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Completely disagree with this assessment. Storage is the key problem. There are no easy solutions and you need scalable capacity that can quickly spin up in the
by thewarrior 6y ago
Completely disagree with this assessment. Storage is the key problem. There are no easy solutions and you need scalable capacity that can quickly spin up in the mean time. Otherwise you’ll have to build some sort of crazy world wide energy internet that won’t be finished in time to beat climate change.
- epistasis 6y agoI agree that storage is the key challenge. But it's a lot easier for us to build storage than it is to build new nuclear. In the time it takes to build new nuclear, we can build two consecutive generations of battery factories. We do this all the time, lots of different companies are building battery factories, and they never get delayed or abandoned due to inability to build. Nuclear, even if we were happy to throw all the money we have at it, is not a climate solution because it can not be deployed quickly enough. In addition to its economic costs in terms of labor and materials, it has huge time costs, and it's now too late to try to build something that may or may not be able to scale. We have zero examples in the West of being able to build nuclear in a scaleable manner within the past 30 years. It's all failure after failure. And the only reason that any utility has tried again is 1) regulatory capture to put all the economic risk on ratepayers, and 2) intensive lobbying of utility executives to make the bad economic decision to try nuclear once again. SMRs are literally the only hope for nuclear in the US, and even their best predictions don't look that great.