The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.
I’m aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it’s the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.
Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.
Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what’s the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades. Probably 30+ years at the minimum.
We’re talking 11 years for 7 “small” reactors. The first decade just to establish a business, but no real difference in the overall picture. How many years, decades after that to make a noticeable difference?
Meanwhile we’re building out more power generation in renewables every year. Renewables are already well developed, can be deployed quickly, and are already scaling up, renewables make a difference NOW.
Renewables cannot provide a reliable base load. Not unless you can have your solar panels in space where the sun always shines, we figure out tidal power, or you’re lucky in terms of geography and either hydroelectric or geothermal work for you.
Solar power doesn’t produce energy at night, wind doesn’t always blow. You know the drill.
You completely sidestepped the entire crux of my comment.
We need a base load of energy to fill that gap, because batteries currently can’t, and likely won’t be for decades. Here are the options we have available:
nuclear power, which produces a waste that while trivial to store far away from people, will be radioactive for hundreds of years.
fossil fuels, which cause massive damage not only to the local environment, but to the planet, and cleanup is effectively impossible.
we put society on unpredictable energy curfews. At night the population can’t use much energy. When there’s a drop in wind or solar production, we cut people’s energy off. Both political parties must commit wholeheartedly to this in order to make it viable. Our lives would become worse, but we’d not have either of the above problems.
Of those 3 options, I’d rather go with nuclear. What’s your choice?
We’re at the beginnings of having useful levels of storage and can keep building out renewables while we develop storage. At the current rates of adoption, we’ll need true grid storage in about ten years.
However, note that one option for “grid” storage is a battery in every home. Another is a battery in every vehicle. Neither is the best option but those are options we already know and just need to scale up
Ok, you’ve added more solar panels and wind turbines.
It’s nighttime. There isn’t much wind. An extremely common thing to happen I’m sure you’ll agree.
There now isn’t enough power, places have constant blackouts, electricity prices skyrocket because demand far outstrips supply.
Grid storage large enough to replace fossil fuels + nuclear is far, far, far, far further than 10 years off.
I’ll ask again:
Nuclear base load that assists renewables
Continued fossil fuels for multiple decades that assists renewables, and hope that we can reverse some of the damage done in the meantime through some kind of carbon capture tech (unfortunately we can’t fix respiratory issues, strokes, and dead/extinct animals and plants after the fact).
Regular blackouts, energy rationing, but 100% renewable
What do you choose? Saying that you’ll magic up some batteries in a capacity that currently isn’t possible isn’t an answer.
I want 100% renewables too. Anybody with any sanity would. But it’s currently not feasible. Our choice is between having a fossil fuel base load or a nuclear base load. Other options aren’t available yet.
And here’s the magic choice …… “time of use metering”. As we electrify everything and add “smart” controls, we can be much more dynamic with time of use metering to adjust the load.
When the sun doesn’t shine at night, already has much lower electrical load than daytime. Early analog efforts at time of use metering tried to shift more load to the night so “base load” wouldn’t have to adjust, and max load wouldn’t be as high
Now we can develop smart time of use metering to shift more load to “when the sun shines”. I’m not aware of anything to quantify this so let me just make shit up: if the load “when the sun doesn’t shine” is half what it is when solar is producing, that’s a crap load of grid storage or base load that magically never has to exist
The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.
I’m aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it’s the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.
Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.
Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what’s the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades. Probably 30+ years at the minimum.
We’re talking 11 years for 7 “small” reactors. The first decade just to establish a business, but no real difference in the overall picture. How many years, decades after that to make a noticeable difference?
Meanwhile we’re building out more power generation in renewables every year. Renewables are already well developed, can be deployed quickly, and are already scaling up, renewables make a difference NOW.
You are totally ignoring their arguments. Not every place can do wind or solar or hydro. Like it’s simply not an option.
Time doesn’t care. Neither does the rate of climate change.
Renewables cannot provide a reliable base load. Not unless you can have your solar panels in space where the sun always shines, we figure out tidal power, or you’re lucky in terms of geography and either hydroelectric or geothermal work for you.
Solar power doesn’t produce energy at night, wind doesn’t always blow. You know the drill.
You completely sidestepped the entire crux of my comment.
We need a base load of energy to fill that gap, because batteries currently can’t, and likely won’t be for decades. Here are the options we have available:
nuclear power, which produces a waste that while trivial to store far away from people, will be radioactive for hundreds of years.
fossil fuels, which cause massive damage not only to the local environment, but to the planet, and cleanup is effectively impossible.
we put society on unpredictable energy curfews. At night the population can’t use much energy. When there’s a drop in wind or solar production, we cut people’s energy off. Both political parties must commit wholeheartedly to this in order to make it viable. Our lives would become worse, but we’d not have either of the above problems.
Of those 3 options, I’d rather go with nuclear. What’s your choice?
More renewables.
We’re at the beginnings of having useful levels of storage and can keep building out renewables while we develop storage. At the current rates of adoption, we’ll need true grid storage in about ten years.
However, note that one option for “grid” storage is a battery in every home. Another is a battery in every vehicle. Neither is the best option but those are options we already know and just need to scale up
Ok, you’ve added more solar panels and wind turbines.
It’s nighttime. There isn’t much wind. An extremely common thing to happen I’m sure you’ll agree.
There now isn’t enough power, places have constant blackouts, electricity prices skyrocket because demand far outstrips supply.
Grid storage large enough to replace fossil fuels + nuclear is far, far, far, far further than 10 years off.
I’ll ask again:
Nuclear base load that assists renewables
Continued fossil fuels for multiple decades that assists renewables, and hope that we can reverse some of the damage done in the meantime through some kind of carbon capture tech (unfortunately we can’t fix respiratory issues, strokes, and dead/extinct animals and plants after the fact).
Regular blackouts, energy rationing, but 100% renewable
What do you choose? Saying that you’ll magic up some batteries in a capacity that currently isn’t possible isn’t an answer.
I want 100% renewables too. Anybody with any sanity would. But it’s currently not feasible. Our choice is between having a fossil fuel base load or a nuclear base load. Other options aren’t available yet.
And here’s the magic choice …… “time of use metering”. As we electrify everything and add “smart” controls, we can be much more dynamic with time of use metering to adjust the load.
When the sun doesn’t shine at night, already has much lower electrical load than daytime. Early analog efforts at time of use metering tried to shift more load to the night so “base load” wouldn’t have to adjust, and max load wouldn’t be as high
Now we can develop smart time of use metering to shift more load to “when the sun shines”. I’m not aware of anything to quantify this so let me just make shit up: if the load “when the sun doesn’t shine” is half what it is when solar is producing, that’s a crap load of grid storage or base load that magically never has to exist