I’d rather see them implement the European supergrid frankly. PV in the Sahara and high voltage lines up to Europe. Think that would be a win for everyone
Assuming no electricity theft, high transmission powerline losses range between 0.5% - 1.1% per 160 km [1], and losses are generally higher on hotter days, leaving us with a probable loss of between 20% - 35%.
I've argued this before, but I would rather avoid unproven storage concepts entirely and fasttrack nuclear reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission?wp...
I have no idea what HVDC underwater cables cost, their maximum voltage, nor their losses, so let’s go with your original figures, and the worst case: 35% losses.
The average of the BNEF 2021, Lazard 2020, and IRENA 2020 studies says that utility scale solar costs $48/MWh while nuclear costs $164/MWh:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
35% loss would make that $73.8/MWh.
At these distances I must assume the grid itself is a non-trivial cost, and estimating that cost certainly deserves a lot more careful thought than I can put into one comment, but that grid would have to cost effectively more than $90/MWh to be worse than nuclear.
Next, nuclear is expensive because the economies of scale are basically zero. Make a nuclear power plant factory and you can get those numbers way down.
Finally, cost probably isn't the right way to look at it. The issue at hand is mostly efficiency, where obviously the nuclear option wins handily.
Except we’ve never done that so we don’t know how big a scale we’d need to get costs down. In the absence of evidence, it’s entirely conceivable there isn’t enough economically recoverable uranium in the world for mass production of reactors to be cost effective.
Therefore the only cost estimate we can rely on is what we have actually managed thus far.
> Finally, cost probably isn't the right way to look at it. The issue at hand is mostly efficiency, where obviously the nuclear option wins handily.
I disagree with both of these claims. For the first: for most of my life, the argument against green power, the reason nothing changed, was always the cost. Make the solution cheap and the problem goes away all by itself.
For the second: so long as it is energy positive (EROI>>1, true for both), and the cost per unit is low (which you’re already dismissing), and you’re not resource constrained (we aren’t), I can’t see what other measure of efficiency matters much. The light-flux to electricity conversion efficiency? No more important than thermodynamic limits in a reactor heat engine. Resistive losses in transmission? I’ve just demonstrated that is irrelevant.
If we also made the energy storage cheap then you would be right. But it's not cheap.
For some models showing these scenarios, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006
It still worked out in favour of PV, even without the suggestion — up in this thread — of connecting to the longer sunlight hours of the Sahara, which reduces need due to each of latitude, covering multiple time zones, and reduced cloud cover.
However, that's not the biggest problem, current world wide lithium battery production is around 300GWh per year. Typical demand in the UK is around 30GW, even your 16 hours is around 1.5x the current battery manufacturing capabilities. You'd be competing against every car, laptop, tablet and phone manufacturer for that capacity.
Also, the cost of grid storage batteries is dominated by the short lifespan rather than by the number of days or hours it can replace supply. If the battery is enough for a week of zero power from all sources in your entire grid, the wear from normal use takes longer to become a significant cost.
Vehicle to grid is interesting but the number of chargers which currently support it very low. It requires a non-trivial amount of infrastructure to invert high voltage DC from the battery back back to a grid synchronous AC signal. In addition to the extra wear on the battery it's had to see how this would be good value while being acceptable to consumers. In some respects recycling of batteries after their service life in a car is a more interesting scenario for grid storage.
Increasing capacity leads to efficiency which leads to the price going doing. Except when the demand is outstripping supply.
Which of us right? I guess we can agree to meet up in 20 years and find out.
That said, grid batteries should ideally be using different chemistry to handle the increased charge/discharge cycling.
I completely agree with this. It would actually be quite unusual if the same solution fit such different problem domains. Energy density by weight is an (almost) non issue in fixed installations, by volume only slightly more important. Lifetime cost and maintenance requirements as by far the largest issue.
At the moment it feels like the stage in the 60s where people thought turbines were interesting so tried to cram them into cars, trucks and trains. Except here we are trying to wire together millions of tiny lithium cells to get enough energy to power a country.
