I'm 100% convinced there is an oil/coal lobby conspiracy here. Nuclear used to cost $3000/kw in the fucking 80s, still does in China.
America needs 700GW of Nuclear power for 100% nuclear energy AND to charge EVs. That's just $2.1 trillion to COMPLETELY decarbonize both energy and transport. That's 3 years of military budget, we could have done this 40 years ago :agony-consuming:
For the UK, even assuming a conservative $5k/kW cost of construction, it would cost $250 billion to fully nuclearize the electricity grid. That's 1% of the GDP over 10 years. This 1-2% over 10-15 years figure applies more or less to all developed countries.
There is ample evidence of coal/oil interests frustrating nuclear power construction through sockpuppet environmental NGOs, lobbying to hamper nuclear development, anti-nuclear propaganda etc.
Here are 5 reasons why capital doesn't want nuclear:
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Nuclear is structurally unprofitable. It requires massive initial capital investment, and there are very little running costs to profit from. Nuclear power has never been profitable anywhere, BUT IT DOESNT MATTER. It is still massively beneficial to humanity. It is living proof that profitability is not the only metric for a better society, and in fact can actively hamper building a better society.
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Nuclear lasts 60-80 years, modern designs could even last 100 years. Coal, Oil and even wind turbines, solar, need continual gradual replacement. See why fossil interests support wind and solar, and oppose nuclear? It's better for them to have a constant stream of revenue. :capitalist-laugh:
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Virtually all reactors are owned by the state, for reasons of profitability. Nuclear is a socialist source of power, private corporations HATE that! There is a reason why China is going all in on nuclear. The Soviet Union also was planning on making nuclear it's primary source.
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Resource extraction industries also extract rent, i.e super profits (according to Ricardian theory of differential rent). Uranium is a tiny fraction of nuclear costs, can't have that, gotta get that oil/coal/gas rent.
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Solar/Wind requires trillions in energy storage, that's another massive cost to humanity, but for capital - a massive source of profit :capitalist:
Edit : China built a 6000MW nuclear power plant for $10 billion. At that cost, it would cost USA just $1.2 trillion to go full nuclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangjiang_Nuclear_Power_Station
With current battery technology, there isn't enough lithium in the ground to run the world on wind and solar. I'm not comfortable relying on technology that doesn't exist yet to decarbonize, so critical support for nuclear.
(I am aware of pumped storage. It's inefficient and relies on specific geographic features that aren't available in many places.)
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This is true, but there are some people on this site who are completely opposed to nuclear. My comment was more addressed to them. I'm not in favor of abandoning wind and solar to pursue only nuclear.
My biggest problem with wind and solar is that they still require fossil fuels to construct. Plastics, chemicals, etc. With nuclear it's just in the concrete and controls, stuff that should last for a long time because it's in an air conditioned building and being constantly maintained without exposure to the elements.
the main problem with fossil fuels is when you burn them, so extracting them only to use them for plastics and chemicals to make solar panels doesnt contribute to climate change any more than any other industrial process would.
You should look into redox flow batteries: https://youtu.be/CSawQl8Lf1Y
They certainly have potential
China coming in hot with an 800MWh station
But there is enough sun. I think you could theoretically power the world with solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, particularly since those together are basically the origin of all energy on Earth anyway. And there are different battery technologies too.
I agree with critical support for nuclear, but we could go completely "clean" if we actually cared enough.
The problem with wind and solar is that the sun isn't always shining and the wind isn't always blowing. You need batteries, or some other kind of energy storage, to use that energy when and where it isn't being generated. We don't currently have the battery technology to store enough energy for everything to be run on wind and solar. Like pumped storage, geothermal is geographically restricted.
We can go completely "clean" eventually, but decarbonizing as soon as possible should be our main priority.
Well, the Sun IS always shining over most of Earth at any given point. You COULD, just as an example, have a network of cables to transport power from major solar farms around the world. Whether that is the best approach, I don't know. But it could be done. You could also do a mix of something like that and batteries. And then on top of that, you could do a mix of lithium batteries and other types of batteries.
You can't move power over distances after a certain point without room temperature superconduction. Modern power transfer tech runs into physics causing loss due to imperfect conduction and voltage needing to go so high it spontaneously ignites nearby objects.
If you theoretically had an excess of energy, couldn't you convert some of the electrical energy into mechanical energy (or thermal, etc) then back into electric? Obviously the energy loss would be high, but if you really had an excess of energy, you might not care.
Also, you might not need a room temperature superconductor if you were sending the energy over a wire deep in the ocean (which is considerably colder than room temperature), though they did recently discover the first known room temperature superconductor (obviously nowhere near the point yet where it could be reliably produced and used in any sort of application.)
You need superconduction because current conduction tech isn't good enough to transfer power over vast distances, and there isn't a way to efficiently harvest lost heat energy. It isn't an economics / capitalism thing, it's just physics to have more and more evenly distributed power generation systems.
This site has a heavy ML tilt so ofc they're big fans of nuclear power, and nuclear is good, but you need state violence to keep the radioactives safe. Solar power is a much more anarchist form of energy because it allows a large degree of independence from centralization.
I'm no expert on how far power can reasonably be supplied across long distances, but I'm sure if this were a practical solution for the duck curve problem, it would be at the front of discussion instead of energy storage.
I'm not so sure. I think a solution that necessitated long term infrastructure investment and planning, involved sharing resources, was super globalist in nature, threatened oil companies, etc etc might encounter a few headwinds that aren't just technological/physics based.
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Nuclear plants solved this problem ages ago. You literally just pump water up a hill with your energy surplus and when you want the energy back you run it back down through a turbine. Or, if you want to be marginally more efficient, do it with something more dense. Like lead ball bearings or blocks of granite.
Wind and Solar energy conservation can work the same way. You don't just need lithium to store energy.
You can use near-frictionless flywheels. Or generate hydrogen/oxygen gas via Electrolysis. Or dump the surplus into desalination plants to generate abundant fresh water, that you can then run through electrolysis machines. Or finally build that space elevator everyone's been asking for and use it to launch matter into orbit. Or just run steel smelters 24/7 and generate a massive surplus of useful materials.
Like, there's no such thing as "too much energy" in the modern economy. "Oh no! What are we going to do with this periodic energy surplus!" is a thing no sane macro-economist says.
Gravity batteries (fancy weights underground with pulleys and gears attached) outclass all of these except flywheels and pumped water storage in most cases.
Well, now I fell down a rabbit hole on Gravity Lights. Thanks.
Those are extremely good too, so you're welcome.
Every home should have a gravity light.