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this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Why not use one of the safest and cleanest ways of producing power?
The wind doesn’t blow all the time, neither does the sun shine all the time, and not everyone is around thermal or wave sources.
Battery tech is coming along, and we are building more gravity batteries, but nuclear can close right in and replace most fossil fuel plants.
New reactors are expensive. New reactors are late. New reactors can basically only be built by nation states but not privately. Nuclear is not insurable. Nuclear produces waste with excessive half-life. Nuclear steals resources and mindshare from other options. Nuclear energy output can't be moderated well (basically for economic reasons, it runs full steam all the time and for safety reasons, you can only moderate output a little), so it does not effectively augment wind and solar, rather leading to wind/solar having to be turned off.
Wind and solar meanwhile can be built cheaply, quickly, privately, locally, site sizes easily scale between kW or GW of output and they only produce a little regular waste at the end of their life. (Okay, granted, Neodymium mining does produce some nuclear waste too — but definitely nowhere what uranium mining produces.)
Wind+solar+hydro+better national/continental grids+batteries+flexible demand is a much better combination.
You’re right that is a great end game
I was very pro nuclear but in the past few years, solar+batteries have become cheaper than nuclear. We can go 100% solar + batteries for less than building nuclear and save the uranium for important things like spaceflight.
It's not just the financial cost though. Going solar+batteries requires a significant increase in lithium production which has all kinds of environmental downsides. New battery tech is in the world to use just sodium and such but we're nowhere near large scale for that yet. Nuclear (alongside other technology and reducing our power usage) could bridge the gap to the new tech.
Either way, good luck getting anyone in charge to agree on anything, let alone that hurts their coal and gas profits.
Lithium production has dramatically less environmental impact than coal mining.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
Sodium just went large scale grid installed:
https://cnevpost.com/2024/05/13/china-1st-large-sodium-battery-energy-storage-station-operation/
But for grid, even ancient nickel iron batteries are fine. Lithium is only needed for mobile device (car/bike/laptop/phone).