Just look at how habitable Chernobyl still is.
Dying at 60 from cancer is still a hell a lot better than starving at 15. And that's assuming we have a Chernobyl like even happen every few hundred square kilometers.
If climate change is an extinction level even we should expect to make sacrifices like those in other events that killed millions, like WWI and WWII. I don't understand people who can think that we think we will die for sure because of climate change, but aren't willing to risk a much smaller chance of dying from nuclear accidents.
So, sure there are dangers with nuclear power if there's an accident. Ideally there shouldn't be, historically there has been a few (seven with fatal outcomes to be exact)[1]. Still with modern reactors that shutdown instead of melting down we should be able to safely handle virtually any accident. With burning fossil fuels the deaths are not _if_ there's an accident, they are a _consequence_ of polluting the air. And the 800000 annual deaths caused by coal burning doesn't even include deaths due to global warming [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... [2] https://endcoal.org/health/
Of course these risks could be mitigated by different designs or just building the reactors 200m underground, but that seems to be even more cost-prohibitive, so it has not even being suggested.
And are destroying every grid which they dominate. Germany, South Australia, California. When you start getting negative price events while the overall price increases something has gone very wrong with the market.
A renewable network is not fit for an industrial society. You need a stable base load to run machines, like computers, elevators or hospitals. You can either try and build batteries, which costs trillions of dollars build in large enough quantities (the largest battery in the world can run South Australia for about 5 minutes), a transcontinental grid to share power, which costs trillions of dollars to build, or nuclear power, which cost billions and is something we already know how to do.
Negative grid prices are the consequences of power plants which cannot shut down in times of oversupply, that is mainly coal and nuclear.
Of course there need to be further investments to be made in the grid and even more so some market mechanisms need to adjust in an age of mostly renweables in the grid. So far, grid pricing was dominated by a varying demand vs. a more constant power output on the grid. With reneweables, there comes the additional component of a variable production. But that is something the market can adjust to. Companies which require a constant supply have to pay for that, those that don't can save a lot of money. Charging electrical cars is a great example of something that can use electricity when the supply is very large.
Riddle me this, then: Why did negative energy prices emerge along with renewables[1]?
The problem isn't coal/nuclear, because the variance in demand is far lower than the variance in output of renewables. Furthermore, both coal and nuclear plants can be adjusted to react to seasonal variance.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...
Even if the marginal cost was zero, you gave coal/nuclear as the cause for negative energy prices, even though they didn't exist before renewables came into the picture. You may claim that the situation is better with the renewables in the mix, but you can't claim that renewables aren't the ultimate cause of negative prices in this case.
Similarly, you may claim that coal/nuclear are slow/expensive to regulate, but then must also concede that wind/solar can't be regulated up at all and couldn't provide a stable supply without e.g. natural gas, or a buffering solution that currently doesn't exist (at scale) and isn't priced into wind/solar.
Please provide a citation that renewables have a non-neglible marginal cost.
> Furthermore, if you pay negative prices as a result of a renewable surge, that might as well be considered into the marginal cost.
With a lot of imagination.
> couldn't provide a stable supply without e.g. natural gas
Alright, we'll keep those nuclear power plants that run on natural gas for now.
> or a buffering solution that currently doesn't exist (at scale)
We've got a way to build things that don't exist yet. It's called "engineering".
Yes, there has. There are still way too many inflexible legacy fossil and nuclear power plants producing electricity no one needs because the demand has been filled by renewables. What we need are storage, load-shedding (contrary to popular opinion, pausing energy intensive industry for a few minutes will not bring us back to the stone age) and, as a stop gap, flexible plants.
> You can either try and build batteries
No, that would be stupid. You're pretty sure of yourself for someone that apparently thinks batteries are the only storage technology.
> a transcontinental grid to share power, which costs trillions of dollars to build,
About 0.13 trillions, to be precise.[1]
> or nuclear power, which cost billions
Hinkley Point C is going to produce 3200MW at a build cost of ~25 billion USD. The EU had about 1TW of capacity in 2017. That's 312.5 Hickley Point Cs, costing 312.5*25=7812.5 billions.
The costs of waste disposal, eventual dismantling the plant and liability insurance (if anyone was actually willing to insure the risk nuclear power causes) is left as an exercise to the reader.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/big-energy-debate/european-super...