| I brought up nuclear because I felt that your original comment above was overly optimistic about what is possible with renewables. People bring up nuclear because it’s the only high density low carbon energy source we have. Splitting atoms produces orders of magnitude more energy than gathering sunlight. Our current reactor designs are incredibly inefficient. The ceiling of what is possible with nuclear is much higher. If you want to preserve the environment higher power density typically means less impact. We’ve gone from burning wood, to coal, to petroleum, to nuclear, and then took a huge step backwards on nuclear because of Cold War fears and Chernobyl. Renewables are great but nuclear is the only high power density option that can keep up with our insatiable demand for more energy in a way that doesn’t require converting vast swaths of land into wind and solar farms. If you think that wind turbines and solar farms don’t have a negative impact on the environment you haven’t been paying attention. Wind farms impact on insect populations for example is another new area of research and it doesn’t look very good. 15x material throughput means you have to mine/produce/transport/refine/smelt/forge 15x more materials, which means more environmental impacts for the lifecycle of those materials. A single ACR-1000 reactor can produce more output than the 14000 acre Bhadla Solar Park in India for example, and it will last 4-5x longer. |