These public freak outs is also why we don't have abundant nuclear energy.
The climate activists of the 60s-90s stopped us from building more reactors, one of the cleanest sources of energy ever known.
The climate activists of the 60s-90s stopped us from building more reactors, one of the cleanest sources of energy ever known.
And now that there are a number of barriers to creating new nuclear, the propaganda has flipped with fossil fuel companies supporting nuclear because they know it'll be decades before anything real can happen.
I have nothing against nuclear and if it can be built I'm for it. But at the moment, solar + battery is quick to deploy and about as cheap as you can get.
The actual equation is solar + battery + gas fired power plant.
That’s the dirty secret behind intermittent power sources and why fossil fuel companies are all investing in solar and wind. Batteries are simply not enough to face the long term intermittence. It’s purely an intra-day solution at the moment and nobody knows how to actually run a large grid on purely intermittent sources.
Even China is actually aggressively pursuing nuclear at the same time it builds an insane amount of solar and gas fired power plants.
Solar is king in places like west Texas and Nevada. Massive sunny flat sprawling landscapes where the land is practically free.
It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny.
Gas becomes much more competitive because you only need 5 acres instead of 500, and the energy is 24/7.
When you compare the rates at which people recognize the need to decarbonize, to the rates at which people are willing to pay 20-50% more for green energy, an obvious and expected trend arises.... people overwhelming don't want to put their money where there mouth is. Or they want someone elses money to go where there mouth is.
It needs to be understood that almost all those "green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels" studies use the best case scenario to calculate those values.
To put that another way, gas meets it's ideal pretty much everywhere, whereas green energy meets it's ideal in small, often far from society, spots. Transmission can bridge the gap to a degree, but it's then a cost multiplier.
A carbon tax is a good way to balance this, but man, people vote hard to not have to spend more of their own money. (I don't want to pay for it/I only want it if billionaires pay for it)
Even in those places, the cost of land is a small fraction of the cost of a PV installation.
Who are the current generation of climate activists backed and propagandized by?
Neither their policies nor their electorate support the idea that people like Jill Stein are in any way looked at as authorities in any "green" subject.
I don't think that someone that had national relevance for roughly half an election cycle, and who got less than half of one percent of the vote (at the peak of her popularity) has had any influence shaping nuclear opinions.
She's not even on record stating her position, that's how utterly unimportant this issue to Putin / Russia.
I'm not even sure how you think Russia would benefit from less nuclear power plants an entire continent away
It's not about any one person. You still see this now, where people suggest regulatory reform for the process of building new nuclear plants in the US to lower construction costs, people appear to tell you that nuclear costs too much and should be abandoned, i.e. they use circular logic to present the existence of the problem you're trying to solve as a reason not to try to address it.
The current line of reasoning is something like "solar plus storage is cheaper than nuclear so nuclear must never be attempted", which ignores both any possibility of improving the cost efficiency of nuclear and that the cost comparison they're using is for intra-day storage whereas nuclear also reduces the need for multi-day storage which is significantly more expensive.
> I'm not even sure how you think Russia would benefit from less nuclear power plants an entire continent away
Russia is a petroleum exporting country and petroleum is a global commodity. If the US (or anyone else) uses nuclear instead of fossil fuels then global demand for fossil fuels declines, US natural gas or coal producers instead sell to foreign customers who might have bought gas from Russia, etc.
Notice that the US oil industry has the same incentive. Exxon is very much aligned with Putin on this one and they have lobbyists too.
Here's one example in Florida, but it is happening around the US https://www.eenews.net/articles/fla-solar-plans-stoke-fight-...
The net effect is a win for the fossil fuel industry and a weakened environmental movement.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-mount-vernon-frasier...
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...
None of this detracts from the quality of the engineering, but it’s important to keep the motivation in view (whether to filter out the propaganda or to try and reproduce something like this at home).
Solar production is seasonal, batteries to carry over seasons are beyond expensive.
Otherwise 10x your dinner solar to get winter solar and now it's not cheap.
And the plummeting price of solar modules makes it more cost effective to over provision for the case of clouds, and/or to mount solar panels to optimize for morning and evening production as well.
Generation costs are a small part of most consumers' bills, but particularly in CA.
If you look at the location marginal pricing map from CA ISO: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices
You'll see that right now (before solar has really kicked in), The price for the next megawatt hour of generation is $49 -- i.e., under 5c per kWh. That's comparable to the average price in PJM (east coast) at the same time:
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices
The big problem for California is that cheap generation via solar doesn't move the needle as much on consumer bills because of the transmission and distribution costs. In San Francisco, for example the distribution fee is over $0.20/kWh. That's twice what mine is in Pittsburgh. In contrast, the generation pricing is only about $0.04/kWh more than mine:
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
though this pricing does favor behind the meter generation such as residential solar.
People are always pointing out the marginal volumetric costs of electricity, which is indeed very high. But that is just reflection of the fact that we use so little energy because of our history of efficiency laws and the mild climate, so the fixed charges and taxes that combine into the volumetric price are much higher than in other states. And our extremely large fleet of behind the meter solar panels also contributes to the higher volumetric price of grid electricity. All together, this doesn't tell us much about whether renewables are a good policy or not.
(When you factor in behind the meter, solar is, in fact, probably reducing the average cost to consumers.)
Many of those other states avoid high electricity costs because they are cold states that don't use electricity for heat.
California's energy problems aren't due to the source of their energy.
Yes, I am over-simplifying the very complex problem of grid management, but so are you.
Advancements in solar also are improving with clouds.
Also, you know, batteries. When someone makes it cost effective to install a device to sell your car battery power on the grid we'll also have a better time managing the grid during spikes... Would be nice if that also did home battery backup in blackouts... 70 kWh would get me through most of the ones I've experienced.
If the sun is shining vs not (and if further withdrawal will freeze the salt) absolutely controls power output.
Not creating nuclear power plants because you're afraid of some bombs is good reasoning?
What about the millions of deaths to fossil fuels every year? Are they better than the nuclear accidents we had?
I don't think good reasoning is why they felt that nuclear power was bad.
If the public doesn't understand complex new thing X, and advocates for X have obviously told them all sorts of lies - yeah. Don't be surprised if the public becomes extremely skeptical about X.
Name them
2. Operation is low-CO₂, but not low-risk Severe accidents are rare, but the consequences are catastrophic when they do occur. Chernobyl and Fukushima are obvious examples. The U.S. history is full of near misses, leaks, hardware failures, and human-factor problems. Calling such a technology “safe” glosses over systemic vulnerability.
3. Waste cannot be neutralised High-level waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. No human institution has ever maintained stable responsibility for anything even close to that timeframe. Most countries still rely on interim storage because final repositories are politically and technically unresolved.
4. Long-term burdens are externalised The benefits (electricity, profits, political narratives) are short-term and local. The harms (contamination, risk, millennia of monitoring) are long-term and imposed on future generations who cannot consent.
5. “Clean” becomes a marketing word In lifecycle terms—mining, fuel fabrication, plant construction, decommissioning, and waste storage—nuclear energy cannot be “clean” in any holistic sense. It is at best low-carbon but high-burden.
This doesn’t mean nobody can argue for nuclear energy, but it does mean that calling it clean is a simplification that hides very real costs and risks