Comment by pydry
2 days ago
We can either pray and wait for a technological breakthrough that makes storage tech way cheaper than gas or we can just use taxes and subsidies to make it happen now.
It's not so hard. Lavish subsidies were used to make nuclear power semi-sort-of-competitive even though it's way more expensive.
The same thing could have been done with solar and wind but apparently we thought the best course of action was just to wait until they became cheaper than coal without subsidies (& then Obama and Trump slammed solar with tariffs).
Or we can go full nuclear.
why? much more expensive, much slower. This reflexive "nukes are the only way" meme amongst technical folk really has gotta die.
More expensive in what way? "Cost" is what everyone quotes about why nuclear isn't great, but isn't the whole idea behind shelving fossil fuels and switching to alternatives due to downsides that are secondary to cost?
To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?
The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.
Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).
The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.
"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
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Get private insurance to fully cover nuclear and I'm onboard.
This might be the only way I could have any trust in Nuclear. I heard recently from a journalist that the Fukushima plant paid Yakuza owned newspapers to avoid negative press well before the incident. The technology is great, humans are not.
could do but im not sure what there is to be gained from unnecessarily spending trillions more to decarbonize.
“We” are only in control of “us”. The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
> The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
As the article spends so many paragraphs to explain to us, the rest of the world is increasingly not burning fossil fuel for their new energy needs. Most of the fuel it burns is for the energy it already uses. And solar is starting to take a bite out of that too.
That's great but if we had accelerated our transition, it wouldn't have lead to them accelerating their transition. The things are not linked or correlated.
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