This is the best comment in the thread and it's somehow being downvoted.
Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.
Taking the view for a moment of somebody who thinks we won't have a solution until we have plenty of nuclear power,
> the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis
In that particular sense, it's not a crisis: if you think N megadeaths will occur in time T as a result of climate change (making no comment on that because I don't know much about N as a function of T), there are still (10000 - N) million humans around at time T to suffer from lack of a solution. In that situation, it doesn't make sense to say "it's a crisis, so a solution that helps after time T can't possibly help"?
So for people who think that we won't have a solution until we build a lot of nuclear power, the slogan "climate crisis" seems likely to badly damage those 10000-N million humans because it gives us an excuse to never solve the problem. People could reasonably disagree with the antecedent ("won't have a solution until we build nuclear"), but I hope you see a bit how the other side sees it?
Greetings from an ex-Physics grad student on the other side by the way! Other side both of this debate and of being a grad student I suppose. Have a nice day over there :wave:
have you noticed how the mythical future where the bulk of energy is supplied by wind and solar is always at an indeterminate point in the future? There is currently no gigawatt scale power grid anywhere in the world that supplies more than 20-30% of annual energy from variable energy sources like wind and solar.
Meanwhile, France enjoys a low carbon grid together with low energy prices as do many parts of Canada, parts of eastern europe and so on.
It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.
Look no further than South Australia with a 65.7% renewable utilization for the 2021. Sure you can shift the goal posts to include total energy usage instead of simply electricity, but that also makes it easier since now you have a whole load of possible smart consumers in for example the transportation industry.
With the exponential lowering of the costs of wind power, solar and storage that band should increase every year right?
South Australia sits at 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.
Based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.
This is not even considering that closer to the poles the wind resources are much better, especially in winter time.
The 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.
With the exponential lowering of the costs of wind power, solar and storage that band should increase every year right?
South Australia is 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.
So now based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.
This is not even considering that closer to the poles have much better wind resources, especially in winter time.
So, the 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.
Is it? This adds nothing to the discussion. If it were actually 50% and i claimed 30%, that would be a distinction worth pointing out.
Since we are being pedantic, you should really look up the figures for energy share from wind in 2021 in Ireland. It fell to 29% which completely negates your claim of it growing rapidly.
> It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.
I am framing it as carbon vs no carbon. A new nuclear plant's timeline to carbon-neutrality compared to the counterfactual where an equal capital investment is made in solar/wind is well over a decade. Given the time crunch we are on to lower emissions, I simply do not think we have the time to waste building new plants. That said, we should not be decommissioning plants that are still operable.
I realize that you won't be impressed, but 20% of electricity in Texas came from wind in 2019 (plus 1% solar) [1].
Texas has been building wind and solar like crazy since then, such electricity in Texas in 2021 was 24% wind + 4% solar [2].
Texas is building 6.1 GW of solar in 2022 and 3.8 GW of wind [3]. So that indeterminate point in the future where ERCOT is more than 30% wind+solar is probably 2023 or 2024. It might even be 2022.
Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.