It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.
Also, because it's a global problem, the solution has to be something that everyone wants to have, and that everyone wants everyone else to have too, which means we have to care that what powers Iran is green and also Iran will care about not triggering another airstrike from Israel fearing it's a secret atomic bomb project.
PV in particular is also useful for being a continuous roll-out, so even if it worked out at exactly the same cost/joule as nuclear and taking exactly as long to reach the same final total average power output, getting the first joules sooner displaces more of the existing CO2 emissions.
Far more compact than batteries, wouldn't compete with other large scale transitions like electric cars, and would work even during either a week-long blizzard, tornado, or hurricane.
Batteries offset the power needs from dusk to dawn, but most solar farms do not build capacity for extended (multi-day to week) outages. A single tornado let alone a hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind capacity. Containment domes on nuclear reactors by contrast wouldn't even blink at these kinds of natural disasters.
We need solar. We need wind. We need geothermal. We need hydro. And we need nuclear to completely eliminate most fossil fuels from our energy cycle. We need some of all. Diversification in energy sources is a good thing.
I strongly disagree that everyone needs the same solution. Some nations are extremely rich in wind while others are most devoid of it. Nations like Iceland have a ridiculous surplus of energy due to geothermal resources. Some nations have easy access to hydro while most don't.
The US produces over 37 billion metric tons of CO₂, making the U.S. responsible for 14% of global emissions on its own. Regardless of what other nations do (and I hope they continue toward de-carbonization), the US must take an aggressive role in reducing its fossil fuel emissions.
As for domestic production of electricity, we are already out of sync with countries like Iran, regardless of what Israel does or does not do. We have 93 nuclear power plants. Iran has 1. The nuclear power (and weapon) genie is already out of the lamp. That said, Israel (and Iran) have other options like PV and especially solar thermal. They exist in a region where thermal masses could be used to great effect without concern.
We absolutely, positively do NOT need every nation to get their power from the same sources. We only need them to get that power from sources other than fossil fuels.
Yes I know.
Counterintuitively, this makes it politically worse, as people can imagine a football field much more easily than approximately the mass of Mt. Everest in CO2 every 5 years.
People :P
> Far more compact than batteries,
Yes but irrelevant; assuming 20% efficient cells at 10% capacity factor, you can store 36 hours of output in a (~10cm~ edit: 1mm)[0] thick layer of battery under each cell (not that one should put the cells there, this is just for a sense of scale).
> wouldn't compete with other large scale transitions that need batteries like electric cars
True in some senses, false in others; they're both competing for the same investment money.
> and would work even during either a week-long blizzard, tornado, or hurricane.
Kinda, depending on the details. There are weather conditions that interfere with safe running of nuclear plants, and in the other direction if you have a large power grid (so all of North America except Texas), the blizzards and hurricanes don't affect the whole zone anyway.
> Batteries offset the power needs from dusk to dawn, but most solar farms do not build capacity for extended (multi-day to week) outages.
For now, sure; but that's a choice to go for low-hanging fruit first rather than an obligation.
> A single tornado let alone a hurricane could wipe out gigawatts of solar or wind capacity.
That sounds like a problem with planning permission or construction if the plants can't cope with wherever they happen to be installed.
> Diversification in energy sources is a good thing. […] I strongly disagree that everyone needs the same solution.
Absolutely agree. Even the fact that the average combined price of PV+LiIon being comparable to nuclear hides the variation in both (and those are just two options).
> the US must take an aggressive role in reducing its own fossil fuel emissions within its borders, since those are the only emissions we can directly control. Diplomacy and economic incentives can only go so far across international borders, but building an maintaining ties overseas is obviously of great importance for that reason. None of this "America First" crap.
Yes indeed.
Thing is, I'm not American, so my perspective here is "appealing to American politicians only works if you can tell them what's in it for them", and a big part of that is jobs for people in their state, and that is something I can't map on to any particular power source…
but I'll leave that to others, politics is so not my thing.
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=20+watts+*+36+hours+%2F...
> That sounds like a problem with planning permission or construction if the plants can't cope with wherever they happen to be installed.
It appears you do not live somewhere with extreme weather. How do you plan to protect hundreds or thousands of square meters during events? Is there some kind of new glass? Panels made of unobtainium?
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-...
As the Earth heats up, weather events like this will become more common, not less. It's not just a matter of the world's thermostat going up or down, truly destructive natural events already happen in these areas and are poised to become worse.
> There are weather conditions that interfere with safe running of nuclear plants
Yes, BUT those weather conditions will not substantially damage the plant itself, and soon after the extreme weather event is over, it can start delivering power again in short order (provided the power lines were buried and not on poles, but that's indeed a planning issue).
If 80% of the panels in a solar farm have been rendered inoperable due to hail, even after the event is over, you're looking at a long-term outage with the erosion of public goodwill that goes along with that it in regions of the country that are already skeptical of the government's ability to get stuff done.
No, thank you. I want something that can provide base load no matter what.
Yes, every other year thanks to the phone market.
We also have transparent aluminium (oxynitride) now.
Not there this should be a particularly hard challenge relative to "people live in these places, do their roofs and windows survive?" (even if you have to use shutters, NDB, do that for the PV also).
There's also the option to have transmission lines and can put the panels elsewhere in the places without whatever… and they already exist and are in place: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wide_area_synchronou...
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Whew! That's a relief. Too bad about those phone repair outlets though that are basically out of a job due to these unbreakable screens.
> There's also the option to have transmission lines and can put the panels elsewhere in the places without whatever… and they already exist and are in place
That hailstorm that destroyed the solar farm in Nebraska? Yea, that was just last month. You have a very odd impression of the state of the US power grid and its current power production let alone most places in the world. I wish I had your optimism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride
> That hailstorm that destroyed the solar farm in Nebraska
I had to look that one up, because Nebraska has about x3 as much capacity in HVDC converter stations from the 70s and 80s as it does total statewide grid-connected PV (which is one of my points, the one I can rephrase as "put it elsewhere if it's really that bad").
> The Scottsbluff project features […] hail stow capabilities from Array Technologies. While it's unclear if the asset's hail stow program was activated during the weather event, damage to the face of the modules indicates it was not.
- https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/solar-farm-pelted...
So again, like I said, solutions are known, even if not actually used.
That’s not how things work. It’s tempting to view money in such simple term but also very wrong. In effect, the state has a lot of leeway in how it decides to invest and a lot of conservative positions are taken to preserve the overall status quo when it comes to who has power and who hasn’t.
National scale investment like the power grid are not subject to the same kind of rules that classical investment because the state can and do print money. For all the bad things I have to say about the Inflation Reduction Act for exemple, it will result in significant investment in renewable with money which for all intent and purpose appeared out of thin air (with all the impact this will have on the overall equilibrium of the economy).
You could have at the same time have a comprehensive investment plan for nuclear and renewable without one significantly impacting the funding of the other. The US would be labour and knowledge limited long before it is capital starved.
The good experience effects of renewables and storage implies we should go full speed ahead installing them. The side effect of pushing down their prices makes this the most cost effective approach overall. Nuclear, which doesn't have good experience effects, is a different story entirely.
If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.
We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.
Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes.
Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.