Although renewable + bess still wins according to most recent studies on that matter, cost comparison between nuke and renewable / Bess is not that useful. Assumptions on the longevity of nuke reactors, for example, helps little if the fleet of reactors end up constantly break down and require repairment as in France and Belgium. So lcoe of nuke over long time span is highly uncertain and contingent; even in construction phase nuclear projects already entails higher risk in time and budget overrun than renewables. Plus the positive feedback loop of learning curve, evident in renewable and Bess, is not so visible for nuclear.

What is more useful for sake of current policy discussion is deployment rate and scalability, which renewable plus batteries clearly wins.

and you don't seem to understand...

solar panels in a desert seems relative low impact infrastructure

honestly I think this discussion is probably a few decades ahead of our time, and were it not for op I would never raise it in this sub. there will probably come a time, however, when I consider supporting ai rights morally imperative. in any case I agree animal rights are more urgent and real atm.

I think we need to be cautious about this type of animal vs machine thinking, since ultimately all existences are "manufactured" in one way or another, and the main component (carbon or silicon) should not be a relevant criterion in morality. The ability to feel pain or form other forms of complex sentients, IMO, should.

on the flip side, under what criteria will further utilization of ai become exploitation to the machine and considered an issue in the vegan movement?

I looked into the gwp* thing and it is more appropriate for macroscopic / global analysis than for the carbon accounting of individuals. if one reduces 1 unit per year of emission of short live GHG now, can they claim the positive climate effects by comparing with the counterfactual baseline, where they continue to emit the GHG with the same rate forever? That is the equivalent of claiming an infinite amount of emission reduction.

in any case it is always possible to use a pulse response function to account for the gwp of any instantaneous emission increase/decrease, since gwp* is just the convolution of the pulse response over time.

just thinking: why stop at 2? I suppose a grid of heat towers with mirrors beneath would provide maximum utilization of the solar radiation

its the marginal cost of running existing plants, mainly from fuel cost.

The political context here is that the Australian conservatives (the liberal coalition I suppose), who have been vividly against climate policies and renewables, are now trying to propose nuke projects on coal power plant sites. Many of these coal power plants are soon to be phased out with renewables plus storage in the queue for the freed transmission capacity, so there isn't really any advantages these sites can offer for nuke projects decades from now.

Of course, any realistic realization of nukes in Australia would be no earlier than 2040 (some even suggest 2050), by then they could already get 100% renewable in energy system easily.

my understanding is that Taiwan buys weapons from the us, so he is demanding something that is already a common practice

just a reminder if they put the orange diamonds for wind and solar it would probably lie somewhere near zero $/MWh

It is highly dependent of the local geological conditions. Convection-based geothermal plants (those with hot spring flowing around) probably have less constraints on heat extraction limit. Conduction-based geothermal plants will face more problems.

In some shallow geothermal use case the ground is used as seasonal heat storage so heat renewable rate is not an issue.

The moemorphic character shown in the picture is Archchan, created by ravimo. I wonder why show her in a discussion about Mint?

It's not a good analogy. A better analogy might be a community that promotes a Linux distro that runs exclusively on Chromebook and claims that that is the ONLY private and secure way to use a computer.

Some people are still using current primary energy supply share of renewables to bash wind and solar. Given the rapid adoption of these techs, such unfair metric will become more and more irrelevant. Once thermal electricity generation becomes the exception, electricity becomes the main primary energy carrier. Some forms of secondary energy carriers will still exist (in form of green chemical molecules) but overall efficiency of the energy system will no doubt improve.