But of course, you got the nukes so you needn't bother with paying for your share of the climate change damages.
Coal has a massive human cost in human health that makes it absurdly expensive overall.
Personally, I would like to see and end to coal and nuclear power.
But the nuclear power plant takes up to 2 days to startup. It's not sustainable for the daily life where consumption change every hour.
That's why there is the need for more agile power plant, where fuel, gas, and coal are suitable. Gas being the most agile but the less efficient, fuel and coal being used as the middle between gas and nuclear, depending of the price of each resource.
This is an engineering constraint before anything else.
Last I checked, the majority of the US's power comes from coal-fired power plants. If there was the political will and public understanding, we could likely replace pretty much all of that with nuclear plants, reserving coal-fired, or oil-fired (or pumped-storage hydro, or flywheel storage, or...) plants to meet peak power demands.
The European power grid is very tight and well-meshed, this is why we can let our nuclear power plant and sell electricity to Switzerland, Germany or Netherlands or buy it.
I guess it's not as well interconnected in the US, so that states can't easily lend power which disable the use of nuclear power plant for many states ?
I've -very recently- heard people making the claim that Texas has its own grid, but that's news to me. Maybe the situation in Texas is that they have all the power gen capacity that they need within the state, and are also hooked into the national grid. shrug
> I know heavy infrastructure like these often have a sound design respectively to their constraints (which can be absurd).
Anti-nuke hysteria is toxic to sound planning and design. :(
East, West and Texas.
It would makes sense.
> Obviously, throwing power across the whole damn continent is far less efficient than just throwing it across a state.
For now. With the future high-temperature supra-conductive cabling we will be able to do wonders of efficiency on large distance.
Sure, the whole process of storing electricity is lossy. Thermodynamics guarantees it. But the point isn't to try and store enough generation capacity to meet our demand. You just need enough storage capacity to deal with the peaks.
There is of course the argument of "pumped storage isn't practical for meeting all of our peaking demands". Of course it isn't. Neither is nuclear suitable for meeting all of our baseline demands. They are both just tools available.
/me puts on pedant hat and mad engineer jacket:
Are you sure about this? The US is huge and has an enormous amount of uninhabited space. If we covered -say- the north-western quarter of Nevada in the best batteries available today, would that cover base and peaking power during slack production time for -say- the surrounding states?
/me removes pedant hat
(Do bear in mind that I feel both that anti-nuke hysteria is hugely damaging to the planning and deployment of new nuclear power plants in the US, and that it's fairly clear that of the currently available non-hydroelectric base-load generation tech, nuclear power is the only good option. [Though, solar power beamed down from orbit is a really intriguing idea.])
But if you're really convinced this problem is unsolvable, lets just do this: we'll generate enough power (with fission, or whatever you want) to meet peak demand all the time. As long as we're near the coast there is a convenient way to get rid of all that surplus energy: desalination plants. I can think of a few areas that would jump at this idea, like California. Even if you wind up with too much freshwater, just start dumping it back into the ocean. The salt is generally worthless and is dumped back into the ocean. This will actually help offset the fact that the oceans are desalinating due to the ice caps melting.
Electricity prices will go up as a result of this, but you'll be subsidizing the fact that the grid is now greener as a result.
Stopping to 0% is not needed in normal load variation, thanks to toaster usage patterns.
The surplus could be used to pump water up damns or charge batteries. Or even to just pull co2 out of the air to compensate for car emissions.
It could provide very cheap night power for electric car owners. Worst case we could just waste the energy.
Once you accept that co2 emissions are an existential threat to the world, small inefficiencies are a small cost.
It is also true that
> When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly.
And yet, we don't hear people screaming to shut down coal power plants nationwide. We don't hear this, despite the fact that they are demonstrably more dangerous than nuclear power plants.
This is one of the reasons people are irked by folks who try to use Fukishima to claim that nuclear power generation is super-dangerous-mmkay.
I'm not going address your tsunami-deaths vs. radiation-deaths comment. A close and careful re-reading of ggreer's comment should help you to understand why.