i think he missed the exponential growth in renewables. deciding to productize a new (in the market) nuclear reactor made much more sense a decade ago than it makes now.
They're not producing all of the time. Renewable power production vary greatly: it's actually problematic that they produce way too much at peak hours, while none at all on windless nights.
You need a stable base production. What better to replace coal and natural gas than nuclear?
A combination of storage, demand shifting and gas.
In a well managed system the gas could be used spasparingl
Then you have thermal storage ; a big share of the electricity we use is to generate cold and heat, and there are a lot of cheap technology out there for thermal storage. It used to be at the clients place for short duration storage(typically storage eater, and now some ice aircon, but there are much more technologies and innovation, at all scales, which include seasonal storage. Most of those tech use thermal storage then to directly use the heat/cold, few use it to generate back some electricity and then could be part of the next paragraph too...
And there are many different technologies taking electricity (or heat that could had generate electricity) and giving back electricity... Pumped hydro is the biggest and oldest player here, but with some innovation coming... There are also different batteries technologies, and many other more exotic possibilities including piling up some concrete blocs...
Lasard Bank write every year a report monitoring the price of the leading technologies. Greentechmedia is a good source to learn more about the development of these technologies and of the market
"The intermittency of other sources such as wind and solar photovoltaic can be addressed by interconnecting power plants which are widely geographically distributed, and by coupling them with peak-load plants such as gas turbines fueled by biofuels or natural gas which can quickly be switched on to fill in gaps of low wind or solar production."
So we can burn the fossil fuel natural gas or a similar gas generated by decomposing bio material. That seems a bit of an odd proof. It seems pretty obvious that burning fuels that releases carbon into the air solves the issue of providing a baseload for renewables, but it has the general problem of releasing carbon into the air. Biofuels are also pretty controversial since they take up a lot of land and fertilizers are not themselves carbon neutral, and current methods for both creating the fuel and the fertilizers has shown to be a major contributor of methane leaking into the air.
As I like to say in this kind of threads, lets ban the act of burning fossil fuels for power. If the market can manage the energy grid without fossil fuels then let the market do that. Which ever technology comes out on top is less important than the fact that we can purge fossil fuels from being used when there is a cleaner alternative.
If you have to depend on gas for the next decade and abolish coal for that, it's still a huge win and progress with an outcome that looks much brighter than this of building a single new nuclear plant or even drowning even more money into research of something that may or may not become realistic in many decades (like fusion).
@the market: if we've learned something in the recent decades than it is that "the market" can't do shit without rules and regulations. Literally. They'll mess up everything they get into their hands and bring out the worse of it.
PS. you are aware that there are already uses for Methane and that there is even P2G generation going on where you gather CO2 from the atmosphere to generate Methane which is than burned afterwards to generate energy.
If that resistance disappeared - even if it was just lessened significantly because of policy - storage, local grid, state grid, national grid and even international grid solutions would all start taking huge leaps forward.
At this point nuclear is for technological nostalgics. There's no role for it, and no need for it. It's an overcomplicated, fragile, dirty, high risk technology which requires strict political, financial, and operational oversight. And when TCO is calculated - something nuke proponents seem to avoid - it isn't even particularly cheap.
Speaking as someone from Sweden, we have already reached maximum exploitation of rivers for hydropower, and it is barely managing to maintain the grid in the winter when the wind is laying low. Expanding it more is not seen as an option, and when the few nuclear plants that is still operational goes offline there are claims that we will need to start import fossil fueled energy during some days of the year.
That's most likely too drastic, leading to a massive immediate economic crash. That being said, what could be done is to start a massive society-wide decarbonization program (think WWII style industrial mobilization), which would start with a few years of building up industrial capacity, followed by a ban on building any new fossil infrastructure or equipment. See e.g.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-...
If we are to take climate change seriously, it's too late to waffle around the margins with carbon taxes etc. and expect that the free market will take care of it all.
I have heard this argument before but not much evidence to support it. There was identical arguments here where I live when they decided to phase out nuclear, and in fairness to the politicians back then, it did not cause an immediate economic crash. Just stopping the production of new plants and letting existing plants operate until they reach their expected operation life time span works pretty well. The energy markets adapts and there are instead an renewed interest to invest as people know that in the future there will be a vacant spot in the market when those plants get decommissioned. Some even argued that it caused stability in the energy market.
The major problem right now is that for the last 10 years, for every extra 1 WGh of new renewable being consumed the fossil based energy also expand by 10 WGh. Looking at world politics and right now there is a lot of focus on expanding fossil fuel extracting and exporting, especially for natural gas. In the EU there are military right now being mobilized because of interest to drill for more natural gas. Investment into new fossil fuel infrastructure has not slowed down but is rather picking up speed.
Massive society-wide decarbonization program where we turn existing fossil fuel plant into carbonfree alternatives are needed, but we should stop people from furthering investing into fossil fuels when there exist a purpose serving alternative. I don't see any good reason to wait.
Apart from that Internet thing, perhaps.
With fossil fuels and nuclear not only the fuel itself is toxic, but when the energy is released it produces an equal amount of bad stuff.
Petroleum fuel is toxic in more than one way, coal not so much, but the waste carbon monoxide is a well known poison which accompanies the waste CO2 in the exhaust.
Every atom of carbon in all of the fossil fuel burnt puts an equal number of atoms of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2.
But carbon is actually the smaller less massive component of CO2. Oxygen atoms are a bit heavier than carbons, and there's two oxygens. So CO2 calculates to contain only about 27 percent carbon.
That means for every huge dump truck full of coal, which is basically pure carbon to start with, when burnt it will put almost 4 huge dump trucks in tonnage of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Petroleum is only about 85 percent carbon so an oil well will need to produce about 15 percent more tons of fuel in order to get an equal amount of CO2 into the air compared to coal
Nuclear waste is deadly toxic & radioactive which is the same insidious combination as its fuel, but no one can honestly say the waste has historically been handled as carefully as the nuclear fuel.
And the hazard is similar but the waste is more difficult to handle so it should be done more carefully not just as carefully.
Also, some people will never imagine that Chernobyl or Fukushima were complete failures, since they could have been worse.
Anyway, the non-renewables have so far fallen into a similar category where more money can be made because full liability of the waste stream is not accounted for in the cost per kWh. Future generations will pay whatever price regardless, they have no say in the matter.
If nuclear was really the lowest cost option, or the slam-dunk shareholder opportunity, that would make it the Wal-Mart of power choices.
Too bad Gates is not rich enough yet or he could splurge a little at this point, and do things for clean energy that no one else could afford single-handedly unless they got it made.
In the winter months there is 9 hours of overcast daylight. There isn’t any room to build a solar farm. There isn’t any room to build a wind farm unless it’s in the water.
Hell I’d like to see a realistic plan to power DFW with renewables.
https://news.energysage.com/states-with-100-renewable-target...
It's not really that hard. Build a lot of wind turbines (more than 100% coverage), reinforce the grid and add some storage.
Offshore wind turbines is a thing. The tech is still somewhat in its infancy, but the costs are coming down.
For a high bound regarding storage, take hydrogen, otherwise whatever cheaper will be in production when you get to it. There are several academic studies of this.
It's not rocket science, just lots of incremental engineering and economics of scale.
If your point is that cities don't have space to provide their own power, yes, you're right, just as they don't have space to grow their own food.