[GS] Nuclear Discussion (hived off from Mali Discussion thread)

[Disgustipated]

Firaxis looks at this thread and wonders how a livestream about Mali in the medieval era turned into a huge discussion on nuclear and other types of energy.

In Gathering Storm thought mode- I wonder if Solar Plant tiles will still generate power if you set the visual time of day in game to night?

Would be interesting, but then everyone would just turn off the day/ night cycle.

 

[nzcamel]

Wow, I'm seeing such a boat-load of nonsense posted here, so much so that I really cannot be bothered wasting time debunking it, as you've clearly all been brainwashed by the Nuclear/Coal industry. Claims re: Intermittent Power are increasingly being shown up to be utter bunkum, especially with massive advances in storage technology. Claims that Wind Turbines disrupt Wind Patterns in a significant fashion are also pure bunkum, and as a scientist I feel dumber for even reading such comments.

As someone who has taken the time to study renewable energy technology, versus the more outdated technologies, I know as a fact that the price per MWh & the acreage per MWh of renewable energy continues to drop, decade by decade-as does the quantity of toxic materials & the life-cycle CO2 emissions.

By contrast, Coal, Nuclear & Gas continue to have high prices per MWh (nuclear being the most expensive, even with massive state subsidies) & high acreage per MWh.......often even before you take mining into account. Then there is the simple fact that Coal, Gas & Uranium are non-renewable resources, which makes moving away from them a common sense proposal, even if you ignore the costs (economic & environmental).

Anyway, I'm bored with arguing with a bunch of technophobes who are all stuck in the mid-20th century.

Yes, name calling and dismissing people will carry the day.

As to non-renewables as long as they are cheaper we should stay with them. Especially for the poorer parts of the world. Of course that works under capitalism as their increasing scarcity will be what eventually drive us away. One day. Maybe a hundred years from now lol

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: 42 posts regarding nuclear power and related discussion hived off from Mali Discussion thread. Please be civil, and try to focus on implementation of nuclear power plants in the game, more so than real world issues with nuclear. Thanks.

 

[Turrdy]

Would be fun if you build nuclear power plants you'd also have to build waste deposit sites:

• 1 Tile that gives -5 appeal
• Produces fallout when struck by a natural disaster
• Has a maximum capacity (Waste is produced with usage of uranium)
• Need to build more deposit sites if the previous one is full

 

[Arent11]

Almost nobody knows that nuclear power has no CO2 emission. The environmentalists in the 70s really, really, really succeeded in spreading their anti-nuclear propaganda.

I am a bit concerned that they start to turn civilization into some kind of political lecture. I mean, we have the absence of pollution & health mechanics - which really was a serious issue during industrialization before air filters & waste processing was developed. And it is still an issue for example in China today. At the same time, units are producing CO2 now? Honestly?

I see these tendencies already in the existence of many "boring" civs - most of them are nice, idealistic, "do gooders". Civ should be fun & doesn't need to be historically correct, but having only nice guys is neither fun nor historically correct.

Compare this to alpha centauri, where you had ruthless dictators, bellicists, fundamentalists, unethical researchers, egoistical money grubbers, an incompetent UN and a "pacifistic" green faction that gruesomely killed their fellow humans with mindworms. It did not tell you what you should think, it showed you the good and bad sides of all the factions.

 

[Disgustipated]

and try to focus on implementation of nuclear power plants in the game,

Actually one thing that concerns me about the implementation is it appears there will always be a risk of a nuclear accident, even after nuclear fusion is researched. I would say after researching nuclear fusion you can do another retrofit (they use a different word) and after that there is no risk at all.

 

[Siptah]

Actually one thing that concerns me about the implementation is it appears there will always be a risk of a nuclear accident, even after nuclear fusion is researched. I would say after researching nuclear fusion you can do another retrofit (they use a different word) and after that there is no risk at all.

Do we know if nuclear fusion increases power output as well? Do we even know if different plants/improvements produce different amounts of power? Or are the resource used and Emissions the only difference?

 

[Red_warning]

Dams have their own price, their ecological impact are immens, perhaps even more so than that of uranium mining.

I live in Swedish Lapland, which is similar to Alaska in climate, but have never seen bear hunt for salmon because nearly all our rivers are used for hydro power.

 

[Siptah]

Dams have their own price, their ecological impact are immens, perhaps even more so than that of uranium mining.

Possibly, and yet some artificial lakes are now beneficial in many ways. But there are enough negative examples. The worst might be brown coal mining which turns landscape into moonscape...

