Nuclear could have already replaced coal by now. Renewables need a lot of battery storage and transmission to scale up to not relying on coal any longer, since a majority of it is relying on the sun and wind.
So we decided a significantly warmer climate was better than dealing with radioactive waste. Now it looks like we made the wrong risk assessment.
It would mean different jobs, and it means valuing work differently right along with things.
Could happen via government action, literally start paying for work and pay at a rate that seeds a market.
Could happen with individuals too. Think gig work without a company making billions at the top. While that is super attractive for some, it is entirely unnecessary, and in my view, a leaner overall model paying more to labor will prove a worthy device to move these sorts of ideas along. A variation on all this could be collectives. Companies owned by everyone in them, lean at the top, robust otherwise.
As for things, maybe we see a return to longevity in service life being more highly valued. I harbor this value now. Absolutely hate things that I know I cannot use for a decade or more. We can do so much better than the current churn of devices and software. A bit different priority and we could see more things as robust as say, Google maps still able to operate with devices made a long time ago.
It has a long half life, but a deep shaft filled with cement in a remote area does the trick.
There’s no kicking the can down the road.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-radioactive-problem-...
The practical difficulty with using renewables effectively is that you need to be able to either store large amounts of energy for later use, or trade power across long distances. We (by which I mean "in the U.S." but for other developed countries it's pretty much the same) could buy solar power from Kenya, Australia, Algeria, or similar places to get us through the night if we had high-capacity transcontinental HVDC lines running to those places. That's a major infrastructure project that would cost a lot of money, but I expect it's probably worth it.
(We can even mitigate the risk of the power lines being temporarily disabled by keeping the fossil fuel plants on standby and just not using them except as an emergency backup.)
Another option is to just build batteries on an unheard-of scale. Lithium iron phosphate cells might do the job -- being free of cobalt an nickel, the only other major bottleneck resource would be lithium. I'm not sure how practical it is to build the kinds of gigantic battery packs that would be needed to provide, say, an 18-hour backup power supply for the entire U.S., but it's probably less cells in total than we'd need to electrify our current fleet of gas-powered cars.
edit: to clarify, I'm not particularly opposed to nuclear. I just don't think it's the only option at this point.
So, we'll just keep burning coal.
> I just don't think it's the only option at this point.
It needs to be viable economically and politically, which could be years from now.