Renewables are great, no doubt. I’m all for investing in those technologies. But even if cheaper, it seems extremely unlikely that there is no role for expansion of nuclear energy sources. That seems nearly as extreme as the position that we can solve everything with nuclear energy alone.
Germany turned its back on solar and then their chancellor ended up on the boards of gasprom and rosneft.
It doesn’t have to be that way. If someone built some shitty windmills, it wouldn’t be a great argument against using wind if we knew that good ones existed and could be built instead.
We probably could, it would just be more expensive and there would be a lot more nuclear waste. The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough energy.
It would just cost a lot more. Just like with fossil fuels, it’s a lot cheaper if you don’t pay for your externalities. Not that renewables have none, but a lot less.
I’m thinking of this on a global level so there aren’t really externalities. We’re all paying for everything in some way, shape, or form.
So what is the problem with the link I posted earlier? Did they not factor in waste storage cost? Or is it something else:
Well, according to Rugby we definitely can’t and if you think so, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.
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But I don’t care. Make people pay for their waste, including CO2, radioactive material, and old solar panels, and let the market decide. I’m suggesting though that you’d see a lot of investment in renewables and storage without subsidies and no one wanting to build an unsubsidized nuclear plant.
Nuclear is just not needed 15 years from now and that is the earliest you can get additional plants online even with full political and public support. We can be fully renewable by that time for less money again under the same condition of full public and political support. It is all hypothetical anyway as neither option has that support so we will continue to burn fossil fuels until we ran out of them or the population has declined so much we no longer need fossil fuels to generate enough electricity.
I have no problem with keeping existing nuclear plants active and extend their life if possible as their clean up costs are a sunk cost anyway.
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You have to pay when you produce and/or use the product. Paying for the carbon by being hot or for nuclear by getting cancer doesn’t count.
The externalities include waste and the expected ecological damage done by accidents (expected in the Sklansky bucks way). In my life time: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
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Yeah. Someone building a nuclear power plant should have insurance to cover that. That’d probably be expensive.
This is the part everyone seems to be glossing over. Is it actually cheaper? There are sources that suggest otherwise. But even if we set that aside. Can we really be fully renewable? So many of these renewable energy sources require things like rivers and abundant sunlight that may not be feasible everywhere. There are also issues like storage and ramp rate (which is admittedly a problem for nuclear power as well).
So, are you saying that if not for the clean up, nuclear would be cheaper?
Based on the chart from the link you showed only LTO is lower. Onshore wind and utility scale solar are both lower than nuclear. LTO includes refurbishing existing nuclear plants and not just new construction. I don’t know if they are appropriately counting waste disposal and any risk for thousands of years.
I don’t exactly disagree, I’m just looking at it from a different frame of reference. If we can get a ton of cheap energy buy dumping a bunch of nuclear waste in another country and giving a bunch of people cancer, then we shouldn’t do that.
But you’re right that humans gonna human, and there are real politicians and leaders who would do that.
They don’t necessarily dump it in other countries.
That was hypothetical. We can substitute ‘energy for rich people by dumping waste where poor people live (or can’t afford to leave)’ for a more realistic analogy.
It’s an absolutely perfect night in KC, baby. Believe it!
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Sure, not trying to argue. But those aren’t poor people in San Diego. They’ll even poison rich people.
No, but the rich ones can and will leave when it becomes apparent that they should.
Honestly, if I were one of them, I’d GTFO now.