| The LCOE of wind/solar is under natural gas, and sodium ion batteries will hit the market this year or next according to CATL press releases (always a grain of salt until you see the product on the market). They are supposed to be half the cost of LFP. And let's face it, nat gas / coal are effectively subsidized by ingrained government policy while they SHOULD be subject to a ten year escalating carbon tax. Nuclear is still ... ok, it's on the high end of solar/wind deployments. Perovskites may solve even more problems, but that hasn't really panned out like hoped, probably a ten year project. Wind and solar don't require "huge areas of land". Well, not new land or land we need. There's a LOT of roofs everywhere. Residential power can be almost completely addressed with rooftop solar + storage, I haven't seen single family homes that need "more than the roof", and the excess can go to multifamily buildings. Windmills can be offshore, or sticking out of farmland or nature preserves. Utility solar can use deserts, there's plenty of that. I hate the hype about "green hydrogen" since it is a shadow play by oil companies to keep other "color" hydrogen sources which are invariably oil/gas. Fusion should continue to get research dollars. We should be pursuing LFTR and other new gen fission. But let's be real, no fission or fusion project initiated now will be ready in ten years, and no one can predict the price of solar/wind/storage in ten years. It won't drop like the previous ten years, but there is enough in the works that it will likely drop ... 50%? I don't think new fission/fusion can be commercially planned until wind/solar/storage prices stabilize. It doesn't matter how cool a fusion reactor is if the energy it produces is 3x the cost of wind/solar. I think the hardest thing to say about fusion is that the "it's always 20/30/40 years in the future" was always a technological commentary. But now the new challenge even if they get a working plant in 20/30/40 years is "is it cheaper?" Constant 3D printing reactor walls sounds like an expensive proposition. Granted I think the same strategies are in LFTR designs since the materials is hard there too. Liquid metal fusion and molten salts has all the materials engineering and endurance issues LFTR had. I guess fusion fuel is effectively liquid though, so they could just move the liquid to another generator while they "overhaul" the one that has neutron degradation. I figured if LFTR hit mainstream they would do the same: mass produce the reactors and then just move the fuel between them as they wear out, and then recondition the "spent reactor". Can a LFTR expert comment on whether it can "burn"/breed/transmute/process most nuclear waste as usable fuel, or at least move the isotopes to other better isotope decay paths? LFTR is supposed to be able to use 99% of its thorium fuel without nuclear waste. |
Also, most people don't live in single family homes, they live in 30-100 family apartment blocs, where even at the equator there won't be enough roof space to power the whole building through solar.
Wind does have a massive land use problem as well (as does hydro). In most of the world outside the USA, there aren't huge swaths of unused land anywhere near residential or industrial areas.
Which is why for example France has green-lit 6 new fission reactors, and the EU in general is looking at declaring fission green energy to get the required subsidies. This is also why Germany, that went all in on wind and solar and even has a few days each year where the entire grid is running on wind+solar+hydro, still produces about twice the GHG as France (both total and per capita).