5 ms·

We do not have power storage facilities to run the globe off renewables, theoretically yes we could, but it is sort of depending on the tech improving in certai

We do not have power storage facilities to run the globe off renewables, theoretically yes we could, but it is sort of depending on the tech improving in certain areas or large scale reservoir projects which themselves will take a decade or likely more to put into operation. Nuclear power is something we could have been running off right now, and something we know is feasible to build within or sooner than the same time spans that full renewable rollout will take. Not to mention it would allow us to shut down all these ancient ass reactors we got going now which is the equivalent of driving around in a Model-T because we can't be assed to get a newer car. I love renewables, but we still have a long ways to go in scaling renewables to not only provide global power demands, and we also need to be using ass tons of additional clean power just trying to stabilize the environment and sequester CO2.

epistasis 5y ago
> Nuclear power is something we could have been running off right now, and something we know is feasible to build within or sooner than the same time spans that full renewable rollout will take. If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life. What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct. This is the crucial road block to nuclear. There are lots of places begging for nuclear to be built, but it never works out, and causes tremendous disaster for all involved in construction. The two "success" stories are China and Russia's Rosatom, but it's unlikely that we could have them construct reactors in the US and succeed. For a while it was hoped that South Korea could build for the rest of the world, but it has become clear in recent years that there was corruption at the root of their inspection process. As for storage, it is getting deployed all the time, mostly in conjunction with new wind and solar installs (called "hybrid" in the field). It is unlikely that we could scale any sort of nuclear construction to catch the coattails of storage now, we are rolling out dozens of GW per year currently, and that will go up by a factor of 10 by 2026, and another factor of 10 by 2031, with an expected 10-30TWh of storage production annually. Nuclear can't scale like that.
- goatlover 5y ago
  > If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life. And how much less CO2 would have been put into the atmosphere over that time period? Also, if we had scaled up to produce that many nuclear reactors, don't you think we'd be invested in new and better ones coming online? Or at least until solar and wind can solve their storage and transmission issues.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    We'd have extended our carbon budget quite a bit. However we must act now with our current best abilities. We do not have time to wait for the the nuclear construction industry to improve productivity to meet our current needs. And for that matter the construction industry has been stagnant in their productivity as a whole since the 1980s, not just the nuclear sector.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct. It's definitely feasible to construct and run, it's just that folks are scared to run nuclear power. France has a _lot_ of nuclear power but only started dialing back after Fukushima scared them.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    No, it is not feasible to construct in the modern world. France has been trying, and failing miserably. I'm begging that anybody who believes that nuclear is possible to construct today, to look at any of the many places where it has been attempted: any of the French EPR or the AP1000s in the US. It has been abandoned by all, except for a few startups working on small modular reactors. These had been avoided in the past because it was thought they could never be as economical as the large reactors that we can't construct today. And even before that, nuclear was abandoned in the US not because of TMI or Chernobyl, but because it had been a financial and managerial disaster: https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-reference-nuclear.html?m=1 https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-... Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?

epistasis 5y ago

> Nuclear power is something we could have been running off right now, and something we know is feasible to build within or sooner than the same time spans that full renewable rollout will take. If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life. What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct. This is the crucial road block to nuclear. There are lots of places begging for nuclear to be built, but it never works out, and causes tremendous disaster for all involved in construction. The two "success" stories are China and Russia's Rosatom, but it's unlikely that we could have them construct reactors in the US and succeed. For a while it was hoped that South Korea could build for the rest of the world, but it has become clear in recent years that there was corruption at the root of their inspection process. As for storage, it is getting deployed all the time, mostly in conjunction with new wind and solar installs (called "hybrid" in the field). It is unlikely that we could scale any sort of nuclear construction to catch the coattails of storage now, we are rolling out dozens of GW per year currently, and that will go up by a factor of 10 by 2026, and another factor of 10 by 2031, with an expected 10-30TWh of storage production annually. Nuclear can't scale like that.

goatlover 5y ago
> If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life. And how much less CO2 would have been put into the atmosphere over that time period? Also, if we had scaled up to produce that many nuclear reactors, don't you think we'd be invested in new and better ones coming online? Or at least until solar and wind can solve their storage and transmission issues.
- epistasis 5y ago
  We'd have extended our carbon budget quite a bit. However we must act now with our current best abilities. We do not have time to wait for the the nuclear construction industry to improve productivity to meet our current needs. And for that matter the construction industry has been stagnant in their productivity as a whole since the 1980s, not just the nuclear sector.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct. It's definitely feasible to construct and run, it's just that folks are scared to run nuclear power. France has a _lot_ of nuclear power but only started dialing back after Fukushima scared them.
- epistasis 5y ago
  No, it is not feasible to construct in the modern world. France has been trying, and failing miserably. I'm begging that anybody who believes that nuclear is possible to construct today, to look at any of the many places where it has been attempted: any of the French EPR or the AP1000s in the US. It has been abandoned by all, except for a few startups working on small modular reactors. These had been avoided in the past because it was thought they could never be as economical as the large reactors that we can't construct today. And even before that, nuclear was abandoned in the US not because of TMI or Chernobyl, but because it had been a financial and managerial disaster: https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-reference-nuclear.html?m=1 https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-... Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?