No more beating around the bush. We need publicly funded nuclear power. (because the private sector won’t do it themselves)
*slight edit for clarity
No, it wouldn't. Renewables are nice, but they are not enough by themselves to build the kind of global wealth we need to adapt to change. We need nuclear as an energy source for that.
"US spends $81 billion a year to protect global oil supplies, report estimates"
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/21/us-spends-81-billion-a-year-...
[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-S...
[2] https://www.salon.com/2021/11/07/one-in-four-us-senators-sti...
> Today, the President is announcing that the Department of Energy will make available releases of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices for Americans and address the mismatch between demand exiting the pandemic and supply.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Do you feel like this is something we have the power to stop? I feel it is a runaway train, that will just run out of steam in a few hundred/thousand years.
I mean I don’t like to be wasteful, and we shouldn’t pollute the earth for the hell of it, but I’m just like what are we gonna do?
What if all those politicians selling the story of renewables, had lots of investments in those companies? Would you still trust that story, that this will somehow stop climate change, and not just pad their bank accounts?
Maybe I’m just cynical in this area, and it is easy to just look around and say I’m not as bad as most people, but I just can’t think politicians forcing renewables is a good thing.
"System costs for nuclear power (as well as coal and gas-fired generation) are very much lower than for intermittent renewables."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
I think the really cool thing that they allow is, imagine solar panels becoming so cheap but still efficient, and huge batteries like Tesla’s power wall, becoming better, you can have like whole small towns pretty easily behave as their own entire power grid pumping energy where it is needed.
It makes the idea of lots of small rural villages seem possible which I think is pretty cool.
We could probably see the world population double and yet keep similar urban densities.
The better way to characterise the problem is that renewables are intermittent - a problem for which we do not currently have a large-scale solution. One solution is to use a non-polluting technology that currently works - nuclear power - while we buy ourselves time to build out and develop renewable capacity.
Still, it's a good distinction to make for people who aren't familiar with the topic, so ty for that.
I wish all the money that went towards renewables research instead went towards nuclear...
And plenty of those alternatives are doing great in terms of funding, growth, and cost. Hundreds of GW of wind and solar came online during the last two years or so. Most of the projections for this market from only a few years ago were completely wrong and this growth has caught more than a few governments by surprise and prompted quite a few of them to move forward earlier announced dates to clean up the grids in their country. E.g. the UK is now talking about 2030 for this. There might be one new nuclear plant coming online in that time frame and possibly a few more might get built. But it's peanuts compared to renewables. At this point it seems more like an expensive vanity project for politicians than a practical solution to supplying energy.
Most of the challenges are actually not adding capacity but balancing the grid and moving energy around. Energy storage and cables basically. Grid infrastructure is where public spending needs to happen. There are a lot of countries that are actually slowing down renewable energy deployments because their grids just can't keep up. Most of the time when you see a wind mill not spinning it's not because it's broken but because it's been turned off because the grid can't handle the over supply. Kind of embarrassing for the companies involved. All that expensive kit and they can't handle the output.
Expensive nuclear plants that you can't turn off and on on demand are part of the problem here; not the solution. Mostly the hard choice grid providers have to make is turning wind turbines off or shutting down e.g. a gas plant. They both cost money whether they produce or not. Some grid providers even have occasional negative rates because of this: they literally pay consumers to consume more electricity. It's preferable to temporarily reducing capacity at great cost. That's why grid batteries are so hot right now.
IMHO current generations of nuclear technology are a bit of a dead end in terms of cost. But maybe somebody figures out a 10x improvement. Worth some public spending. Fusion is actually getting some traction lately and it seems that is starting to attract some serious money and there have been some breakthroughs reported recently.
But if nuclear was getting even a fraction of the money that fossil fuels receives, we would be carbon neutral right now.
You harp on costs, but energy is _always_ expensive, and there is nothing, not even renewables, that will provide the amount of energy that we will need in the coming years anywhere near quickly or efficiently enough.
Nuclear will get cheaper like every other industry does once we create the actual market for it. Right now, we just have decades old reactors on shoestring budgets and scientific studies because _we didn't properly fund it_.
Electric cars alone are predicted to nearly double our energy grid requirements in the next few decades[1]. We're not moving anywhere nearly fast enough with renewables to account for the growth from those vehicles alone.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-grids-autos-i...
We can’t even agree to enforce the rule of law.
Still, I remain hopeful as to be otherwise would leave me in despair.
A government building a nuclear power station is orders of magnitude more likely than an entire population complying with a mask mandate.
It is unfortunate that too many democratic governments are consumed by political bribery and pressure groups rather than doing what is in everyone's interest.
The strange minority is those who desire this awful hell we’ve enacted with our covid response.
Have you considered that rather than people wanting this "awful hell", that they believe mask mandates are our way out of this hell?
I don't know anyone who wants mandates, kids in and out of school, masks, etc. But I know plenty of people who are willing to inconvenience themselves temporarily for what they believe to be the greater good for all.
I’d argue a majority of people just don’t care. They don’t care they have to wear one, will stop wearing one as soon as they don’t have to.
I'm not here to argue the medical science, as I am not a doctor and if you are, you have not disclosed it.
My point was you assume people are being sadistic and want all of this shit. No one wants everything going on, they just believe it is for the best. Or they don't care, as you pointed out. Neither of these is what you said at first; that people desire this "awful hell".
I have to disagree. Rich people have money, working class people have productivity. Money doesn't create things, it just moves them around. Everything done by the government necessarily displaces productive resources from workers. If we take x% of the workforce and have them building reactors instead of Y, there will be less of Y to go around, and the rich will employ money to make sure their portion of Y is unaffected.