Carbon emissions and climate change were solved decades ago in France with nuclear power. We can adopt the French model and export it worldwide.
Try exporting the nationalization of the energy supply to the U.S..
By the way, they are still driving gasoline cars in France. Obviously, they didn't 'solve' carbon emissions.
Didn't know that.
- Overly complex fuel chain that actually makes the waste issue worse.
- Inability to keep the know-how for more than a few decades and corruption resulting in the loss of ability to build new reactors without big flaws (note that Japan seems to have the same issue).
- Inability of planning ahead for even a few decades resulting in new reactors not being built fast enough to compensate for the planned retirement of old reactors, with the most likely consequence : keeping old reactors running until one of them melts down.
- Inability to set up long term waste storage.
Continued reliance on outdated nuclear technology might not have the same crucial global technology spillovers as investments in other clean energy (including advanced nuclear). Since the best path towards global decarbonization is through global technology spillover into emerging economies, the actors that have the best emissions score may, surprisingly, not be the most effective actors at reducing the global rate of emissions in the future.
This has some counterintuitive implications. Consider that Germany has higher carbon emissions than France even though it has invested more heavily in solar than its neighbor, which uses much more nuclear. Should advanced economies like Germany leave their nuclear plants running? Perhaps, but it will not make a very large dent in global emissions because 75% of all future emissions will come from emerging economies, which will not adopt the kind of (non-advanced) nuclear power currently in use in Germany & France.
Nuclear only contributes 5% to the world’s energy supply[159] and even in China, where regulation is lax and public opposition to nuclear is not as big an issue for policy-makers, few reactors are currently being built (_six_ in the last 18 months).
While advanced nuclear power in some advanced economies might actually reduce nuclear proliferation risk by using up nuclear material, in other countries, nuclear power might increase proliferation risks.[161]
It will not be used in many emerging economies.[162] Consider that only 1–5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are currently plan to have commercial nuclear power and these countries are at least 10 years away from starting construction on nuclear plants.[163]
citations here: http://lets-fund.org/clean-energy
Gen 3 nuclear buys us time to get to Gen 4 nuclear which will buy us time to get to nuclear fusion. The theoretical work is proven, these more advanced technologies only need engineering solutions.
I mean, nuclear is still better than fossils, but it's still a ridiculously stupid idea.
So how else are you supposed to cut CO2 emissions?
It is amazing to see how far people will go to deny the only solution to climate change - namely nuclear power.
Batteries aren't the only way to store energy. Isn't pumped hydraulic able to work at city scale?
Not really. Pumped hydro is able to work at the scale of a city, but not in the scale of many cities - effective pumped hydro requires very specific locations (a sizeable river with sufficient flow; a comparably high drop, and space for a large reservoirs not only above the dam but also below the dam) which are quite rare. The best spots for it are already used; you can't simply take a normal hydro power dam location and use it effectively for pumped hydro.
We could double the current use of pumped hydro; we could triple it; heck, perhaps we might use ten times of current pumped hydro if we're ready to destroy lots of ecosystems by altering major rivers, but it's physically impossible to have enough pumped hydro to cover half of our grid.
I also thought that pumped hydro needed all that to work, until I found a study about potential locations for pumped hydro in my home state. First of all, you don't actually need a river with that much flow; you only need enough flow to replace the water lost through evaporation, and for the initial fill of either the lower or the upper reservoir. Second, both reservoirs can be completely separate, the lower reservoir doesn't need to be directly below the dam of the upper reservoir. Both reservoirs are connected by a tunnel, with the generator/pump being at some point within this tunnel.
So what you actually need is a pair of areas with suitable geology for a reservoir, one being higher than the other, close enough that the tunnel isn't too long (that study had tunnels of over 4 km, so they don't have to be very close), and a river near one of them.
> The best spots for it are already used; you can't simply take a normal hydro power dam location and use it effectively for pumped hydro.
The best spots for normal hydro would be the ones where the river is near the upper reservoir; pumped hydro allows using spots where the river is only near the lower reservoir. That's the insight I was missing before I found that study.
You could even use an already existing hydro power dam as the lower reservoir for pumped hydro, as long as there's a suitable spot for the upper reservoir nearby.
- batteries won't work because there is no technology today or incoming that can a) store enough to power a city for hours, days, or weeks and b) can even main storage across weeks or months (as would be needed since wind/solar varies seasonally and yearly)
So what other storage methods are left?