do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:
You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn’t kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.
The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.
Why is it supposed to be easier to get people onboard with nuclear (which is decreasing) than wind and solar (which are increasing at triple the rate of the nuclear construction peak in the 80s and growing at 20% p.a.)?
People are on board with VRE. Some of the are on board with nuclear too, but it’s not working.
Nucleur isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, maybe it would be economical if we had heavily invested in the tech decades ago. But current plants have major issues, here is a snippet from another article:
The study also questions the reliability of the nuclear fleet, particularly given the dramatically low availability of French power plants this year – nearly half of the 56 nuclear reactors were closed even though the EU was in a complicated period of electricity supply with frequent peaks in the price of electricity above €3/kWh.
The availability of this electrical source is also questioned in view of the increasingly frequent droughts expected in the coming years, causing, in particular, low river flows and therefore associated problems of cooling power plants.
Buying time isn’t a great argument for nuclear when it takes so much longer than wind or solar to build a plant - median time of 88 months to build a nuclear plant compared to 8-14 for solar.
People will get on board when they see the cost per kwh.
But this is my argument against those who complain about Solar and Wind – those won’t kill you or destroy a location for hundreds of years if they break down and once they’re installed they don’t have to be fed by more mining, or anything else. Just wind and sun.
This attitude is about a decade out of date. It made sense around 2010 when wind and solar weren’t widely deployed and cost more than nuclear per megawatt hour. Now we have more wind and solar deployed than nuclear, and they’re significantly cheaper and faster to construct and make better economic sense than nuclear.
I hear this point all the time, but it’s simply not true. The total power that humanity consumes could perhaps eventually be generated with wind and solar, but they don’t generate on demand, scalable power to provide the actual base load needed.
Don’t get me wrong, I think every new building (and probably the old ones too) should have solar panels, but that doesn’t negate the need to move the base power generation to nuclear from coal and oil.
do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:
You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn’t kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.
The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.
Then you just move the planet slightly further away from the sun! Problem solved!
The U235 is good for about 3 years, and pinning everything on something that has never had more than a half proof of concept is a bad choice.
Why is it supposed to be easier to get people onboard with nuclear (which is decreasing) than wind and solar (which are increasing at triple the rate of the nuclear construction peak in the 80s and growing at 20% p.a.)?
People are on board with VRE. Some of the are on board with nuclear too, but it’s not working.
Nucleur isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, maybe it would be economical if we had heavily invested in the tech decades ago. But current plants have major issues, here is a snippet from another article:
Article
Study: Why investing in Nucleur is bad for the environment
Buying time isn’t a great argument for nuclear when it takes so much longer than wind or solar to build a plant - median time of 88 months to build a nuclear plant compared to 8-14 for solar.
People will get on board when they see the cost per kwh.
But this is my argument against those who complain about Solar and Wind – those won’t kill you or destroy a location for hundreds of years if they break down and once they’re installed they don’t have to be fed by more mining, or anything else. Just wind and sun.
And maintenance, it apparently takes quite some effort to keep those running
This attitude is about a decade out of date. It made sense around 2010 when wind and solar weren’t widely deployed and cost more than nuclear per megawatt hour. Now we have more wind and solar deployed than nuclear, and they’re significantly cheaper and faster to construct and make better economic sense than nuclear.
I hear this point all the time, but it’s simply not true. The total power that humanity consumes could perhaps eventually be generated with wind and solar, but they don’t generate on demand, scalable power to provide the actual base load needed.
Don’t get me wrong, I think every new building (and probably the old ones too) should have solar panels, but that doesn’t negate the need to move the base power generation to nuclear from coal and oil.