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by RetroTechie
1023 days ago
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> It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate. Yes renewables are growing at an amazing rate. But they don't cover countries' energy needs entirely, all the time. Which you need for a power grid. The storage problem is by no means solved. And eg. hydro is only an option in a few places. So you need other power generation to fill in the (big!) gaps. Right now, that's a choice between a) let power grid go down, b) fossil, or c) nuclear. Note this is temporary! Only needed until sufficient storage comes online to let renewables do the job. Given the urgency of the situation we're in, I see nuclear as the lesser evil here. And it's very annoying that NGOs like Greenpeace are actively blocking that escape hatch with their outdated stance. They should NOT get in the way of those working to reduce CO2 emissions. Even if nuclear. |
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No. But they can be manufactured much faster than setting up a nuclear plant.
If you have a combination of wind, solar, hydro and geo over enough of a distance then you can get continuous energy with very little reliance on storage. The main problem is that this only works at scale and some countries are smaller. For this we need marketplaces that sell energy between countries automatically. That isn't a hard problem on the technical level, but might be a political issue and a logistic issue (grid connections, security etc.).
Because of the urgency nuclear isn't viable. The same capacity *with storage* can be setup in less time than it takes to build a nuclear plant. It will be cheaper to boot. The economics of nuclear made sense a decade ago, not now.