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> I think your missing the point. If you ran your entire grid on just solar and wind, no nuclear, or coal or natural gas peaker plants, you'll find that wind and solar is no longer cheap, and is much less resilient to exceptional circumstances. That kind of is my point: countries are doing this and without blackouts and it's actually fine. You seem to be claiming nuclear is needed to provide an unspecified base load at an unspecified cost. Other people are pointing out that it is about 3x more expensive and just not generally worth investing in at that cost difference. Your points about mining are a bit beside the point. I don't actually disagree that the mining sector needs to be cleaned up. But our economy generates demand for lots of things we dig up out of the ground. If anything, it seems that the likes of Tesla are vaguely being responsible here and are actually making efforts to clean up that part of their business by working to source what they need in a sustainable way. You seem to imply that a scale change is needed on the mining front to bootstrap renewables. I doubt that that's as big of a deal that you seem to imply. Also, you could make the point that with clean energy, resources locked up in that become available for recycling at the end of their life. So, things like lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, etc. actually can be reused. And there are also some efforts to replace some of these minerals with more readily available alternatives. E.g. cobalt free batteries are a thing. Finally, we can offset that by no longer digging up coal, drilling oil, or fracking gas. The difference is that absolutely zero percent of that gets recycled because we burn it. And lets not forget that uranium mining is probably one of the dirtiest forms of mining. That's just a really nasty business mostly happening under exactly the kind of circumstances you point out. Nothing clean about it. Lots of pollution, radioactive waste, and health issues. And you need to mine a lot of rock to extract very little uranium. |
A system that can meet the demand with an increasingly higher percentage of non dispatchable wind and solar needs some plan B for when it is night time and there is no wind. Or it is cloudy and not windy for days. It can be batteries but there is a cost to that too. Any place with a high share of non dispatchable generation tends to either have good interconnections to their neighbors who have firm power supplies, or they have their own natural gas or diesel generation, but there is a cost to having that sitting around too.
I’m fine with cost for nuclear, for batteries, for over building wind and solar, and for nat gas used as a backup for that weather system that moves in once a year that would otherwise result In a blackout. cost is just a number in a ledger somewhere.
The energy supply should come from diverse sources and nuclear is a good part of that solution.