Wind and solar with storage are already less expensive (LCOE) than nuclear in many cases and by a lot in some cases. No one wants to spend billions of dollars building nuclear plants that take at least 10 and maybe 20 years to build only to find half way through (LCOE of solar is half of what it was in 2015) that it’s even more obsolete.
And the disposal of waste is not a non-issue. Countries that actually do it reasonably, like Germany, spent a LOT more money than the US which is left with a big problem. All for something that costs more.
The problem isn’t that there’s a dearth of energy available. There’s plenty. People aren’t building renewables fast enough largely because there’s not demand. The fossil fuel plants (starting with coal) just need to be closed.
Pumped hydro rules and there’s already some big plants in the US and they operate in the opposite direction that at least solar will need. Water is pumped at night when there’s lower demand. This just changes to pumping less at night, more during the day, and generating when it’s dark and/or wind isn’t blowing.
I hadn’t heard of “run of the river” pumped hydro before.
Nuclear could have helped us transition to renewable energy if we had started building some 30 years ago when we knew CO2 was an issue. Start to build one now is just a waste of money and resources that have a better ROI when spend on solar/wind/hydro combinations.
For sure. The real political problem is that the fossil fuel companies have enormous political power. As much as we could reduce carbon emissions quickly, we are not going to. Luckily renewables are cheaper now and the vast majority (over 90% in the US) of new energy sources are renewable, but without closing fossil fuel plants there’s going to be a lot more burned.
I’m being completely serious here, but I don’t think you understand what basic logic is.
Here’s a hint: When I use that term, I’m not talking about the entire topic. I’m referring to only very specific points that you have made.
Here’s an example: When you say stuff like “We don’t know if small modular will work” and I say “My argument has nothing to do with that” our disagreement is not a content-based one. It is a logic-based one.
I think this is a general problem with anything that has a long lead time. I’ll bet 30 years ago people were saying, “Bah, nuclear. We need power now! Ain’t nobody got 10 years to wait” It’s short-term thinking.
A different way to look at the same fact pattern would be say that we made a mistake then by not thinking ahead and we’re making the same mistake now.
I hear solar and wind are cheaper when there’s storage…but there isn’t storage. We can’t store their energy currently at a reasonable efficiency. That’s why the heavy majority of North America’s grid energy is made up of nuclear and hydro.
We aren’t making the same mistake now. We know how much a nuclear plant costs and how much a solar/wind farm costs now and how long it takes to build each one with the same capacity. You are better off building the solar/wind farm. This was not the case 30 years ago. Of course we are doing neither and we are still building coal and gas plants all over the world.
This is one area where I think it starts to get political. Depending on what source you read you get wildly different methodologies and estimates on costs. For example, it’s not hard to find stuff like this:
Dutch living in Sydney and just back from a trip to Europe. Australia is terrible with renewables. There is enough sun, wind and hydro options to get rid off all coal plants but coal plant closures get challenged all the time by the coal lobby.
As for nuclear. Any nuclear plant should include the cost of nuclear waste storage and dismantling the plant. They include it for solar and wind costs as they get replaced at least once during the life of a nuclear plant. Any calculation saying nuclear is cheaper does not include these costs.
And the USA does a s***** job disposing of nuclear waste. I don’t know about australia. There are containers of nuclear waste that are 3 in thick sitting on the beach near San Diego just rusting away and they are too fragile to be moved. In Germany the same kind of containers are 18 in thick and not just lying on the beach.