Adding nuclear is more expensive than wind/solar _right now_. Not in a hypothetical future but as of this very moment. We know because the UK government has decided to subsidise a new nuclear power plant as a low carbon must run for the future. That is on track for generating electricity in 2025. So I'm not exactly buying the "added capacity per year" stats there as terribly relevant for now.
China is ramping up investments in renewables (including crucial grid strengthening measures) and hasn't approved a nuclear power station in two years (as of beginning of this year, I haven't heard if it has resumed building them now).
Again, I'm not ruling out that nuclear has a role to play. But most of the lobbying for nuclear seems to be based in an instinctive dislike of wind+solar rather than in facts. Nuclear is terribly expensive and there really is a waste problem (even if CO2 is clearly the more severe problem).
> Adding nuclear is more expensive than wind/solar _right now_
Indeed, wind and solar can produce power very cheaply nowadays, which is awesome. We should definitely build more of them. OTOH, due to their variable nature, their value to the grid reduces as their penetration increases, so it's a race of declining costs vs declining value due to increasing penetration.
Nuclear, being somewhat dispatchable, doesn't suffer from this.
Given the magnitude of the climate crisis, IMHO we should build about every low-carbon source we can, as fast as we can. Including wind, solar, and yes, nuclear.
> China is ramping up investments in renewables (including crucial grid strengthening measures) and hasn't approved a nuclear power station in two years (as of beginning of this year, I haven't heard if it has resumed building them now).
Additional investment in transmission lines and sector coupling is politically more viable and cheaper, and already that is stalled. So I'd rather push for that. (Plus we avoid a massive scale waste problem). Let existing ones run as long as possible, and if China or other countries want to go for the nuclear option, great! I'm simply objecting to the idea that that's the only/easiest/optimal option.
The variability of renewables is of course a well studied problem [1] and exactly why, after a certain point, we need transmission capacity (or, more expensive, local storage). The variability averages out on large scales.
Honestly, I don’t even like nuclear power. I just see it’s track record in expanding availability of carbon neutral energy sources. To me, going all in on solar and wind and potentially running into scaling issues down the line after abandoning nuclear energy seems more risky than the waste issue in nuclear power. Also, as I noted in another reply, I think we need a carbon tax to correct our accounting for the different energy sources. After that, if we start lots of different experiments and find that there really are no issues scaling wind and solar, I will be overjoyed at being proven wrong.
A global carbon tax in 1990 would have avoided a lot of the mess we find ourselves in. As it is we don't have the luxury of implementing one. Even something as weak as the Paris agreement hinges on one election in the US. A globally enforceable carbon tax is much much less feasible than universal cheap fusion power.
That said, we are in the middle of the experiment you are talking about. Renewables are cheaper now than new nuclear, despite nuclear having received a massively larger amount of subsidies over the years, there are still many parts of the world that are building nuclear so it's not like we're losing the technology, but really, there doesn't currently seem to be a good reason for building new nuclear.
Let me put it another way, a relatively small island like Ireland is going to be capable of going 100% wind/solar relatively soon. They are not strongly connected to the EU grid. Smaller disconnected islands already have gone 100% renewable. So we will have plenty [1] of test cases of increasing size as we ramp up renewables. Conveniently, electricity is also much more expensive on small islands, so it's also economical to test every technology you want to bring to maturity there first.
If we find that beyond a certain size it doesn't work we'll have a decade of warning before we hit that wall with the big continental size grids.
You make good points. I just don’t think we have the luxury of leaving ourselves in a position where burning fossil fuels might remain more economical than carbon-neutral alternatives. A carbon tax seems the only way to get around that. I agree that a carbon tax remains unlikely, which is why I spend most of my days in a depressed and anxious haze for the future :)
But maybe a group like the Citizen’s Climate Lobby can pull something off (they suggest using the revenue of the tax as a monthly dividend for all citizens. Never underestimate the power of a monthly bribe in generating consensus in the American public).
China is ramping up investments in renewables (including crucial grid strengthening measures) and hasn't approved a nuclear power station in two years (as of beginning of this year, I haven't heard if it has resumed building them now).
Again, I'm not ruling out that nuclear has a role to play. But most of the lobbying for nuclear seems to be based in an instinctive dislike of wind+solar rather than in facts. Nuclear is terribly expensive and there really is a waste problem (even if CO2 is clearly the more severe problem).