This solution, for all its problems, has the advantage that it can be imposed on unwilling countries. Short of coercion tantamount to war, you can't make the unwilling stop burning fossil fuels and use non-fossil alternatives instead.
Nuclear also isn't the best solution in any case, for multiple reasons that have been explained here over and over.
There is no singular best answer. Nuclear fission for the foreseeable future will remain one of the solutions. There is the caveat that it’s not technically “sustainable” or “renewable”, but practically no source of energy is fully.
Yeah building nuclear plants should be priority one. There is no replacement for the quality(variability) and quantity of power produced by them. It's obviously political, there's no money in building nuke plants for the current ruling class, only in "renewables".
Nuclear is an energy source of the past. It's too expensive and therefore rejected by the markets. Modern, emmission-free energy-sources like solar or wind (accompanied by storage in homes, districts and some larger-scale storage facilities) became so cheap in the past decade that you can now build more than 10 times the capacity in renewables for the price of a nuclear reactor. It's simple economics why nuclear is dying a slow death.
Perhaps I misunderstood your point, but building nuclear plants can't be priority one because we don't have time to wait around for them to be built. We should be building them in parallel with more immediate initiatives that can buy us time.
Or if one day we discover that those aerosols have side effects we didn’t think of.
A better way would be to build a large mirror at a Lagrange point between earth and sun. With the huge reduction in launch cost by Starship this would become possible. And it’d be “easily” reversible.
But nothing of this will get done, because there are way simpler solutions.
> Nuclear power is the best solution we have for a sustainable and prosperous society.
Nuclear or hydro or solar+wind. These are all good solutions.
Nuclear is far more expensive, but it can provide 100% of needs by itself.
Solar+wind is far cheaper, but the variability means that we can only get about 70-80% of the grid that way (no storage needed), with the remaining 20-30% made up by cheap storage or gas.
I mean i could store all the nuclear waste to power America for 10000 years in a football field 1500 ft deep, with 300-400 of that just being fill. Ideally stored in a salt mine of some sort. It's not "renewable" the can is so far kicked a better power source will definitely arise by then.
Seems pretty easy to understand. No one is claiming that nuclear is a permanent solution, they are claiming that is a solution we have right now that can produce more than enough to meet our needs for at least a century if not a lot more. I've also never seen anyone say that we should use only nuclear and ban using renewables, their argument is usually exactly what you just stated, that we should use a combination of solutions which would naturally include nuclear.
> 1. People think a non-renewable resource is somehow a permanent solution
They usually think solar and wind isn't good enough due to variability. Most haven't looked into it, and are adopting a plausible-sounding line they've heard someone else say. Probably someone who aligns with them politically, given how politically charged and partisan the topic is.
It is good enough. The variability isn't a problem. The US, Canada, Australia, EU, could provide 80% of the their grids from renewables, no storage, for a cost a lot cheaper than nuclear, and delivered 10 years sooner.
The case study that demonstrates this is Denmark, which has about 50% of its energy produced locally from renewables, mostly wind. They plan to increase this to 84%. They hardly had to overbuild, and they sell the excess capacity to their neighbors. Even if the overcapacity wasn't sold and was wasted, it's still much cheaper than nuclear.
This shows us that a bigger country could easily get >80% from renewables without storage. Two reasons. First, more terrain means more variability cancelling from wind. Second, solar cancels out wind, and Denmark has very little solar. Solar and wind are significantly negatively correlated, because it's less windy in Summer.
You can do even better by having a network of countries, each selling overcapacity.
Storage or gas makes up the small remaining shortfall. Luckily battery costs are declining on a super-linear learning curve.
I'm all for nuclear power, it works fine and is far better than fossil fuels. But I'm more for renewables as a mass scale solution. It's cheaper and we can have it sooner.
> It isn't good enough due to variability. We don't have efficient energy storage so that means you have to build massive overcapacity, like 5x as much.
