Will this hurt Tesla?
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Parts of what they are doing will.
I just want to add that nuclear energy is clean energy and that the GOP is right to push for it. They might be wrong on most things but not on this one.
Too expensive, takes too long to build, still risky.
And dumping radioactive sludge into a hollowed out mountain, not clean.
Its not economical yet, especially with renewables being so cheap. With a continental grid filling each other's gaps, renewables are unbeatable.
Renewals cannot sustain industrial energy demand on their own. By all means encourage people to use renewable energy in their houses but industry requires more juice so nuclear it is. And how come it isn’t economical? We used to have way more nuclear power plants and it wasn’t economical concerns that shut them down afaik.
What specifically makes "industrial energy" different from any other energy? I keep seeing this lie about renewables everywhere and it doesn't even try to make sense. Electricity is electricity. Need "more juice?" Install more renewables for the cheapest juice in history.
There are some applications where "industrial energy" isnt electricity or motion but instead simply heat.
AFAIK synthetic fuels would be more dollar-effkcient for many usages than an equivalent electric heater, even if we ignore the tooling cost.
But if its not a blowtorch and instead just motion, electricity is electricity and the only thing really special about "industrial use" is the amount demanded.
Right, I bet no one thought of that.
Industry requires stable energy in very large amounts,so if the sun does not come out for 2 days then you have to stop production. Also at some point you’re gonna run out of space to put solar panels and the maintenance cost might make it prohibitive.
Here’s the bottom line: if at the current level of technology and price renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels, every Corp in the world would be running purely on renewables. This the one nice thing about capitalism, that it only needs one argument to be convinced: lower costs. But that is not the case,” and renewables, or rather the infrastructure needed to harness it, is not yet cheaper than fossil fuel.
The solution is to invest money in r&d that makes renewable infrastructure more efficient and cheaper.
I think we just need to keep expanding battery farms. 3+ phase power definitely generates more heat, but that's an issue that's been solved many times in our traditional power supply systems.
It is not clear to me that this solves any environmental issues given that mining the minerals and manufacturing batteries with current chemistry and technology is horrible for the environment.
We should find a way to make clean batteries first and then I would agree with that statement.!
We already have some very promising seeming sodium based batteries that are much more environmentally friendly. Afaik, the capital class hasn't been funding it as well as they should because it's unclear if the tech will ever reach the same level of energy density per dollar as the current stuff. In other words, I don't think the problem is the tech. The problem is the owners of the private sector energy companies are more interested in sustainable short term profit than what's best for society, long term.
Yes I agree with what you posit at the end. It’s a huge problem at a systemic level in fact, and I don’t think it’s necessarily inherent to the capitalist system because it wasn’t always like this. And the most ruthless capitalists on earth, the Chinese, do not seem to have this myopic focus in short term gains and are very willing to eat a loss today to end up winning over the long term. I think this is the true downfall of our society.
I want to make it clear that I don't really agree that nuclear is bad. In any shape or form fusion and fission are the two cleanest sources of energy that we have and are the sources of energy humankind will need to guarantee our survival as a species.
However, there are clean batteries. Battery is just a term for potential energy storage and things like gravity batteries and thermal batteries are feasible right now. Electrochemical batteries aren't the only type of battery that we have. Actually, they are less efficient and less reliable than the others at scale.
I know there are clean batteries but I thought they were inefficient/hard to scale? If that isn’t the case why are large scale battery farms made with lithium batteries?
I’m genuinely asking here as I thought those technologies were still in their early days.
Well, there's obviously going to be a lot of angles to that question but initial cost and the fact that large scale battery farms aren't necessarily needed right now stick out to me.
The grid as it is designed right now is capable of producing power at demand simply by spinning up more generators. There's no cost benefit (really) to generating extra power and dealing with logistics of storage while the extra power is not needed. Not at statewide scale and while the infrastructure isn't built already.
Let's for a second assume that a power company at statewide scale wasn't able to just spin up more generators to meet demand and there IS incentive to provide storage. The company looking at the market today has 2 choices. Buy batteries that provide a versatile/portable solution with no real local consequence OR spend money developing and engineering molten salt or pumped water storage.
Electrochemical batteries:
- Pros: rapid installation, available market for part replacement, resellable, cheap to repair, energy dense, variable discharge, no significant R&D, negligible local environmental concerns
- Cons: less reliability, finite resource reliance (rare earths) can cause repair and replacement costs to increase, global environmental concerns, local weather systems can more easily damage infrastructure, limited cycles
Gravity and thermal batteries:
- Pros: renewable or abundant recourses depending on location, reliable and simple, efficiency increases with scale, difficult to damage irreparably, fewer global environment concerns
- Cons: large amount of R&D financial cost/time to account for local environmental concerns, construction and implementation could take multiple years in addition to R&D, unique systems don't allow for much resell ability, larger potential footprint, location constrained, semi-fixed discharge rate, fewer partner companies to provide unique part replacement options, potential impact to local families in the event of failure (Taum Sauk).
Yes, and in fact, nuclear energy is precisely what is needed to manufacture the infrastructure of a clean energy grid with the least amount of carbon output. Thorium reactors are de wei.
Maybe. By all means it deserves investment, deserves the attempt, but it doesn’t seem much more practical than fusion
Cost?
- renewables are the cheapest power generation
- nuclear is most expensive, not economical
- thorium isn’t even developed for regular use
Time?
- renewables can be built asap, and brought into use incrementally
- nuclear takes decades to build, no one can afford that
- thorium isn’t even commercially offered