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Men will do everything but switch to renewable energy sources.
Nuclear is amazing. It is absolutely one of our greatest energy sources we have, and it is green. It has the ability to be at peak operation 24/7 in 99% of weather, at night, on cloudy days, on windless days.
I think solar and wind energy is amazing and needs to be put up everywhere, but until we're there, nuclear has the ability to transform our energy use.
Not to mention, nuclear is GREAT for reliable baseline load. Pair that with renewable sources (which in many locations tend to be bursty) and grid-scale batteries/supercapacitors/some other energy-storage mechanism, and you’ve got a zero-carbon electric grid.
Well, yeah if we had bet more on nuclear two decades ago and kept building them, this would have been relevant.
But now renewables are expanding at a rate faster than nuclear power ever did, and unlike nuclear the growth rate is not flattening out yet. I don’t see how nuclear is much more than an irrelevant distraction when it comes to new energy production (existing is another matter, please don’t shut them down).
The base load problem is essentially solved IMO. Just a few years ago the duck curve was made to be insurmountable, and now it’s basically fully solved. Long term months long storage is also partially solved for colder regions where they are the most relevant.
But most importantly, this all ties into all the work we have to do to decarbonise industry. We have to make a lot of hydrogen and build a lot of electrical industrial heat production (which comes with free energy storage). Modern gas power plants are already hydrogen ready. We just need to build lots and lots of hydrogen electrolysis plants (for steel and ammonia production) near the gas power plants, and put some aside to use during dunkelflaute. That means many places already have much of the infrastructure needed to balance 100% renewables.
As dumb as Germanys shut down of nuclear has been, I think their strategy will be considered brilliant in 30 years time. The reason they have relied so much on gas is they need a that gas for the industry they specialised in anyway. The trick now is just to transition them to hydrogen and electric heating. There are already factories and fertiliser plants with on-site hydrogen production. It has started.
I just would like to point out that China is putting up stable reactors in less than 7 years span. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-rate-of-nuclear-construction
I do think we need every egg in this basket to hatch though, and honestly our main focus should be renewables as you said. But nuclear is just so damn reliable. Besides a reactor can last 75+ years. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-reactor-much-longer-you-might-think
Nuclear is also incredibly energy efficient. If you were able to power 100.00% of an 82 year life completely on nuclear, the fuel needed for that is about the size of a soda can. https://cna.ca/2019/06/25/your-lifetime-used-fuel-would-fit-in-a-soda-can-want-proof/
I absolutely love nuclear, I think it's such a cool energy source. And it brings together so many disciplines of industry and engineering. But I am also a huge proponent of decentralization, and I recognize that nuclear plants are the epitome of central, state and corporate owned, need high security and expertise to run. Whereas, solar and wind once made can be community owned, individually owned, off grid, etc. I think there's pros to a multi layered approach.
China is still benefiting from their incredible demographic dividend. Comparing us to them is misleading. It should be said that the west built all its reactors during its demographic dividend periods as well, maybe that’s relevant, maybe not. But food for thought.
The lifespan of the reactors are not that interesting. What matters are long term costs. With renewable power plants you generally replace a larger part of the power plant when you repower the power plant. But that’s because they don’t need a huge concrete structure and building to contain them, if you replace the part doing the work that’s already most of it. Repowering a renewable power plant is significantly cheaper than building a new one from scratch. How that pans out in the long term remains to be seen. But most likely costs will fall further as the world moves to mostly maintaining/repowering what it has rather than building new sites from scratch.
The size of the nuclear fuel (end product) is not at all interesting unless you’re building a space ship. I should say that future space exploration is one reason why I hope nuclear power stays alive in some form.
This fuel comes from ore. You need ~10tons of ore for 1kg of fuel. For the HALUE fuel needed by the SMR reactor that are supposed to save the industry you need ~40tons of ore. Still much better than oil and gas, by a wide margin. But it’s fundamentally not a renewable process and there are significant concerns around the supply chain of this fuel. Read up on France’s issues and concerns with its supplies from Niger and Namibia.
Fun fact btw: nuclear power contributes directly to global warming from the heat they emit. The effect is surprisingly significant. All thermal power plants equate to about the climate gas emissions from airplane travel if I remember correctly. The only upside is the effect disappears instantly when the power plant shuts down. But this is not an effect we can afford to multiply when we’re on the precipice of ecological collapse due to a warming planet.
It has basically the same next-century issues like oil.
Can you back up claims like that please? I don't think nuclear energy is causing Earth to copy Venus' atmosphere (exaggeration on scale of course).
Looks like you understood what i meant. What to do with the highly active and highly poisonous waste is still not solved, aside from using even more energy to make it less active. Can as well just plug a generator in a geologically active area.
There's no need to gender this particular brand of idiocracy