cycomanic
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
I want experienced small acts of kindness in many countries and in both rural and metropolitan areas. I do agree that different societies are more or less likely. In my mother's travels, she was met with a lot of distrust in Guatemala (but this was reasonably recent after the end of the dictatorship), similarly my best experiences have been in NZ (just walking around with a map in central Auckland often ended up with someone offering to drive you to where you needed to go).
You keep saying that nuclear can keep operating during the day, because of neglible fuel cost. But fuel cost has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. So even we ignore opex, if you have to earn $100 a day to earn back your capex investment, if the price during the day is such that you can sell electricity for $0, yes you can still run your plant, but if prices allow you to only earn $80 during the night, you're still loosing money. So it's still a terrible investment. Calculations get worse if prices go negative during the day (but your plant can't easily be switched off) or if we include opex.
Moreover, other technology like batteries, are on an exponential trajectory. So average price differences between night and day are likely going to drop.
This is where you're wrong. That is the big problem for nuclear in particular. You just can't recover your capex during the night. The night is the low demand time anyway, and you are still competing with wind etc.. Nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors, because it's not economically viable. In fact operators even want to turn off reactors because even their running cost are too high (happened in Sweden, a while ago. IIRC the government wanted to turn it back on for political reasons).
Variability and fuel costs have nothing to do with why nuclear is a bad idea. The problem why nuclear is expensive is that all the cost comes from capex, which is huge in comparison to all the other sources (which is also the reason why trying to quickly bring down emissions with nuclear is so fraud). But because they are not variable, nuclear has to accept the price which is set by other sources.
This is actually illustrated by Denmark. They are a net importer of electricity in terms of kWh, but a net exporter in Dollar amounts. In other words their energy mix allows them to export when prices are high and import when prices are low.
Anyone else experiencing the same? I have been wondering if it might have been me using molly, so will test now after going back to signal for second device.