While for 40 years California may have opposed nuclear power, it might be time for people to figure out how to make it work.
Many places elsewhere have all but completed the transition to renewables and are well on their way to 100% renewable grids early next decade. That's not some fantasy, it's basically largely past tense in a lot of places not plagued by blackouts with any kind of frequency.
The biggest case against nuclear actually isn’t environmental, but economic: they still take a lot of money to build and rebuild after their useful life is over. The reason no one is fighting too hard to keep nuclear around as an option is because it simply isn’t feasible without the government subsidies handed out in the 60s and 70s.
But nuclear with its really cheap fuel and the new ability to store power in batteries when demand is lower might be feasible if the capital and insurance costs can be tamed more.
I still find this argument hard to believe. The physics involved is pretty simple, immerse the rods in water, bring them together, water boils, water turns turbine. It's the polar opposite of fusion.
What makes fission reactors cost money is the Government being involved from the first pen on paper, to the cutting of the ribbon and all the steps in between.
Allowing private companies to design and build them, the Government to regulate, only, should reduce the price dramatically. SMRs are a thing: https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...
IMHO the potential for fusion long term is amazing but unlikely to happen first half of this century. Nuclear options short term makes sense for some niche use cases but it is a hard sell on the grid given prices for wind, solar, and battery continue to trend down from already being vastly cheaper. Anyone looking to sell nuclear probably should be planning for 1-2 order of magnitude in cost reduction just to keep up.
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
I'm really interested in this progress, can you enumerate just a handful of these places.
Countries like Denmark, Sweden the UK, , come to mind as places that are closing in on (or over) 50% at this point and have ambitious targets of getting pretty much to 100% by next decade or so.
In many other markets (e.g. Germany, China, the US) renewables are either or both the fastest growing form of energy or the largest (by kwh) form of energy (typically displacing coal recently or in the near future). These will take longer but are probably going to close in on the 50% mark by the end of the decade nevertheless.
Clean energy absorbed most of the growth and shrinkage of coal & nuclear in the years the transition happened. About 2/3rd of the nuclear capacity disappeared around 2010 and the combined growth of coal, gas, and brown coal is a fraction of that in that period. Rewewable growth around the same time on the other hand took most of that. And it didn't stop growing. At this point that dwarfs nuclear, coal, gas, browncoal combined (<40% together). Of those gas is pretty much the only thing that had some growth (beyond 2010 numbers); from the looks of it partially at the cost of black coal.
Brown coal has been more or less the same in recent history thanks to the CSU (mainly) lobbying hard for keeping that around for a few decades). But they might have to negotiate with the green party soonish and I doubt they'd agree to continue backing that.
If there was a problem it was PG&E, not nuclear energy, which there was never a rational argument against it. Big oil has been playing us like fiddles.
I'm inheriting a broken world. Didn't have to be that way.
There are rational arguments against nuclear when the stewards are incompetent. :) It's high time we get the right engineers and companies in place to make the switch.
That said, I think most of the people who actually do the work (e.g. linemen, reactor operators) are definitely ready to do the work. A lot of my family works for PG&E in various capacities and everyone from the civil engineer to my lineman uncle love their job. What they all complain about is the pressure to run it like the profit-motivated "business" that it is, i.e. screw everyone but the C-suite including the rate payers.
As much as people complain about the overreach of California's politics and how bloated it can be, I'd much rather have someone who is publicly accountable and can be removed by the voters as the head of PG&E. It's high time California eminent domain them to not serve up shoddy service to their constituents.
I just hope more lives aren't lost due to PG&E inaction in the future, only to have them issue some "we're vewy sowy" half-assed apology while barely admitting any wrongdoing (if at all).
The stewards of our current energy sources aren't very responsible, their have been a number of rather catastrophic and avoidable accidents. Seems like a pick your poison kind of situation. I pick nuclear. Radiation is just not that big of a deal
"A reactor trip causes all the control rods to insert into the reactor core, and shut down the plant in a very short time (about three seconds)."
You can also achieve something similar using geothermal energy. Like this geothermal plant in California that generates 700 MW:
Let me know when you figure out how to make the operator pay the insurance, cleanup and decommissioning costs. HN nuclear fanbois keep evading this question.
It will take the entire nation of Japan to clean up Fukushima.
Citation needed. Why don't people understand that the GIEC and UNSCEAR are essentially the same, except that the GIEC have one of their group focused on making politic statements (not the group i like the most, obviously). But if you trust the GIEC documentation and agregation, why not trust UNSCEAR's? I mean, you don't get to cherry pick science. If you're not a climate/radionuclear scientist, you should either distrust both UNSCEAR or GIEC, or trust both.
Not GIEC Group3, they mostly heed scientific advice hopefully, but they are different.