Nuclear is very expensive, which means it needs to be run for a long time to make up for the initial investment costs. There are not very many places where you will be able to have enough cooling water for 3 to 5 decades that is not on a coastline. However, if you build on the coast you have to build with 50 years of sea level rise, tsunamis and flooding in mind. All of that adds to the already high costs.
Cover everything with solar, build up on and offshore wind, improve existing hydroelectric and invest in geothermal, make the grid larger with more grid storage, and if you still need more energy sources then add nuclear.
Yes, I don’t think people realise the scale of production involved. We’re currently producing about 8500 TWh of power with renewables annually (nuclear is about 2600 TWh), and adding about 585 TWh of renewables per year (this is steadily increasing). A typical nuke plant generates about 8.5 TWh annually, so we would need to be building 68 new nukes every year to keep up with renewables (at current renewable numbers). The cost and construction time is massively prohibitive for nuclear, uranium mining is pretty dirty and there’s some downsides of nuclear waste at present. Yes, there’s some emerging tech but we won’t be building many of those for some time to come.
It seems unlikely nukes are a practical path to any significant contribution to new generation required and they will continue to fall behind. They can help but they’re not the magic bullet many people seem to think. Solar, wind and hydro will dominate in the medium term. I think they will ultimately make way for geothermal to dominate, maybe via plasma deep drilling like Quaise or PLASMABit utilise to potentially make bores up to 20 km deep, which opens much of the world up to being suitable.
Fusion may become practical in the next 20 years or so, but that will also be ludicrously expensive, so also unlikely to make a meaningful contribution in the medium term either.
Ideally, I think you’d want to use hydro and geothermal first, because they are local resources that can be built with relatively low overhead, and where you can’t, just spam nuclear (assuming it is within the country’s capabilities), with a massive storage-infrastructure-stabilized (preferentially offshore) wind and solar kickstart. Classical renewables have the advantage that you can build up capacity efficiently, and we are definitely on a timer here.
However, the real world is a little bit more complicated, so I think really we should just take what we can and not overthink it too much. Functionally, there’s no single, clean, silver bullet energy source.
This is half of what we should be doing for power. The other half should be nuclear.
Nuclear is very expensive, which means it needs to be run for a long time to make up for the initial investment costs. There are not very many places where you will be able to have enough cooling water for 3 to 5 decades that is not on a coastline. However, if you build on the coast you have to build with 50 years of sea level rise, tsunamis and flooding in mind. All of that adds to the already high costs.
Cover everything with solar, build up on and offshore wind, improve existing hydroelectric and invest in geothermal, make the grid larger with more grid storage, and if you still need more energy sources then add nuclear.
Yes, I don’t think people realise the scale of production involved. We’re currently producing about 8500 TWh of power with renewables annually (nuclear is about 2600 TWh), and adding about 585 TWh of renewables per year (this is steadily increasing). A typical nuke plant generates about 8.5 TWh annually, so we would need to be building 68 new nukes every year to keep up with renewables (at current renewable numbers). The cost and construction time is massively prohibitive for nuclear, uranium mining is pretty dirty and there’s some downsides of nuclear waste at present. Yes, there’s some emerging tech but we won’t be building many of those for some time to come.
It seems unlikely nukes are a practical path to any significant contribution to new generation required and they will continue to fall behind. They can help but they’re not the magic bullet many people seem to think. Solar, wind and hydro will dominate in the medium term. I think they will ultimately make way for geothermal to dominate, maybe via plasma deep drilling like Quaise or PLASMABit utilise to potentially make bores up to 20 km deep, which opens much of the world up to being suitable.
Fusion may become practical in the next 20 years or so, but that will also be ludicrously expensive, so also unlikely to make a meaningful contribution in the medium term either.
Ideally, I think you’d want to use hydro and geothermal first, because they are local resources that can be built with relatively low overhead, and where you can’t, just spam nuclear (assuming it is within the country’s capabilities), with a massive storage-infrastructure-stabilized (preferentially offshore) wind and solar kickstart. Classical renewables have the advantage that you can build up capacity efficiently, and we are definitely on a timer here.
However, the real world is a little bit more complicated, so I think really we should just take what we can and not overthink it too much. Functionally, there’s no single, clean, silver bullet energy source.