When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that's also very much part of American branding.
Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.
Today, there is 413GW of nuclear capacity globally. Of that, 57GW is in China.
China plans to reach 300GW of nuclear capacity by 2035. Assuming linear growth, that number will be around 550GW by 2050 (more than double the current global nuclear capacity) There are currently 57 nuclear power plants under construction. 21 are in China. 1 is in the US.
This US pledge is basically useless.
It's not bad, its just bullshit. None of that shit is going to happen, and if it does happen, it'll be China leading the charge not the US.
Personally don't like China, but I will say when they want shit done they get it done.
Nuclear power isn't bad. I used to be anti-nuclear energy because of the specter of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and Fukushima. But learning more about it, there haven't been many actual problems with nuclear energy.
Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement and arrogance. 3 mile happened because of a malfunction. Fukushima happened because of mismanagement and failure to keep up safety standards in case of natural events.
These are all things that can be mitigated to one extent or another. it's much cleaner than other forms of energy, outputs way more than solar or wind, and with modern technology can be extremely safe. I think we should be adopting nuclear, at least as a stopgap until renewable tech reaches higher output in efficiency.
Kinda annoyed that these investments are going into foreign countries, when we are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas. We should be building them here first to mitigate our own ghg contributions, then helping smaller countries build theirs.
I do still have concerns about waste removal and storage tho, but I'm sure we could figure that out if we actually wanted to. But I doubt we do, because "dA cOsTs" or some shit.
Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we'd be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we'd have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I'd read the heck out of it.
Anyone still worried about the safety of the method is an ignoramus. "Dying slowly to lung cancer and the environment cooking me alive is so much better than the one-in-a-billion chance of having to eat some prussian blue"
Waste removal is my biggest concern. Unless the plans to expand also come with ways to recycle the waste, we're just setting ourselves up for giant exclusion zones throughout the globe, most likely in small countries where the plants are imposed on them by foreign economic powerhouses and then they're told to figure the waste out themselves.
Not to mention "just bury it" is neither futureproof nor is it good for the non-human inhabitants of our planet; sure if those concrete containment cysts in the desert ever fail it will "only" be leaking radiation into the desert, but any desert is still home to hundreds of species of living things and its own complex ecosystem. "Desert" doesn't actually mean "devoid of life"; there are no good locations to bury it and forget it.
Let's talk about the absolute devastation mining rare materials does to ecosystems and the exploitation of third world countries that it's led to. We're already implicated in so much violence against the earth itself and colonialist exploitation, and I'm supposed to support gods know how much more of that for Uranium from Kazhakstan (45% of the worlds' production in 2021)? That's basically begging for more forever wars over energy resources in the middle east.
"We'll figure out long term solutions after the infrastructure is put in place" is how we got to where we are with fossil fuels AND landfills.
I'll fully support any plans to make a push toward nuclear, but the foremost concern of that push should be waste recycling. After that's figured out, everything else is small potatoes. It would even make the long-term costs cheaper than fighting for new material and figuring out million-year half-life hazardous waste disposal. A nearly unlimited energy supply that doesn't fuel wars and is safer than the current system? Sign me the fuck up.
2050? They probably know this shit isn't going to happen and just put it out there to make it look like something is being done.
Next they'll say that fossil fuels will be phased out by 2075.
Nuclear power is good imo. Batteries are not a viable solution to the intermittency problem of renewables, you need that baseload
It's not often I agree with you guys, but this is one of those times. If we're aiming to reduce out energy usage we are going to seriously limit ourselves for the future. We need lots of renewables with a strong baseload (nuclear), because energy usage is most likely only going to go up. Especially if we want to get into vertical, local farming and stuff like that.
Good point, you should also look into bringing the world population down to less then 100million.
It's actually supposed to undergo fluctuation. Less this year more next but theirs a minimum based on houses/hour. Unfortunately you can only go up as the population increases.
