Science Memes

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Anon questions our energy sector (slrpnk.net)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer.

Obviously, the best answer is to improve energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Why would we waste hundreds of millions on a stupid toy power plant when we could spend 10% of that money on just running decent underground cables.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You really don't understand how expensive underground cables are. You know those big, huge steel transmission towers that you see lined up, hundreds in a row?

Those towers costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each. And the reason they're used is because that's way cheaper than underground.

Shit - just the cable is a couple million per mile per cable.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Are you fucking serious? Nuclear power plants cost way fucking more than some cables. You people are fundamentally so unserious. Pull your head out of a reactor for ten seconds and take reality as it exists

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yes. They cost more than some cables. But we aren't talking about wiring a stereo.

A new nuclear unit (4 billion-ish) costs about as much as 2,000 miles of transmission-grade cable (about 2 million per mile). Considering that there's about 30 cables on a tower run, you're looking at around 65 miles' worth of cable for the cost of a nuclear unit.

And that's just the cost of the wire. No towers, no conduit, no substations, no land acquisition (aerial easement and underground are very different things), no labor.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Because superconductors are even more expensive than breeder reactors.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

and breeder reactors are more expensive than faerie magic, I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real

Wake up, 80-ies were 40 years ago!

USSR figured it out long time ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor