Not true, it's too late for nuclear power.
Additionally it is quite expensive compared to renewables and makes the burden on future generations even bigger.
Anyway, don't shut down any working plant early... We need everything we have atm
Anyway, don't shut down any working plant early... We need everything we have atm
In reality, the fossil fuel disaster is much more severe with far bigger environmental impact.
The cost is also HIGHLY dependent on time to complete. And a big part of that time, besides contractor inexperience because we don’t build them much any more, is the constant battles with activists and environmental groups and NIMBYs
Counter-argument: Wind and sun are unreliable
Counter-counter-argument: Why not build 10x the amount of wind and solar if it's so cheap, and automatically break the circuit when not needed?
Nobody builds ONLY solar or ONLY wind or ONLY hydro. Why should you?
Please stop repeating this...it's ridiculous.
My personal plan is 30KW (over the next few years) so I can get through like 4 days. And heck, a stormy day will still generate enough electricity.
In terms of "hard to believe", ask yourself why countries have not managed to roll out storage capacity to match the solar capacity? It's because solar is relying on fossil fuels or nuclear or hydro to be there when it's dark.
The sheer amount of electricity produced by intermittent renewables (solar & wind) while nobody wants it grows. Many markets have more and more negative prices timeframes, where the producer is ready to pay in order to get rid of it (gridpower network stability implies "production == consumption", any over/under-load is dangerous for it). However electricity prices are way, way up during under-production periods. This creates an already huge and growing incentive for storage.
Also add electric vehicles batteries (and, maybe one day, home batteries) which will more and more be usable to store overproduction thanks to smartgrid and various tricks ( such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid).
The landscape is quickly (relatively to its huge inertia) changing.
And yet the storage is not being built in any meaningful sense. At best we have "ideas" but these have not been actually deployed at scale. People keep throwing out ideas, but when there is a crunch they fly in diesel generators or add gas peaker plants.
That alone should tell you how expensive the storage problem is to address. It's a very hard problem.
The reason grid storage hasn't been built is because batteries were too expensive, but more importantly, grid storage was never needed. It takes 5-10 years for new tech to see widespread deployments, and it's only been a few years that grid storage had been getting this investment.
you: This just isn't correct. There are dozens of pilot projects for novel grid storage
Really not sure what else needs to be said, so this is where I need to disengage.
We should be using the best energy for the job, which in many cases/places is nuclear.
Nuclear is a clean and reliable source of energy that doesn't need grid-level energy storage in order to be a comprehensive solution. Solar and wind need storage. Not everywhere is windy and not everywhere is sunny.
If you look at the total cost including storage and decomissioning, solar and wind are not nearly as cheap as you think they are.
Title should read "Was" not "Is".
We're out of time. We should have been building out nuclear for decades.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
One suggests a lie, the other is just SOP in any plant with moving parts. Are you sure you're an engineer?
Many people focus on carbon or some other element that in vast amounts is damaging to our climate, but forget the fact that animals,birds,and life in general can sustain and even undo the effects of pollution in some cases. A 0-carbon atmosphere is rendered useless if there are no birds, plants(which by the way USE it) or life (besides humans, presumably). People should look at the individuals/entities that push for climate _alarmist_ (not awareness, a distinction to be understood) messages and think beyond the political and economic gain that those entities benefit if such messages are to be followed.
As for animals etc undoing the effects of pollution "in some cases" - some practical examples would be helpful, because I suspect most people have never heard of any examples that aren't trivial or anecdotal.
The whole point of zero carbon is literally to keep the planet as hospitable to life as possible. Your vague argument about... something is the exact opposite of the point here.
That is why China has announced they're building 150 new nuclear reactors in the next 15 years. The US will _inevitably_ have to follow suit to remain competitive.
* 50GW nuclear already in place, producing 5% of the gridpower. Previsions: up to 200GW in 2030.
* 790GW renewables already in place, producing 26% of the gridpower. Previsions: 1200GW in 2030.
In 2020 alone China added 71.6GW of windpower.
The problem here is that China's share of total energy from renewables has decreased from about 33% in 1990 to 13% in 2018[1].
Solar and Wind are not particularly useful given they are unreliable. Hydro is useful as it is reliable, but after the three gorges dam project, there isn't a lot left on the table in terms of hydro for China.
Note that this is not because China is reducing renewables but rather it's energy needs are increasing so rapidly.
And 58% of China's energy usage - 74 Terrawatt hours - is from coal, and that number is increasing -- 220 million more tons of coal being added just this year[2]
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/asia/china/energy-consumption.php
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-coal/chinas-coal-consu...
This is key (also: in the graph hydro isn't accounted for), and the reason why the current observed trend (huge push to renewables, increasing their share despite the rapid energy needs increase) is another key.
> Solar and Wind are not particularly useful given they are unreliable
Their variability can be reduced, maybe even totally compensated, by various methods: continental-scale deployment of wind turbines, using a mix of sources (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... shows that is is true in Europe (quote: ""we demonstrate that the European energy system would strongly profit from exploiting the implications of these regimes for continent-scale wind generation patterns."), and maybe also for China (quote: "Liu et al. investigated wind energy complementarity across China, demonstrating that whereas a combination of wind and solar resources over a given area reduces the occurrence of zero-power hours, wind resources alone are sufficient to provide baseline power production, if a large enough area is considered.")
If you ignore the colourful but factually incorrect rhetoric and look at the reality, nuclear power is expensive compared to renewables, and renewables will only get cheaper over time.
But more importantly, when you consider a complete lifecycle analysis instead of cherry picking operational emissions and ignoring the rest, nukes are not a genuine low carbon energy source.
https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-...