How about this. It’s ok to declare nuclear a failure once we actually make a serious attempt to do it in the first place.
The best time to focus on developing already invented renewable technology was over a decade before the first fission reactor. The second best time is now.
Nuclear has had trillions of public money and countless lifetimes of research spent on it. And cost trillions more in externalities. A tiny fraction of that investment that finally started getting spent in earnest in 2010 has overtaken 70 years of nuclear construction with the buildout mostly happening in the last five years.
It's not "too hard, don't do it" it's "stop trying to hold back the thing that's working to chase a failed dream".
Renewables like solar and wind don’t work at grid scale to supplant base load provided by fossil fuels without batteries. Regardless of the details, batteries have only just started to be able to be used for that, primarily due to smartphones and now electric cars increasing demand. You were never going to get there faster. And batteries, still, have terrible displacing base load because they’re not energy dense compared with fossil fuels. Oh, and batteries are NOT renewable, requiring strip mining precious metals that will get more and more expensive as easily accessible resources are depleted.
I have no problem with renewables and we SHOULD be investing in it. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear can turn generation on / off pretty quickly without issue. So the more renewables are able to provide, the less we run the plants (it changes the unit economics of course, but we should be ok running nuclear at a loss, and yet we insist it must be profitable). But we should be honest about the reality and the consequences of going down the route of renewables without nuclear. Battery technology is great and improvements go faster than nuclear. That’s for sure. But
a) it’s still veeeeery early days for grid scale batteries
b) batteries are tiny bombs with potential for runaway chemical reactions. As density increases and larger battery installations are made, those are essentially massive bombs and fire risks. I’m not sure that’s less risky vs nuclear unless it’s in the middle of nowhere. I would personally feel more comfortable living to a nuclear plant than a massive battery (eg look at why fly wheels aren’t used even though they have insanely better density than lithium ion and as battery density increases, I suspect you’ll just approach flywheel behavior). Radioactive materials by comparison are more stable outside the reactor.
Look. I don’t disagree that nuclear had challenges to handle. However, to me they seem solvable because necessity is the mother of invention and we know that nuclear can meet all the every needs of earth many many times over. That seems harder with batteries because it starts way further back and requires meaningful R&D advances to make renewables viable to maybe take on current energy needs.
And your FUD about cAn'T mEeT bAsElOaD is just false. Even with just existing hydro most countries can meet the overwhelming majority od demand https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Finally your point about meeting the world's needs many times over is also blatantly wrong. Existing designs run out of fuel almost immediately at a few TW, and the more burner reactors you build the longer your fictional breeder fleet takes to start.
- we dont have enough trained staff to build and operate them
- it takes 5-10years to build one
- we dont have infrastructure to supply them all with fuel and dispose waste (even new ones that can run on previous waste MSR)
- we are too divided as a spiecies and too occupied with worthless disputes (are you pink or blue? Yada yada)
Ppl at the top realized that they cannot stop changes, so instead are preparing for alternatives. We cannot stop it nor reverse, so all we can do is adapt.
There is not much place left to run to, so better get trained now to defend yourself and your family.
Ps. Yes, millions if not billions of ppl will die. Top does not care. It wont be them.
Ps2. To recapture CO2 we have all energy we need provided by sun. All we need is to reforrest half of the land globe.