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Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot m

Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment. It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.

Muanh 6y ago
Ignoring the fact that we don't need 5-10 year development for batteries. You are ignoring the 5-10 year build time for a nuclear reactor.
- jnxx 6y ago
  Five years is extremely optimistic. The Finnish Olkiluoto plant might go on line in 2022 and then it would have had a 22-year development time. Starting such a project today this would mean it finishes around 2040. And this was planned with "conventional" nuclear technology and knowing well all the difficulties such a construction entails. That would perhaps be in time to power a kind of cold house museum to show our children how Earth has been looking before runaway climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... Proposing new technology which is sure to run longer smells to me a lot like to suggest doing nothing in order to avoid change that is both absolutely urgent, and totally possible now.
- manfredo 6y ago
  There exist no feasible plan to build out the storage required to make renewables work within 5-10 years. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity every day. About 500GWh every hour. We have about one Gigawatt hour worth of battery storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. The availability of battery storage remains off by several orders of magnitude.
jnxx 6y ago
There are a lot of things which are already employed, like generating hydrogen by electrolysis and feeding it into natural gas storage and gas distribution networks. This is not a full solution but works and is being used in Germany now. Also, we will need many transition technologies to make every step ecomonical, it won be a single technical break-through.

Muanh 6y ago

Ignoring the fact that we don't need 5-10 year development for batteries. You are ignoring the 5-10 year build time for a nuclear reactor.

jnxx 6y ago
Five years is extremely optimistic. The Finnish Olkiluoto plant might go on line in 2022 and then it would have had a 22-year development time. Starting such a project today this would mean it finishes around 2040. And this was planned with "conventional" nuclear technology and knowing well all the difficulties such a construction entails. That would perhaps be in time to power a kind of cold house museum to show our children how Earth has been looking before runaway climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... Proposing new technology which is sure to run longer smells to me a lot like to suggest doing nothing in order to avoid change that is both absolutely urgent, and totally possible now.
manfredo 6y ago
There exist no feasible plan to build out the storage required to make renewables work within 5-10 years. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity every day. About 500GWh every hour. We have about one Gigawatt hour worth of battery storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. The availability of battery storage remains off by several orders of magnitude.

jnxx 6y ago

There are a lot of things which are already employed, like generating hydrogen by electrolysis and feeding it into natural gas storage and gas distribution networks. This is not a full solution but works and is being used in Germany now. Also, we will need many transition technologies to make every step ecomonical, it won be a single technical break-through.