[Peak Oil] Nuclear Power running down, no-one seems to care

[Sea Skimmer]

Be fair, a combined cycle gas turbine plant is the most efficient combustion based power source that exists, better then even a huge slow reving diesel engine. Turbines are already highly efficient at full power, and with a combined cycle you have a second steam turbine running off the exhaust heat. Efficiency is about 60%. If you go further and also use the plant to create heat for buildings then efficiency can go even higher.

Reaction time isn’t as good as a hydropower station (a few minutes vs. less then one), but thats still very low and makes gas turbines well suited to meeting peak power demands. This plus the ability of a gas turbine to run on virtually any kind of fuel means that they’ll be around for a very long time to come. In fact they’ll always be around, since humanity will likely be destroyed before we run out of methane from landfills, and that’s normally burned in gas turbine plants (they have great scalability, though so does hydro) on site.

Unfortunately, most gas turbine plants that currently exist are not combined cycle, and it’s generally not practical to rebuild them to use that technology.

[Kanastrous]

But, but, Marina, reindeer occasionally migrate there! Why do you hate Rudolph the Reindeer, and by extention, Christmas and Our Values? Monster.

Seems to me that if we want reindeer with phosphorescent red noses, exposure to a stiff dose of ionizing radiation is the best crack we'll have at getting them.