This is still pitting two cooperative undertakings against each other, and we really shouldn't do that.
The thing is, we want more power. Like, a lot more power. Power is wealth, there is an unlimited number of good things we can do with it.
Nuclear power is qualitatively about the best power you can have. Absolutely enormous amounts, available on demand, constantly. You just can't beat it.
We should heavily subsidize reasearch and development on new nuclear energy, until we have ten times as much nuclear power as we have now.
And we should do that in parallel with building out so much solar that we can rapidly retire coal completely, because we want to do that in ten years and that is completely feasible with solar + batteries. The new nukes will barely be coming online when that happens.
But the 40s will be a renaissance of human culture if we have that nuclear power.
Agreed that the 2040s have great potential due to massively cheaper energy and lots of it, but I disagree that nuclear will contribute much. I'm not convinced that nuclear has such great qualities compared to renewables plus storage, and I think the only reason this is not more commonly held is that people have not yet internalized a world with storage at the prices we will see it within 5-10 years.
Battery storage can scale large, but more importantly, it can scale really small. This means that you can throw a couple shipping containers of it at one side of a congested transmission link, and save tons of money. It means that we can make all our houses self reliant for hours at a time.
Storage will help us solve the problem of transmission lines causing massive wildfires. It will provide massive reliability and resilience across the grid. Small nuclear won't help much with that, unless is also paired with storage.
If nuclear can provide electricity at rates competitive with solar and wind, then storage will help nuclear too. But if nuclear is not beating the cost of solar and wind, then we will have less wealth if we spend our labor building nuclear than if we build renewables and storage.
A world built on solar wind and storage will probable have peak power capacity 2x-4x more than we need, with 2-3 days worth of storage. The ratio between power and storage will largely depend on the relative costs of storage versus power.
And I think it's time to start thinking about the sort of word where we have an over abundance of energy that renewables will provide. We will have lots of excess energy being produced, and with the right applications that can tolerate intermittency, that excess energy will incredibly cheap.
People keep touting the low cost of renewables plus storage, but this is incredibly misleading when most regions (Germany, Denmark, California, etc.) that have high renewable adoption have some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Storage (especially at the current rate of growth) is nowhere close to meeting our capacity needs for a 100% renewable grid. We can't store enough energy for a single day of consumption. Keep in mind we would need to store enough energy to handle long periods of low production. We're an order of magnitude away from that. On top of that, the vast majority of global energy storage is not actually provided by batteries, but by pumped-storage hydro (expanding this capacity would run into environmental issues and physical limitations; we don't have enough water in convenient locations).
Battery tech seems way off from providing us the needed capacity. Even Tesla is bottlenecked by battery production. We'd need to see Moore's Law level growth to have enough storage capacity to mitigate climate change, but we're only seeing 30% to 40% growth, which is just not enough given that it's currently less than a fraction of a percent of our total energy storage needs for 100% renewable power.
People are also seriously overestimating the time table needed to build a nuclear power plant. India, China, and Russia have been able to build plants in a few years vs 10 years in the West. If we're not pushing nuclear now, we'll be burning coal and natural gas for the next century.
Only about 14% of what we pay in Denmark and probably a comparable amount in Germany goes to paying for the actual electricity.
The rest is for "Green taxes" that pays for our new green infrastructure, R&D and lots of things that will benefit the transition.
So if we just said "we good now", 86% of the cost would disappear, and probably not be much more expensive than US energy, or even cheaper, at least soon!
I find it hard to believe that any 'green tax' will be reduced, or at least without a comparative increase somewhere else, once the infrastructure is done.
But the tax isn't is a problem, quite the opposite because it targets non renewable sources and has been decreasing as green energy has been established.
Also it works as a magnet for business surprisingly maybe.
We have enormous new datacenters from Google, Facebook and Apple being built right at this moment, even though Denmark is tiny.
Taxation is extremely important when it comes to transitioning to green energy. As long as the taxation scheme favours green energy - granted that is difficult to define exactly.
We've had to same scheme with electric cars giving you about half the price of a conventional car.
This is exactly how government should help the green transition, instead of the exact opposite that for many years has been happening in the US with the corporate welfare and grotesque subsidising of heavy industry. Though again this is a contentious issue as Tesla has sucked a lot of green subsidies from the pool. So there definitely is problems to tackle.
Even if it loses the race, we should subsidize research and development right now.
This is too important to leave to the back of a napkin, is what I'm saying. Breakthroughs in nuclear energy would be a big win. The aesthetic and ecosystem costs of transforming hundreds of square kilometers of desert into solar farms are bearable, but they're real.
The power yield of solar panels in the Belt is also not superb given the launch costs. Pretty dangerous to go blasting uranium into space on top of a rocket, no matter how reliable, but we can go to where the uranium is, for the most part.
We don't want to be behind the curve when that time comes. Extracting metals from Earth's surface is just going to get more environmentally noxious and less profitable, as we work through the good veins. We might luck out and find a few more rich lodes, but we shouldn't count on it, and mining in the ocean is a whole unexplored world (just like the Belt): it's closer, but it's also an ecosystem, and water is capable of spreading solid pollution quite a bit more promiscuously than the air is. Groundwater and surface water leaching from mine tailings is already very bad, we don't want that happening in the ocean. We only have one of those and we already beat it up pretty badly.
A lie would require that both 1) batteries can't scale, and 2) I know that they can't scale but am knowingly asserting a falsehood.
Neither of these are true. We are current at 200-300GWh of production per year, and consistent with recent history are expected to grow capacity 10x every five years, so that by 2031 we will produce 20-30TWh of new batteries per year. That's 500-750GW per year, at a 4 hour duration.
In contrast, the idea of scaling nuclear production to 100GW of new capacity per year by 2031 is simply inconceivable.
In 2021, with current technology, nuclear simply can not scale as fast as storage, or for that matter solar or wind.
The thing is, we want more power. Like, a lot more power. Power is wealth, there is an unlimited number of good things we can do with it.
Nuclear power is qualitatively about the best power you can have. Absolutely enormous amounts, available on demand, constantly. You just can't beat it.
We should heavily subsidize reasearch and development on new nuclear energy, until we have ten times as much nuclear power as we have now.
And we should do that in parallel with building out so much solar that we can rapidly retire coal completely, because we want to do that in ten years and that is completely feasible with solar + batteries. The new nukes will barely be coming online when that happens.
But the 40s will be a renaissance of human culture if we have that nuclear power.