Likewise. It currently seems to me that the same chemistries are being used for both simply because the cost reduction due to mass production for cars has made it the current cheapest option, but I don’t expect that to be true forever.
Solar is stupid cheap, just build more is a perfectly viable option. To put things into perspective the fuel cost alone on gas turbines is twice what solar cost. Which means if 50% of all solar energy generated is absolutely useless, it’s still dramatically cheaper than natural gas, which is it’s self dramatically cheaper than coal, and coal is dramatically cheaper than unsubsidized nuclear.
Model enough hydro, wind, and solar to provide sufficient power 99% of the time and even on days that fail the failure is minimal. Further, batteries don’t like to be deep discharged, so a price optimized 16 hour reserve includes a more expensive reserve which would require a week of 1% days to eat into. Except on that timescale demand is somewhat flexible which solves the problem.
We already have >10GWh of pumped hydro storage (most of which at Dinorwig Power Station) which is required to balance a grid with a mixture of Gas, Nuclear and Wind power.
That said the southern tip of England is noticeably better than London. So, having some minimal local production is viable.
Large scale wind production? Maybe, but it's still less than the nuclear component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
Nuclear power in the United Kingdom provides 20% of the country's domestic production, as of 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...
That said, 5% of it’s power comes from that undersea cable, and France is Heavily nuclear so it arguably swaps back to Nuclear.
Why is it needed?
My first comment in this thread is in the context of putting the PV in the Sahara desert.
Correct. And we've managed to bring the cost of nuclear down to 1-2 billion dollars per GW when building plants at scale [1]. This was done during the late 60s and early 70s when we built lots of nuclear plants at once [2].
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
2. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
Your first link. Second link is invalid for me.
That was actually the official outlook of the US Atomic Energy Commission back in the early 1960: They feared the advent of the nuclear age would see world uranium supplies rapidly exhausted.
This potential outlook is what triggered research into early attempts at thorium fuel cycles [0]
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
Dig down into the numbers and a 50% drop in construction costs wouldn’t make unsubsidized nuclear even close to cost competitive with unsubsidized wind or solar.
You can get actual construction costs for comparison from various sources like Wikipedia. More recent US numbers are inflated due to the age of these reactors, but looking at costs over time shows they where never cheap to operate.
Excluding Watts Bar which is a very odd situation: The plant, construction of which began in 1973, has two Westinghouse pressurized water reactor units: Unit 1, completed in 1996, and Unit 2, completed in 2015. Unit 1 has a winter net dependable generating capacity of 1,167 megawatts. Unit 2 has a capacity of 1,165 megawatts. Both units are the newest operating civilian reactors to come online in the United States, and Unit 2 is the first and only new reactor to enter service in the 21st century in the US as of 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant
Their lifetime capacity factor is also 73.45% which makes generalizing based on them a poor choice.
That's exactly what modern nuclear proposals look like. You make a nuclear power plant factory, mass-produce smallish mostly-sealed reactor units of a few hundred megawatts each, truck a few of the units to a power plant for installation, and truck them back to the factory occasionally for service.
Look at what the DoE has to say about things like "Advanced Small Modular Reactors". Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/floating-nuclear-powe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awiL0BeZ-k
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
There's a big cluster of plants built for 1-2 billion per GW during the late 60s and early 70s. That's nuclear's economy of scale.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
(Naturally this means I think the growth seen since 1992 won’t last until 2030, but the point remains)
Your link appears to show cost going up since ‘65, not down.
Meanwhile the prices people are quoting for solar are with massive economies of scale at this point.
We need economies of scale, and I'm not talking about 1970s scale, I'm talking about scale.
1970s scales work fine. It was built at a cost of 1-2 billion dollars per GW, which is very competitive versus solar and wind + storage.
Maybe you misunderstood and thought I was saying that you can't have economies of scale with nuclear? If so, that is pretty much the opposite of my intended meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
https://asian-power.com/power-utility/news/chinas-thermal-co...
