Comment by RandomLensman
21 hours ago
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
21 hours ago
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
I'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
I was under the impression tidal was mostly tapped out because any half-decent location has already been turned into a power plant.
My baseline expectation is some opposition to any new energy infrastructure.
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.
Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
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This right here. It's not one or the other, its a diverse combination of all of them that makes for the best results.
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
Why would fusion reactors magically appear when the entire field of nuclear energy production is, in this scenario, essentially dead??
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Because the reactor will still run 20 years after that while the solar and storage will need to be replaced by then
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