s more expensive than avoiding the need for long-duration storage, and burning it (if you don’t store the oxygen, which raises costs even more) produces lung-damage nitrogen oxides. So there’s a lot of reasons to minimize the need for hydrogen as much as possible.

Depends a lot on where. Places with a lot of both wind and solar need a lot less than those with only one, or with big seasonal heating needs. Way more to say about this than can fit in a comment

You do need some amount of long-duration storage, with the amount depending on how generation diversity and how much clean firm generation you have, but we are still in the early stages of it.

People are going with batteries and demand-shifting first because they’re more cost-effective when it comes to dealing with a few hours of storage. Hydrogen storage is mostly a contender for longer-durarion storage

What’s new is the closed-loop horizontal drilling in places where geothermal was not possible before

That “or” is fairly surprising to me; its fairly easy to use waste heat from electric generation for district heat. Id expect some modest reduction, but not a total trade-off

This was classically true, but the fact that it’s a fleet vehicle economy standard means you can have something inefficient, and sell it in the other states, while selling EVs in California. So you’re doing two different vehicle models for different parts of the country, but achieving the required efficiency standard.

Kinda sorta; because it’s a fleet average, it means that EVs will be marketed in the states following the California standard, but not the rest of the country.