Discussion last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26385374 (455 comments)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
Pretty sure it’s very much a concept only at this stage
Classic deserts aren't the best place for solar. They may be sunny but wind-blown dust covers panels. Sand+wind etches glass. And heat reduces PV efficiency. A better option might actually be the high north. It gets plenty of sun for at least half the year and when it isn't getting sun it is getting wind.
https://thenextweb.com/science/2021/03/02/solar-panels-in-th...
only a fraction (around 15%) of that incoming energy gets converted to electricity
Your point remains however: Desert solar-power is a different beast than normal solar-power. PV won't work well in a desert, you need to change your methodology entirely.
A "Solar tower" consists of a tower (which is just a standard thermal power-plant: usually a steam engine), and a ton of mirrors that heats the tower to 500C. The hotter the environment, the better a solar tower design gets.
In contrast: PVs get worse-and-worse the hotter they get. Hot solar panels mean that the silicon resistance goes up and up.
IIRC, someone (I think IBM) did "solve" some "PVs in the desert" issue by running cold water to cool down the panels so that PV-efficiency can go back up. (Where "solve" was some experimental plant I remember hearing in the news years ago...) That's the kind of thing you need to do to get good energy from PVs in a desert environment.
------------
So for any hot and dry environment, it just sorta pushes the design towards thermal plants, and away from PVs. PVs are really good in temperate conditions however (where natural wind is good enough to cool off the panels). Just different technologies for different ecologies.
Cheaper to throw in a bunch of panels and replace them after they are scratched by the sand, that to build expensive panels.
Automation can be the solution for solar farms in the deserts. Daily automated cleaning, compressed air hosing, etc can be built into the project.
Its cheaper to replace a mirror than to replace a PV panel.
The main benefit to solar-thermal is that they're innately offset from the sun by a few hours. In the morning, it takes a few hours to heat up, and then after the sun sets, it takes a few hours to cool down.
During that offset period, the plant continues to generate power. Generating power at 9pm from thermal-residue (at the cost of losing 9am performance) is an acceptable tradeoff, especially when you consider that thermal plants work as a "team" with normal PV panels.
Normal PV panels cannot give 9pm or 10pm power, not without an expensive battery bank (which suddenly makes thermal solar towers cost effective).
----------
Moving forward: the problem isn't going to be megawatts... its going to be megawatts AT THE APPROPRIATE TIME.
That 7pm to 12pm power is currently served by Natural Gas peaker plants, and will continue to be served by peaker plants for the foreseeable future. After that point, the wind picks up and Wind Energy + Baseload (aka: Nuclear) takes over for the rest of the night.
I know there's a group who believe that solar + batteries can solve the 7pm to 12pm power problem. But I believe that specifically discovering generators for that timeframe (ex: thermal solar towers) would be a superior option compared to giant battery banks.
CMIIW, but aren't "standard thermal power-plants" (especially those involving steam) usually reliant on a steady supply of (cold) water? That would seem like a major dealbreaker in a desert...
Yes: you need to cool the water down to increase the efficiency of a steam engine / traditional thermal power plant. For many plants, this is a supply of fresh water.
No: A desert environment is obviously hostile to fresh water (like a stream). As such, "cooling the water" is solved through other means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
In the case of Ivanpah Solar Power (the first Thermal Solar Plant that popped up in my search), they air-cool the water in a closed system. It won't get as cold as stream-water, but it still gets cold-enough that they can recycle / extract energy out of the steam engine system they use.
As Sahara PV is still on the northern hemisphere this would not solve the problem the study tries to tackle.
Roughly 360 hours of sunshine or a bit more in the summer, 290 hours in winter months [1], so about 80% of max.
If we look at direct normal irradiance instead, a more appropriate metric, it varies between 7.93 kWh/m^2/day in June vs. 5.51 kWh/m^2/day in December [2], so about 70% of max.
Hour-to-hour and day-to-day fluctuations are another thing altogether, and higher demand in winter (e.g. for heating) yet another consideration, but if we're purely interested in some sort of "seasonal correction" I guess you'd want to overbuild by 40% or a bit less if you set the angle of the panels in such a way as to optimize winter production at the expense of summer production, a common strategy.
