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by throwaway894345 1729 days ago
Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet? Nuclear is proven and if we claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat I don’t know why we would pin all our hopes on solar and wind and some to-be-discovered storage solution. To be clear, I’m not against solar and wind—on the contrary, I want a diverse clean energy portfolio. But wasting time emitting while we pray for a storage solution for wind/solar seems utterly foolish.
2 comments
oezi 1729 days ago
Sorry, but Nuclear is just proven to fail. Even if we would reverse course on Nuclear today it would be 20 or 30 years until the plants would be build. By that time solar and wind will another magnitude cheaper.

The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else shouldn't be focused on.

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throwaway894345 1729 days ago
> Nuclear is just proven to fail ... the way forward is wind and solar

Nuclear is the only proven clean technology for base load generation. The only hiccup is political (i.e., people decided they don't like nuclear), and while it's a big political problem, the whole climate crisis is an enormous political problem. Yes, there's the waste to be disposed of, but we already have to manage some waste and once you have to safely manage a little nuclear waste it's a marginal increase in cost to manage a whole lot of nuclear waste.

Further, innovations in nuclear are making it cheaper, safer, and faster to build. Moreover, as another commenter pointed out, if we were willing to ease some of our restrictions on nuclear such that our nuclear plants didn't need to be a thousand times safer than our coal plants (but merely, say, twice as safe), then nuclear could be even less expensive and facilities built more rapidly.

Yes, wind and solar will play a major role in the future, but we incur tremendous risk by ignoring nuclear.

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foxfluff 1729 days ago
What's driving the price decrease in wind?
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jhgb 1729 days ago
Economies of scale, largely.
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ben_w 1729 days ago
> Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet?

Yes. There are basically so many different chemistries (and non-chemical storage methods) that the important question is “which type should we prefer” rather than “can we even do it”.

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vagrantJin 1729 days ago
Yeah, I don't think it's an either or science decision any more than its likely a business-cum-political situation.
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