India's third home-built 700 MWe nuclear reactor achieves criticality
economictimes.indiatimes.com
economictimes.indiatimes.com
Article says 16 though so there’s probably more coming.
"Nuclear is not considered to be a renewable energy source."
The "renewables" aren't actually. They rely on a sun that has a bit over 4 billion years left, and they put a hard cap on our planetary energy consumption possible without negatively impacting the environment (image a planet covered in solar panels for an extreme).
Nuclear energy is in a different tech tier not far off from the sun itself. The order of magnitude of unleashing energy directly from atoms is the end game of energy production for humans. It allows for space travel to every planet in this solar system and beyond. It allows for thriving colonies on other planets and trade between them. It will allow for an explosive growth in innovation, trade, and economic activity. And, it will open up access to resources orders of magnitude larger than what is possible on Earth, with the asteroid belt alone -- all without harming the Earth's precious ecosystems.
Most importantly, it gives the next generations hope. Hope of a better future, of extreme progress, of something to feel pride in our species for. This is what creates life in human civilization.
We, as a species, can eventually offload ALL manufacturing from Earth to other, ecologically dead planets. Mars is a great candidate for this. And at 1/3 the gravity, activities like drilling into the ground and building large, shielded warehouses will take significantly less energy than Earth.
Energy should be the foundation of currency, not whatever our current currencies foundation is. Energy capacity and usage is the truer measure of a civilization's productivity. The sooner we all realize this, the smoother our planetary transition to the next phase will be.
If curious, there are more "foundational measures" -- computational capacity (cumulative of neurons and artificial compute), and attention (what the compute is targeting), but that's another thought.
It makes no sense to worry about how "renewable" or "sustainable" some technology is if the time when it would start to matter is long after the technology has likely been replaced by something else anyway. That is, it makes no sense unless you're trying to score some political point...
"The International Energy Agency defines it as "energy derived from natural processes that are replenished at a faster rate than they are consumed"
You want to use another definition, that's fine by me. I'll stick to the generally accepted ones.
The OP didn't know the difference, now he does. I think that's a good thing, no? If I used incorrect terminology to describe something, I would prefer it if this was pointed out to me. It makes it easier to communicate.
By the provided definition, solar and wind are non-renewable. They are just sun/fusion energy collectors, and the sun is not regenerating its fuel...
...it just has A LOT of it. Sort of like another fuel available to use, called Uranium and Thorium, and every other fissionable radioactive element in the entire universe.
By the time we run out of nuclear fuel, we will be making gravity-confined fusion reactors with shells made of solar panels, aka artificial suns for energy.
Most nuclear reactors are not considered "renewable", but breeders are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_rene...