The closer you get to the equator, the less it matters whether you're in the northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere. Aswan is at 24°N, a latitude at which you can still find a lot of smaller cities, but as you go to the south of that, infrastructure disappears and it might not be economical to build PV or solar thermal installations in the absolute middle of nowhere. Seems to be about the latitude to which DESERTEC proposes to lay HDVC connections.
Not an expert though, just someone who can look up some numbers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-Direct-normal-ir...
Also don't forget: The Sahara is in a worl region where plenty of people don't have an electricity grid yet. So yes, by all means, build solar power there, but a significant share of it needs to be provided to the people living there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrifi...
It’s closer and Spain is part of the EU and politically stable.
Yet more options are the Danish artificial island for distributing wind power and the UK huge offshore wind projects. All these are possible with today's tech and could dramatically reduce the need for batteries while still getting to net zero.
The Sahara idea is a non-starter due to geopolitical risks, no way the EU would agree to having critical infrastructure coming from North Africa.
There was a discussion recently on the EU supergrid[2]. If politicians were serious about solving the climate crisis we'd already be building out all this infrastructure instead of everyone wringing their hands about the cost. And meanwhile the likes of Nordstream2 is powering ahead.
While you cry about environmental impact of burning Russian natural gas (even though Nord Stream 2 physically can not increase its export to the EU by more than 10% and probably will be used to simply re-route existing supplies from middle-man countries like Poland and Ukraine), the likes of Poland generate 70% of their electricity from coal. But, hey, they don't pay to Russia so it's fine!
Until we will have a viable geography-independent solution for grid-level energy storage (which ideally should be able to store several days worth of consumption), massive renewables (aprox. more than 20-30% of a total generation capacity) always will be backed by fossil plants. Well, unless of course you want for blackouts to become a common occurrence. If you indeed care about ecology and climate, then the choice between coal and natural gas should be obvious.
The lengths of bizarre ideas people are coming up with just so they can avoid nuclear power seriously have no end.
Lots of energy in Europe is supplied from countries you may not want to be reliant on (Russian gas for example).
For me people seem to have an either or opinion - we should build renewables or nuclear or whatever (I don’t think this is your stance though).
Reality is that we should be deploying none CO2 producing energy as quickly as possible, and if that means building solar / wind farms then build them, if we can build nuclear then build it.
Hopefully politics will enable future low risk low waste etc nuclear to thrive.
I agree it is up to European countries to do what they want.
The lengths of bizzare ideas people go through to not help their close neighbours, so that they can avoid facing the injustices of the past have no end.
Maybe not a great idea to setup infrastructure that is core to your country.
Just look at Russia and German gas imports to see how this plays out.
The US is the worlds Hard SuperPower, europe is the worlds Soft SuperPower.
You'd pre pretty resentfull too btw, if your continent had been carved up by a foreign power with complete disregard for your cultural borders, extracted your resources and the discarded you in a state of chaos.
The african people can't be that hatefull if they try to escape their impoverished conditions by seeking an education and better life in europe.
The european people have a historical responsibility to right the wrongs their ancestors did to the ancestors of the people of africa.
A inter-continental power grid and energy collaboration is a win win for everybody.
That's not how this worked out in the last 20 years of negotiations;
> You'd pre pretty resentfull too btw, if your continent had been carved up by a foreign power with complete disregard for your cultural borders, extracted your resources and the discarded you in a state of chaos.
Agreed, but that just validates the fact that it wouldn't be a good idea to put critical infrastructure in a country that resents you.
> The african people can't be that hatefull if they try to escape their impoverished conditions by seeking an education and better life in europe.
Right, because they individually gain something out of it.
> The european people have a historical responsibility to right the wrongs their ancestors did to the ancestors of the people of africa.
Do African people have a historical responsibility for the wrongs done by Algerian piracy or for destroying each other's empires?
> A inter-continental power grid and energy collaboration is a win win for everybody.
It's really not when the most basic things already don't work in said countries. You can see the European CoVid-19 help to Tanzania for a little sneak preview.
