If only it was a conscious choice... I fear significant climate has happened already, and even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow will continue for a long time to come. Putting up a few km2 of solar in e.g. the Sahara now is surely less effort than decommissioning dozens of nuclear plants in 50 years.
Why not do both? Solar power works really well in the Sahara, but not so well in Northern Alberta. While the Sahara's emptiness is penetrated with limitless sunlight, Northern Alberta features vast, rolling plains where waste heat from nuclear plants could be used to heat homes for people escaping the burning wastes of California and BC, while generating carbon-free energy for the North American grid. Waste heat can also facilitate the chemical processes needed to extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere. You can also use nuclear waste heat to replace natural gas heating when extracting bitumen from oil sands -- arguably an activity that we ought not to be pursuing anymore, but tell that to the companies and people making their livelihood from it.
The problem with high latitude places like the northern half of Alberta is that hardly anyone lives there. The population is not high enough to justify something as large as a nuclear power plant.
A similar thing happens in Alaska. The largest grid there, the Railbelt grid, has an average power flow of just 600 MW.
It's a massive logistics challenge and it would require an unprecedented level of cooperation between Saharan nations and given how unstable the region is as of current... I'm afraid it's not happening for another 30-50 years, when climate change will probably corner these countries or their rich neighbors living further north. That being said, Australia is a better candidate to this due to it being a single country and a very stable one at that...
Once Australia proves the concept, Africans can follow suit, and we'll build solar arrays over the oceans, and then we'll become a type 1 civilization.
Or we could just overthrow all their governments and make them vassal states. Sounds crazy? Well just take another good look at Saudi Arabia, crazier things happened in name of energy stability. If the choice is between unlimited renewable energy for Europe and sovereignty of the Sahara I know where I stand
You really think it'd be that easy? Europeans, especially France and the UK backed off from that part of Africa mostly because they don't want massive uncontrolled immigration.
For over 50 years now France has been corrupting those countries' elites at the expense of more than 90% of the population. For 50 years those countries' cooperation level with each other have been hindered and their industries dilapidated to keep them poor and dependent from Europe or outside aid. Dictators have already been put in place (like how can anyone even stay in power for 25 years with nobody batting an eye despite the country lagging behind in everything?) to pillage the regions economic resources and pollute their soil, especially uranium and other metals.
Do you really think it'd be internationally acceptable to commit a massive genocidal war after what Nazi Germany had done to Jewish Europeans eight decades prior?
Overthrowing the established governments is only going to make matters worse. Just see how much of a mess Libya is right now, 10 years after Gaddafi died. French civil aircrafts still won't even fly over it.
Easy? No. Also highly unlikely and against every treaty etc. But bigger wars have been fought over energy security, so not entirely impossible. And with Russia, China and USA fighting injust wars left and right, it seems Europe is the only major power that still cares a bit about internationally acceptable.
This is my issue with the debate between Nuclear proponents and Renewable proponents (most of whom seem to be nuclear detractors): They usually compare what is possible in a future state with renewables to what is currently possible with Nuclear technology from decades ago.
I want people to start imagining what innovation in Nuclear can look like again. If you want to compare current state to current state, then neither are going to move the needle enough. But let's imagine what can be possible, especially if we poured in the same tax dollars and incentives to Nuclear as we are with renewables. We don't have to imagine that we will be decommissioning the same honking reactors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Let's imagine what's possible with next-gen plants.
> ”if we poured in the same tax dollars and incentives to Nuclear as we are with renewables.”
We do. Modern nuclear plants (for example, Hinkley Point C in the UK) receive enormous subsidies. Far more than renewables projects (eg: offshore wind farms) get on a per-MWh-generated basis.
Or to put it another way, each $/£/€ invested in renewables generates a lot more clean energy more quickly than if that some money goes into nuclear.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be funding nuclear research and trying new things, but for now it’s hard to justify building new nuclear plants when better alternatives with better economics/ROI are available.
The problem with your argument that while there is currently more funding for renewables historically much more funding has gone to nuclear [0], and that is not even counting the significant military funding. In fact renewables got to the current state with much less funding, so why should we pour much more money into nuclear when the return on (research) investment is much better for renewables?
Not to mention operational losses of many nuclear plants already out there. Quite a few of them could not compete in the current market if not for massive subsidies.
I think your assessment of what is currently possible with nuclear technology is somewhat skewed. The time from start to plan to put in production of an old technology nuclear plant is seven years on average (which honestly sounds optimistic). Whereas utility scale solar can be deployed in half the time (which will likely be reduced because most of that time is permits and other legal requirements.)
All this is current tech for both. And honestly, solar panel and energy storage technology improvements are already coming down the pipeline whereas the next-gen nuclear has been "almost ready" for decades.
Precisely. There are numerous non-political, but rather purely technical and operational reasons, why any appreciable new nuclear builds are probably a decade plus away, even if significant resources are devoted to start right away.
The picture for most renewables as a fossil energy replacement is much rosier, even considering the generation profile problems that some renewables present.
I'd be happy for there to be some amount of investment in new nuclear builds, just to maybe prove me wrong, but right now it seems like a good thing nuclear is not much of a focus.
It’s funny to me that you’re getting a totally different interpretation from the same facts. When I hear that nuclear needs with the same massive investment, subsidies and decades-long R&D that were required to get renewables to the point were they are today, it’s completely clear to me that nuclear power is on its way out.
Renewables are already moving the needle quite rapidly. Take China for example, from 17.74% in 2009 to 29.09% in 2020. Meanwhile coal dropped from 79% in 2009, to 62% in 2019.
Nuclear is going to stick around, but at best we can start building today’s designs and have them finished in a few years. It’s simply to late for any significant R&D effort to pay off, we needed better designs a decade ago for them to be proven reliable today and then ramp up production for 3-5 years from now. It’s not even just building nuclear stuff that’s slow, the Navy has a solid track record and trains people quickly but even that takes time.
I don't think putting up km2 of solar in the Sahara will solve the problem. You just can't ship electricity that far. We're at the point where we need to build any and all green power supplies as much and as quickly as possible if we want to get past this.
While it certainly possible to ship electricity over such distances (there are connections from e.g. Norway to the UK or Europe) I agree that that should not be the priority. There is huge potential for renewables within Europe first. Most places in southern Europe still have very little solar (AFAIK Germany has by quite a margin the most Solar installations in Europe and it definitely is not the best geographically). Sweden has huge potential for wind but hardly any installationsjust two name two things.
Another aspect that should not be ignored are the efficiency gains of producing electricity close to where it is used by e.g. roof top solar
Except you lose a lot of that power through attenuation. You can't really send electricity from the sahara to europe efficiently. Even over relatively short distances (a few dozen miles), you're losing up to 10-15% of your overall energy. A thousand miles or more...and I can't even find numbers on that because nobody does it.
Your 10 to 15% figure is total transmission and distribution loss from producer to consumer. If you scale up the transmission distance only, the total shouldn't change much. There are several studies referenced in this course http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/. Looks like 2 to 3% loss over 1000km.
