Why is it every post about solar or wind have to end up with comments about how great nuclear is? It is like a religion they simply must preach.
In the modern day, fossil fuel companies stir up pro-nuclear propaganda in order to deter renewables, which they perceive as the biggest threat to their business, because it's long since become clear that nuclear power is not economically viable as a replacement for fossil fuels even without the effect of their original propaganda (and the fact that they propagandized against nuclear in the 70s has yielded fertile harvests of people who are still salty about that, inspiring them to take up the pro-nuclear torch with little provocation).
Source?
Nuclear power plants replace coal plants. Renewables on the other hand can coexist nicely with fossil fuels as backup power for days without wind / sun.
Let's be realistic about the devastatingly massive amounts of environmental damage wind/solar are doing by requiring unimaginably large amounts of minerals to be mined for both solar/wind AND the required batteries.
Right now, it's an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of a problem because the mining happens in poor countries. How many cobalt and lithium mines have been approved in the U.S? I can think of only a couple in the past couple of decades. Why? Because they're terrible for the environment.. so we outsource the environmental damage to poor countries.
Nuclear is expensive, but if we build a new plant every 40 years... what do we expect? Each plant is a one-off bespoke creation. The same economies of scale that have made solar+wind so cheap also apply to nuclear tech.
We have the technology to solve the climate emergency. Nuclear lets us do it. Everything else is wishful thinking.
p.s wind and solar have a part to play - specially in unstable and failed states where the existence of fissile material could be very dangerous.
This last point is important because nuclear plants generate a lot of power, so you cant easily build a plant “just” for 500 people in the same way you can for other energy sources.
I am fine with nuclear in principle. There are real reasons nukes are expensive and not the ideal option in many situations. We have to be clear eyed about this.
I guess it makes sense to me that the conditions that spike electric demand also stress generation and transmission, but I do find it astonishing how universal it is, solar/wind/hydro/nuclear included.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
Also you can reduce the heating requirements to use some of the waste heat for district heating. Modern heating pipelines have negligible losses even over dozens of kilometers, you you can heat even quite distant cities. Such a project is now in the works here in Brno:
https://energycentral.com/news/czech-nuclear-plant-dukovany-...
Though its just an older project that has finally been restarted:
They really don’t. Nukes are fundamentally extremely complex pieces of technology, that also happen to benefit from being physically large. They will never be simple. Solar is brain dead simple in comparison, which is why it’s so amenable to manufacturing efficiencies
Mainland USofA is relatively mineral poor wrt economic feasibilty.
There's a reason the bulk of US Cold War yellow cake came from Africa, Canada, etc and very little from the "weak tea" leach mines in the contiguous US.
( 'Relative' meaining exactly that, the US does of course have a 64 year prospect for copper (and other resources), it's just that other parts of the world have higher grades of most things that are cheaper to extract. )
Lithium you'll find is mostly mined in Australia - mining isn't the dirty part, it's the post processing of the spodumene concentrates - this currently takes place in China, Malaysia, and elsewhere.
The US is currently building at least three spodumene concentrates facilities - one in Texas for use by Tesla.
According to wikipedia, we already have enough fuel to produce enough energy for the entire planet for 5 billion years (assuming 1983 global energy demand):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
The main issue is that they produce and then consume weapons grade material as part of the reaction, and you have to periodically re-refine the reactor's contents. That makes it hard to prevent people from stealing the weapons grade material.
I've long thought that we should build robots to maintain the facilities, and a second fleet of robots that stay near the plant and shoot anyone they see on sight.
That reduces the security problem to programming the fuel-handling robots.
All in development AP1000 projects were cancelled after this debacle. But this shouldn't be daunting to true believers. The most advanced cancelled project was Turkey Point in FL. It had received all approvals so a developer can start tomorrow if they want.
If we made everyone who said "what about nuclear" buy a $100 share that sucker would be funded in no time.
Loud PR campaigns dont work on everybody but can reliably convince a large % of people to believe most things.
At this point, it isn't even a culture war, it's a college football fans' rivalry.