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by KirinDave
2070 days ago
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We might want new nucelar power plants for industrial centers. But what we certainly shouldn't be doing is using them as an excuse to propagate the idea of a centralized grid of power authorities distributing power nationally or globally. Centralized grids are incredibly expensive, difficult to manage, and introduce single points of failure in the physical and information domains. We should be doing everything we can to decentralize our grids, promote distributed power generation and storage in urban and commercial installments, and focus on letting the municipal levels of government coordinate bulk storage appropriate to their needs. Folks get so worked up about highly efficient new nuclear power plants that they forget about transit and storage, or argue that these aspects shouldn't be considered. Both ideas are deleterious to making a modern, resilient power infrastructure that's able to adapt to climate change, changes in the economic environment, and the increasing pace of modern technology in the space of power storage and delivery. Until these goals can coexist with the call for a "nuclear new deal", we should view them for what they are: short-sighted and misguided attempts to make profit off a need without considering the actual long term goals that society has. |
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I don't know about the situation today, but for years the massive wind farms on Tehachapi weren't even connected to the grid. Even after PG&E bought the electricity to meet their renewables quota, it was cheaper to waste it than to build the transmission infrastructure.
Renewables have the inverse of the problem you described: They are too distributed, and it's hard to get enough to power a community without running transmission lines over hundreds of miles.
Yes, the centralization of infrastructure required for efficient nuclear energy production is a problem. But don't forget that renewables have equivalent problems.