That's a problem already solved: Storage. Germany alone has 3.4 GWh of home-battery storage installed as of today. And it's constantly increasing. Averaged over a year, renewable energy sources operate at about 30% of their capacity. So even in a worst-case scenario with no storage whatsoever you would need to build 3x "overcapacity".
> We should have some renewables but we can't base the entire energy supply on them.
> Averaged over a year, renewable energy sources operate at about 30% of their capacity. So even in a worst-case scenario with no storage whatsoever you would need to build 3x "overcapacity".
I don't think that calculation is valid. Even assuming perfectly sunny days solar power e.g. runs at less than 100 % of its capacity simply due to the day-night-cycle. However that doesn't mean that overbuilding solar by just "1 divided by average capacity utilisation %" will be enough to get you round-the-clock-power – in fact no amount of overbuilding will get you any solar power at all at night.
What you'd actually have to look at is define a desired reliability factor for your electric grid, calculate the minimum guaranteed power output for that reliability factor (so to remain with the solar power example – even during the daytime you need to calculate the likelihood and impact of cloudy weather, but in any case as soon you as you want more reliability than there are even theoretical sunshine hours in a day, guaranteed power output drops to zero – unless of course you finally attempt to include some storage) and then overbuild according to that calculation.
If we're in the fictional world where any production above a perfectly constant baseline (with the occasional two month break for refuelling where fairies power everything) has zero utility, that excess is worthless isn't it?
There's only so far you can take these counterfactuals, but presumably you'd be selling it at, say, $10/MWh (because things like hydrogen are already profitable at this cost) which might cover part of the distribution costs (which are not in that model) and bring it down to roughly on par.
If it really is on par, then even the stupidest approach to renewables (i.e. massively over-building instead of using some storage) is equal cost to nuclear. That's a strong case for renewables.
It's really hard to overstate how much better the case for renewables is than the competition.
That said, there are a bunch of risks and externalised costs in a zero storage strategy not captured by simple prices. Many of the objections of the nuclear industry are actually true in such a scenario.
Overbuilding solar 4-8x with current tech would cause alot of CO2 emissions from silicon refining, it would strain silver and copper supplies. Overbuilding wind by a similar amount would require vast amounts of steel, strain niobium production, and cause CO2 emissions from concrete. Even if your system was on par with nuclear on a dollar basis, it would still produce too many emissions (half or more of 100% gas) and quite fragile.
Relying on cross continent links to reduce overbuild ratio is a massive strategic risk, and if someone in the chain does a texas and has a bunch of equipment fail, you'd have a real version of the scenario the anti-wind campaogners are imagining in europe right now.
A good strategy is a mix of everything aiming to remove as many emissions with each dollar spent. If that means aiming initially for 50% net solar availability, and 30% net wind availability with 20% surplus and keeping the gas turbines running through winter to provide the remaining 40% for a few years whilst shotgunning money at research for abundant batteries, electrolysers, and tidal to see which one sticks, then that is far better than using the same funds to pay for 20% nuclear that will be online in 2050.
Another good strategy would be to build out scalable storage (thermal batteries, electrolysers and pumped hydro) immediately and go all in on wind/solar asap. The amount of concrete required for the pumped storage might he prohibitive though and it won't cost a great deal less than nuclear (although it will be online sooner).
Even a strategy with 10-20% nuclear like what China is pursuing is tolerable (including the very likely chernobyl scale incidents that will happen if it's pursued worldwide -- which are vastly preferable to the consequences of coal) in countries that aren't controlled by neoliberal systems which are fundamentally incapable of operating any large scale project that won't pay off visibly in an election cycle. It's just the constant shouting of "stop all the wind and only build nuclear" that's imbecilic.
The biggest danger I see here is that we won't reduce emissions, we'll just carry on business as usual and pump up aerosols to compensate.
And then if one day we can't pump up enough aerosols and they begin to dissipate there will be intense warming. It's a band-aid.
Nuclear power is the best solution we have for a sustainable and prosperous society.