Is that true? It's not hard to think of energy poor countries that are poor or energy rich ones that are poor. Stability is an ambiguous thing but it seems like it's easier to make the the argument that stability causes wealth or instability causes poverty then the opposite.
That fact alone that nuclear power is so much more expensive compared especially to renewables is it's last nail in the coffin.
Edit: fixed idiom, thanks raverbashing
Europe and the N.America are 34% of the entire electricity consumption. Even If they miraculously reduced their carbon pollution to zero not only would 2/3 of the problem remain, but - and here is the kicker - the growth in consumption is coming from the poor and poorest countries with enormous populations.
They are going to use the cheapest energy available: brown coal.
Its not a simple simple cost argument: we have to find a scalable, safe, clean, base-load source of energy that is cheaper than coal.
And then give it away.
The only possibility is nuclear fission - preferably not one that boils water in a pressure cooker.
The same is true for your scenario, though: Why should the rich countries export one of the most expensive energy sources to the poor countries, when e.g. onshore wind is right now already on par with brown coal?[0]
[0] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... page 2
LCOE isn't a very thorough standard which you quickly realize once you dig into it.
Furthermore renewables are unreliable and thus require backup energy from reliable sources such as coal, oil, gas or nuclear. Because renewables are forced into use when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, they basically make the reliable sources more expensive.
I could go on with all sorts of ways this provides a completely skewed comparison structure.
Comparing the cost of nuclear vs. and wind and solar is like comparing the cost of construction and upkeep of a Boing 747 and a Cessna based on their ability to fly.
All of these, including decomission, are part of the LCOE formula, just as they are for renewables or coal or gas: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/e049...
That problem with renewables can easily be fixed with storage, which can be batteries, generating green hydrogen trough electrolysis or a number of many other ways.
While on summer days where a lot of sun shines nuclear reactors have their very own problem: They produce too much heat and need to be throttled/shut down [0] [1] or else they would start heating up their cooling medium too much, which are usually nearby waterbodies/river systems.
With global warming being a thing, we can expect this problem to occur much more frequently, and even more so if we decided to build even more reactors.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nucle...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Coal $112/MWh vs. utility solar $48/MWh.
I wouldn't underestimate the appeal renewables have in terms of "we get free energy as long as we can keep the facility running" if you don't have much money. It's a rather "obvious" investment.
Here are some of the very valid questions a poor country would have to ask.
“Do we really want America’s unreliable foreign policy to effectively control our ability to generate electricity? What if we piss off the wrong diplomat, hire the wrong leader, or if our people believe in the wrong god? What if they decide to destroy our economy via embargoes? Where will we get our fissionable materials? Will they pull a stuxnet on us ? Will they assassinate our top nuclear engineers?”
Unless of course a military coup happens and contracts are nullified, or riots, or conflict or etc..
And even worse, how can you ensure someone will be around willing to put in the effort to safely decommission something that has no more value? Even in the most developed and stable nations this is and will be a challenge. Who wants to put in the effort to clean up the previous generations mess.
The economics of electricity generation have been transformed in the last couple of years - for example, the LCOE from on-shore wind and solar has dropped 80-90% in less than 10 years. Prices for renewables and even grid-scale batteries are falling so fast that you cannot even trust financial analysis of electricity generation from a year ago.
Burning coal is now 2 to 3 times as expensive as on-shore wind, for example. Nuclear is over times as expensive. Where governments aren't forcing the market to use coal, nobody is building new coal generators.
This price shift has had a very visible effect on coal generation for example - you can see it in graphs of global electricity sources - after a long period of growth, coal generation (as a share of the total) has been dropping since 2013.
The fact that wind and solar are not dispatchable unlike coal and nuclear turns out to not actually be a deal-breaking problem for expanding renewable generation considerably.
Quite a few European countries which now generate nearly 50% of their electricity through renewables. None have grid-scale batteries and many don't have nuclear. As a whole Europe gets about a third of their electricity from renewables. And even the US is at about 20-25%?