Civ VI doesn‘t include these effects, nor should it in my opinion. For gameplay it is strictly better to have early energy = dirty, turning more clean later in my opinion. Civ isn‘t a realistic game, so it should not suddenly try to become realistic for some details.

 

[Red_warning]

Possibly, and yet some artificial lakes are now beneficial in many ways. But there are enough negative examples. The worst might be brown coal mining which turns landscape into moonscape...

Civ VI doesn‘t include these effects, nor should it in my opinion. For gameplay it is strictly better to have early energy = dirty, turning more clean later in my opinion. Civ isn‘t a realistic game, so it should not suddenly try to become realistic for some details.

Aye, I don't mind video games simplifying things, it should be expected. And not taken as some sort of choosing of political sides.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I always come at Game Play and Game Mechanics, especially in a 'pseudo-historical' game like Civ, from a Historian's standpoint: I am a Historian by profession and inclination, so no apologies for that!

That means I'd like to see the gamer get alternatives, with both the positive and negative aspects of those alternatives. They can be simplified - in fact, they have to be to keep the game playable - but they should be there.
So, ideally:
Nuclear Plants get you 'clean' Power, but lower the Amenity level in the city (Nervousness), and if there is a Nuclear Incident or Accident, that negative Amenity level goes up.
Hydroelectric Plants require dams, which also block the river to navigation, so trade Routes get no distance/cargo bonus from that river any more (this requires a different Trade Route mechanic, I know, but rivers as important trade routes is Long Overdue in the game, IMHO).
Later, you can 'replace' the dams with Tidal Generators, which generate power from Coastal Tiles, but may also remove Natural Resources from any coastal tile next to them.
Wind Turbines provide power from virtually any tile (a few years ago traveling through West Virginia and east Tennessee, I noted that every wooded hill top seemed to be festooned with Turbines, so Plains, Grassland, Desert, Hills, Forested Hills, Farms and Pastures are all possible Turbine Sites) but will possibly alter neighboring Tiles - changing a plains tile to grassland, or vice versa, or 'spreading' a desert by one tile - and these changes will be Random, because we have a hard time now predicting wind pattern changes and their effects.
Coal or Oil burning Plants will provide early power (Industrial/Modern Era) but will deplete those Resources and will in (short) time produce a Population Increase reduction as cities become increasingly hazardous to breathing - and in the game, we could have a London Fog graphic start to appear over the cities, gray and dim, which would not dissipate until the coal/oil plants were replaced or New technologies ('scrubbers' or Future Tech) clean them up sufficiently.

 

[The googles do nothing]

I didn't realize uranium is something the world is running short on. That must be why you can't run down to the store and buy plutonium.

I would love if they would align governments in civ 6 with environmental agendas. Rather then the hard production bonus of communism/fascism and just allow them to build Nuclear/Hydroelectric plants with no happiness penalties and have give democracy some negative amenity malus.

 

[Sostratus]

Actually one thing that concerns me about the implementation is it appears there will always be a risk of a nuclear accident, even after nuclear fusion is researched. I would say after researching nuclear fusion you can do another retrofit (they use a different word) and after that there is no risk at all.

Didn't we see some stuff in the stream relating to global warming mitigation? Or maybe I saw something in the screenshot thread. If that's true, then I would hope they could make nuclear accidents go away with fusion. Even if they made fusion plants have very heavy maintenance cost. They have that weird progression where the coal/oil/nuke plants themselves offer a 1/2/3 production aura, which I understand for game reasons. It would be nice to have an ultra endgame/future era power plant that just converted gold into power (since you still gotta pay to run this stuff- say, 8 gold=4 power?) with no other downsides.

I do quite like that the district/building power choices are all base load and the improvements look to be the intermittent types. Probably coincidence but, it just makes me feel better on the inside.

Nuclear plants have the huge issue of competing with GDRs for uranium, which I think will end up carrying the day on any higher level game that gets to that point. Not even just because you can use robots to take on the world, but more because they are the only practical defense against enemy GDRs!

I didn't realize uranium is something the world is running short on. That must be why you can't run down to the store and buy plutonium.

They are finite, yes, although it's not like we don't know where the uranium is. Those reserves have us at a century+ if we don't find more. It's comparable to our world coal supply. To put the figure "recoverable below 260$ per kg" into context, I think uranium is like 80$ per kg right now. Looking at an EIA link I posted, US uranium costs could go up by ~2.5x and they'd still be cheaper than coal plants. The only renewable baseload is hydroelectric. Maybe we will develop a breakthrough in mega scale energy storage, but until then, you simply must have coal, gas, nuke, or hydro in your energy grid for anything large scale. In the context of civ6, strategic resources really won't run out over the course of the late game when you are extracting them.