We do. It’s called nuclear power and it‘s fought by those who claim they are fighting for the environment.
Put these plants in USA deep red states to create high paying blue collar jobs in construction.
Help level out impact of coal mining ending.
I do agree though that even I used to be completely against nuclear power because of the unsolved waste problem. However in light of the last 25 years not having brought enough progress to prevent an environmental collapse I'm inclined to accept that now, as yet another thing we'll just have to figure out at some point.
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste could be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
Transportation could push that total to 50% if all ICE cars were converted or destroyed and only electric vehicles were used (ignoring ships and trains). "Industry" includes CO2 waste byproducts which are much harder to reduce as many processes may struggle to eliminate that byproduct. Instead capture and sequestration would be needed. This is another 25%
The rest are small, but since we need virtually all CO2 emissions to be zero, we are left with nearly another 25% that isn't tied to electric production and is difficult to replace.
So, 50% of all CO2 isn't power generation related.
So about 1/3 of emissions. It’s worth doing, considering we can reasonably execute this in a decade.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...
I live in Scotland. In the past 20 years we've gone from around 12% electricity from renewable to around 90%. The last coal fired station closed in 2016 and we've not added any new nuclear in that time.
This is usually the point that someone handwaves that having more money and more people makes you less capable than Scotland...
Fossil fuels provide the backup power source.
Out of interest, what percentage are you at?
It has been some years since I had a power cut.
No a rebuttal on HN will usually be on the lines of something something small homogeneous population something something
Not to mention the pile of nuclear warheads parked in fallout radius of our largest city. Which is the real origin of a lot of the opposition to nuclear.
Scotland has done an amazing job of decarbonizing the energy sector. That said, the important thing about electricity is that storage is very expensive so you have to export when the wind is too strong and import when there is no wind. From the "Annual Compendium of Scottish Energy Statistics 2020" Aug 2020 update available here:
https://www.gov.scot/publications/annual-compendium-of-scott...
>...For almost three quarters (74.4%) of the time in 2019, Scotland met its own demand with its domestic low carbon generation only (renewables and nuclear), down from its peak of 77.8% in 2017. This is likely to be related to outages in Hunterston nuclear power station in 2018 and 2019. Scotland’s rapid rise in renewable electricity generation means that renewables alone met electricity demand for an estimated 42.3% of the time in 2019, rising from 0.0% as recently as 2012.
>...In recent years, imports have increased as well, rising from approximately 200 GWh in 2014 to more than 1 TWh for every year since 2016. This is possibly a consequence of the closure of the coal-fired power station at Longannet in 2016, which has meant that there has been a potential need for Scotland to have non-intermittent electricity generation available.
Obviously it is the intermittent nature of renewables that is the challenge. As the Royal Society of Edinburgh wrote in "Scotland’s Energy Future":
>...The reality of where we find ourselves, however, is that the planned closures of both of Scotland’s remaining nuclear power stations by 2030 will see Scotland lose the source of generation for almost 43% of its electricity, going into a period where it is widely expected that demand for electricity will increase. These closures potentially coinciding with the end-of-life of the first wave of offshore wind only adds to this problem.
https://www.rse.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Energy-Rep...
To combat proliferation reactor designs aren’t the issue, you need to control the source of the fuel and it’s entire lifecycle.
Building nuclear weapons isn’t hard, but it’s a project that requires a huge investment in infrastructure so proliferation has always been a question of will and consequences not capability.