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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3618 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Between cheap gas, cheap solar, and limited grid interconnects, Texas is a weird place to be boosting nuclear because it can't possibly compete. It's the north that needs it desperately.

It's the north that needs it desperately.

Texas would therefore be wise to ensure the North continues to depend on Texas industry for its energy production, even in a potential post-hydrocarbon future.

It's not like the North is going to bother developing it, given their current strategy of "ban all development with environmentalism as the excuse, then freeze to death in the dark" means they can't advance nuclear technology even if they wanted to (and their best and brightest have already left for Texas).

Fracking is putting the US in a screwed position in terms of power generation. Fracking produces a lot of cheap gas which outcompetes most other electricity production. However, it is finite. Fracking will essentially deliver 30 years of super cheap power and then another decade or two of cheaper power. It is going to leave a large void behind it. Texas needs to start planning for a post fracking future and considering the sorry state of western nuclear manufacturing this is going to take time.

Ten years is more than enough warning to develop alternatives and just the crazy fast ramp-up of nat-gas plants shows that power generators are more flexible than people give them credit for.

Gas can be build that fast. However, that requires cheap gas. Scaling nuclear is going to take more than a decade.

It does help that for natural gas generating stations the turbine technology they use is quite mature and has a relatively wide pool of engineers that know how to build them. Nuclear is a... bit more complicated by comparison, since the heating of the water for the turbines is the complicated part, whereas with natural gas even when we're doing fucking retarded shit like this that blows up the entire plant cleaning that mess up is quite a bit easier and cheaper.

I think that’s probably true for low temperature reactors. If higher temperature gas or metal reactors become available in the future I think it could be a real bonanza for a place like Texas for direct heating applications in the petrochemical industry (imagine how mad green peace would be over a nuclear heated oil refinery).

Texas recently had a bad power outage during a cold snap which I don't think more solar would solve. And Texas is growing quickly. Abbott is probably trying to get ahead of the curve; power outages make us and him look bad and do actual material damage. In terms of predictable scandals that could seriously harm Abbott and/or his party, more grid problems is probably up there.

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