You can achieve these sort of percentages with a low-tech approach. You over-provision wind/solar generation and use derating in the case of wind to cut generation if demand is very low. This is feasible because of the cheapness of these power sources.
In tandem with NG peaker plants and a small amount of storage (hydro and some batteries for stabilization) and/or interconnectors, we have seen countries achieved 40%+ renewable electricity without any effect on the reliability of domestic supply. This share is still rising, so the limits of this approach are not yet apparent.
There are projects of cheaper nuclear power plants, which I agree is the main issue. You have to put 10, 15 years into building this massive thing instead of doing modular, smaller projects.
Obviously costs come down when you start mass producing things, which we've done with solar but have not even really tried to do with nuclear.
It doesn't matter anyway: Only what is, not what could have been will have an impact on the decision makers.
For costs to go down on nuclear, you need to stop building giant one-off projects which are bespoke down to the rivets. It's like expecting a hand-made suit to ever be price-competitive with something you buy off the rack at Brooks Brothers.
> It doesn't matter anyway
Luckily, it's not what could have been because unlike the cynics on HN, some[1] people[2] are actually having a go at solving this problem.
Maybe small modular reactors will do better. That would be great! But at this point I'll believe cost/schedule numbers only after a new reactor enters commercial operation. The numerous reactors that exist only in PowerPoint form belong in the same bin as the Battery Breakthrough of the Week.
Did you want to wait for Solar to be price-competitive with gas before we started using it? That doesn't make any sense. The reason solar is so competitive these days is because we invested massively while it was still expensive. This has not happened with nuclear in its entire history, because we lack the political will (mostly thanks to anti-nuclear FUDders) to do so.
The AP1000 units under construction at Vogtle started construction in 2013. That was 56 years after Shippingport Atomic Power Station and Vallecitos Nuclear Center started operation in Pennsylvania and California.
As of February 2013, the 2 AP1000 units at Vogtle were supposed to cost $15.3 billion. As of December 2017 the estimate had increased to $23 billion. The big mystery is why the costs were so badly under-estimated only 4 years earlier. Construction started after Three Mile Island, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, after 50+ years of commercial power reactors in the US, and after regulatory requirements had changed to address prior nuclear incidents. The initial cost estimate should have accounted for all those factors. Will the next nuclear project account for them better?
"How the Vogtle Nuclear Expansion’s Costs Escalated"
https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...
[1] Summing column "Reference unit power" from IAEA Power Reactor Information System https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...
Iterate on nuclear like we have with basically everything else and I guarantee the prices come down significantly. Why do I know this? Because this is what has happened every time we have iterated on anything in human history. Nuclear is not the magical exception to this rule, it's just harder to iterate on because the initial investment is so high.
https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us
A big wind turbine generates up to 6 megawatts [1]. A big solar panel generates up to 0.00067 megawatts [2]. If nuclear reactors can't progress much faster per iteration, that's another way to say that they won't catch up at all.
[1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/...
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/11/trina-launches-670-w-...
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
> c) the Swiss population voted against new nuclear plants in 2017, so this topic is moot anyway.
This topic is not moot. This is the only realistic way to save humanity from the climate catastrophe, even if there are many fear mongers.
that can change if big governments focus on that
> potentially dangerous
the safest energy production per kWh hands down
> radioactive waste we have no way of dealing with
not true, we deal with it since 40's and we are doing fine.
In that context, nuclear has very much seen way more focus and support than probably any other modern form of energy generation.
So, why didn't that pan out and we apparently need another round of "big government focus"?
The focus is needed to double down to get rid of all coal/gas plants.
Musk claimed the entire US could be run on solar power with a 100 square mile (258 km2) patch of land - that's smaller than Malta. Batteries to ensure a continuous supply would need 1 square mile.
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/gas-grid-operat...
It’s going to be a lie mix of many of these promising ideas, blended in such a way that is, hopefully, not too expensive, not too insecure, not dirty in a new way, and not not at least a little bit fun.
Build them all in a large strip, side by side. Attach a blower on rails at the top. Done.
C'mon this isn't rocket science.
How is this an improvement again?
https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boo...