For whatever reason, energy production seems to be about meeting demand, rather than finding use for surpluses.
Steel production require massive amount of energy, especially if you want to go coal free. Forest products also depend on cheap energy. An other area is concrete production.
After those I suspect it is food production. Read somewhere that fish farms on land is suffering in particular.
Basically any production dealing with raw materials.
I'm thinking, maybe we get to the point where we have lots of nuclear humming at a constant (ish) rate, and some much cheaper, but unreliable renewables. Can steel mills start and stop? Forestry, ming etc. work on the schedules of wind and sun?
Sounds tricky for sure. Especially because then, renewables will have to compete with marginal cost of nuclear (which is drastically lower than average, since it doesn't include the massive cape, fuel is cheap etc.)
The steel industry here try to build next to hydro, in areas where the price is relative low. The price point can differ by more than 100% when we compare the cheapest regions with the most expensive, for reason that has to do with transmissions. There is also experiments with hydrogen.
A few paper mills have cut down on employees, and in some cases shutdown the plants during periods of low wind.
Food production can't shutdown. A fish farm need to keep the water at a set temperature or the fish dies. Greenhouses that depend on artificial light can't just close down or the plants dies.
I would say that the answer is mostly a no. Short term some industries can adapt a little while waiting for the energy prices to stabilize, but long term it is a hard sell to have employees and building just sitting around.
Mining for materials, waste products, waste heat, noise.
Already have regular extended family complaining about the huge number of noisy shipping containers in their communities. These are middle of nowhere towns.
My point is we don't have them at a competitive price, and yet the renewables people insist we definitely well. We might, we might not.
The only way we can get there at a reasonable cost is via hydrogen energy storage. The other ideas are orders of magnitude too expensive.
For the UK, the solution might look something like this: https://hydrogeneast.uk/study-explores-uks-geological-hydrog...
Imagine if we had said that 40 years ago. We’d be talking about getting to net zero by 2075 instead of 2050.
Now we’re still waiting for renewables
The entire electrical generation industry knows all this. They know when clouds are coming and when wind will stop and model it all. Pricing information is sent ahead of time and plants know if they will be required to spin up or spin down well in advance. Especially something as simple as "everyone gets home at 6pm at a regular time every weekday". It is easy for plants with slow ramp times, such as nuclear and coal, to plan for that.
I agree storage is a problem, maybe not as big as it is generally made out, but even then, would I rather struggle with nuclear waste, or millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? The latter will lead to a planetary-scale disaster, the former at worst to minor regional ones.
Also, the dangerous isotopes are also the ones which decay most quickly. Let the waste sit for 300 years and it will be no more radioactive than the uranium ore it was originally mined from. At that point you can dump it back into the uranium mine, or else keep it anywhere else you think would be safer than an abandoned uranium mine, the risks are miniscule either way.
Nuclear is an amazing source of cheap and clean energy, but the problem has always been the management of Nuclear plants and waste that has resulted in environmental disasters.
I'm honestly not confident in anyone to handle the Nuclear properly, not private enterprise or government. As history tells us, nobody can seem to get it right 100% of the time.
Maybe advancement in technology means safer Nuclear plants and easier to manage waste, but maybe they thought the same thing when they built the Fukushima or Chernobyl plants.
History has a knack for repeating itself.
Citation needed. (Or in less polite words: stop lying, it doesn't.)
> waste that has resulted in environmental disasters
Have you ever seen a coal ash pond? Do you know how many there are? Do you know what is in them? (There are thousands, they are filled with arsenic, heavy metals and often radioactive waste, and they are all across the landscape.)
Have you seen how brown coal is mined? Obliterating entire towns and villages as a matter of routine? All waste by all nuclear reactors in the world would fit in a single brown coal open pit and would do less human and environmental damage...
Sorry, you are right, let me clarify my answer. Dumping of radioactive waste in Europe was prevalent back in the 80's, but the effects of this are still felt today. Just recently a large number of barrels were found in the Baltic [1]. Japan also has announced it will be dumping large quantities of radioactive material into the ocean, because they simply don't know how to handle the situation any better [2]. The Japanese government claims that they intend to make the waste safe, personally I wouldn't trust such a statement.
> Have you seen how brown coal is mined? Obliterating entire towns and villages as a matter of routine?
I never mentioned the environmental impact of burning or mining coal, nor did I claim it was any better or worse than nuclear power.
I'm highlighting that mismanagement of Nuclear has historically been a problem and I don't feel confident that those mistakes aren't repeated in the future.
[1] - https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/2800-ra...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/13/fukushim...
We started off with 100% of power generation being either fossil fuels or nuclear (+hydro etc. but these are minor for most places). As part-time renewables enter the stage, they take priority over the fossil fuel plants when they do produce, and simply go quiet when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine. We accept that, because we're fundamentally still in a fossil fuel energy mindset.
So what does the post-fossil fuel world look like, with a nuclear+renewables mix? Well, we have as much renewables as we'd like, but really (and here's the kicker) we also need enough nuclear for windless nights (or winter days which in e.g. Northern Europe barely count as daytime). So really, we need to be able to power nearly 100% of the economy through nuclear alone in those cases.
But then, that begs the question, do we still need the renewables at all? Right now it probably makes sense, because it lets you throttle back the fossil fuel burning, so is a net win. But if your baseload generation is carbon-free (at the margin anyway), it doesn't matter. You just don't need the renewables.
This is somewhat oversimplified, perhaps. E.g. the times when you are less likely to have wind and solar are at night, when energy use is lower (though will that remain the case when everyone's electric car is then charging?). Also, winters drive heating demand. Perhaps some small amount of storage makes a big difference; e.g. if we could store a week's worth of power, that takes us through all but the biggest troughs in power generation, and you need less nuclear (though again, not sure how that works with winters).
I'm not nuclear-crazy, if we could do solar+wind+batteries, why not. But I find the renewables lobby just says "yeah prices will fall, we will solve energy storage, just go all in on renewables, perish nuclear", which just seems like crazy wishful thinking. Whereas nuclear is always described based on 1970s technology and with the most exaggerated (un)safety numbers.