Sadly I see no other viable alternative. Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources, have a massive footprint, and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather.
>"All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades."
No risk of accidents is an impossible standard. I know this will sound snarky, but, if you agree with the idea that the danger of climate change is existential, affordability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Especially when you consider that a big factor as to why Nuclear is so expensive today is because we don't build them anymore, outside of places like China and India, which already have nuclear weapons.
We pull 700 million tonnes of oil out of the ground every year. The resources required to build a clean energy infrastructure is significantly less than that.
> have a massive footprint,
Powering the US with solar requires a smaller footprint than footprint of parking lots in the US. Wind is even less because while a wind farm is massive, it doesn't prevent the land from being used for other things.
> and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather.
Hitting 99% renewables is straight forward. You get above 90% if each solar plant is overbuilt enough to handle a cloudy day and has enough batteries to handle a single day/night cycle. This isn't expensive, it only roughly doubles the cost of your plant.[1] Interconnect a bunch of those plants along with some wind will get you the next 9%. Then use a gas peaker for the last 1%.
1: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
Overground storage quickly goes more expensive than nuclear.
Putting solar farms in a desert is an attractive idea and way less impactful than covering hillsides in green and temperate areas. My understanding, though, is that the transmission of all that energy is the real issue. You can build a giant solar farm in the Mojave desert but distributing it to farther parts of the U.S. is a problem.
I also believe the amount of land we would need to convert to solar would be mostly be newly developed land. We probably wouldn't be converting already productive and utilized land.
A pessimistic scenario for Germany requires about 2.5% of the area for 100% renewable energy with today's technology. In a very densely populated country not exactly blessed with loads of sunshine hours. Taking into account the possibility of dual use (PV on buildings, wind turbines on farmland etc) we'll probably use about two times as much land for renewables than we use for cemeteries. It's very manageable.
No, you can't just pave desert with panels and magically solve power generation without ugly environmental consequences, that doesn't work even in computer games.
Why would putting all the panels in a desert do that to a rainforest on a different continent?
And how much of the Sahara do you think we’d need to cover in PV if for some strange reason we didn’t put any on rooftops, brownfield land, parking lots, car bodies, and (for most of the world) closer deserts?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area%20sahara%20%2F%20%...
(And the other person was actually saying electricity, which is what WA is inferring in that calculation)
So, like storage for renewables?
Seems to me, we're not concerned on R&D budgets, so we should pursue all relevant methods of decarbonisation, of which nuclear is a very promising one.
Oh, and while we have lots and lots of people and know-how in renewables, battery tech and transmission technology. We don't have that many people who can build reactors, due to the anti-nuclear trend of the last three decades. You can bemoan that, and maybe building up nuclear during that time would have been a solution to climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that even if we wanted to build hundreds of nukes today, we would lack the specialists.
Meanwhile c) we are working on getting paper designs for storage that might or might not work to get renewables good enough.
The starting point is vastly different.
Just curious, why do you think so? I do think this should be the case, but I just don't see it happening.
In the planetary scale, paying a few $10bns or $100bns is nothing, especially against the backdrop of global warming damage. I don't think we should skimp on researching nuclear in this context, "because renewables are cooler".
I think we need a new "nuclear Trinity project" (only this time for energy generation!) or a SpaceX-type enterprise. Iterate, build a simple, single, safe design, and deploy it widely. Or fail, but not without trying.
Stuff tends not to work out in practise. It costs more, it's unreliable etc.
If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?
> why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?
You may be inclined to wonder why there is so much nuclear waste at all. After all, we could just melt it, dilute it into a slag with a bunch of silicon, cart it off to a boat and dump it into a deep ocean trench if we wanted to be safely rid of it. But we don’t want to be rid of it. It’s extremely expensive to produce and extremely valuable, and any permanent solution for storing nuclear waste needs to be reversible in case we ever want it back for reprocessing.
Because naysayers have had a dominant influence over nuclear policy since Chernobyl.
More on this: https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV
Nuclear had its chance, and it failed to deliver. It's a failed technology. It didn't work out, and it was never as cheap or as reliable as people wish it was.
Take away gas turbines and other fossil sources, and without magic pie-in-the-sky, renewables leave you with rolling blackouts and broken grid.
Until we first agree to shut fossil fuels down, talk about fossil fuels alternatives being "too late" is advocacy to continue burning fossil fuel.
While we would indeed need to process seawater at an enormous scale, that becomes necessary after roughly 24 times longer into the future than the first nuclear power plant is into the past, which is when the non-seawater fuel runs out. This is too far into the future to make realistic predictions about technology or industry.
As for it being too late to stop global warming: well yes, but because that ship sailed some time ago. As is said of various things and time periods, the best time to do it was a few decades ago, the second best time is today.
The bigger problem is the political viability, both internally and internationally. How does Iran ever use nuclear power when every reactor is destroyed by an Israel afraid that Iran wants the atom bomb?
But, instead of thinking of it as all or nothing, think of the reactors than can be built as storage or intercontinental power grid capacity that doesn’t need to be built, or at least that we don’t need on the same time frame.
Right now, solar is doing what nuclear promised and failed to deliver for costs; batteries, while cheap enough to make electric cars interesting, are still more expensive for shifting day production to night load than just using nuclear to start with, and my preference of a global power grid needs a few decades to build even with (unrealistic) zero political concerns. All of this can probably be helped with nuclear.
https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
And yes, solar farms are bigger than nuclear plants. That might be a problem in Singapore, but a few hundred square miles of solar farms is not a big deal in a country with 3.5 million square miles.
Now consider that Boston is on similar distance from North pole as Spain, and not everywhere has huge swaths of unused land conveniently stripped of natives.
And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hundreds of billions of tons of sea water every year, even if we disregard the fact that most seawater isn't easily accesible.
But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late. Even if we managed to build nuclear reactors faster than at any other time in history, we would be far too late to stop climate change.