It’s a tricky thing, but renewables and nuclear fission plants are not two mutually exclusive things that can’t coexist. The issue with renewables is that, right now, they are not consistent enough to be relied upon 24/7, and we don’t have, right now, a good enough storage technology to solve the issue.
Without this, the only other option is to have renewables cover 30-50% of the production capacity, and another technology to provide a base capacity when renewables cannot be used. This can be hydro, if you have it, nuclear, gas or coal. Choose your poison.
Nuclear can absolutely produce power on demand, once the reactors are up and running. I just wish we would have invested in molten salt reactors that cannot meltdown back when we invented them in the '60s. Of course you also can’t make weapons with those reactors, or the isotopes that we need for modern medicine.
We can’t entirely get rid of nuclear power because of the aforementioned isotopes, but I would be very happy to see all the for profit reactors shut down permanently. You cannot safely run a nuclear reactor when you care about profit.
Oh and those molten salt reactors are why China is probably going to start selling nuclear waste disposal services to the rest of the world in about a decade once they turn the ones they are currently building on.
There’s some promising research in using heliostats (mirrors to direct sunlight) towards a central tower to create molten salt, allowing solar energy to be stored and released at night.
It’s a cool idea, but has not worked well in practice. The plant referenced in the 2016 article you linked (Crescent Dunes) stopped operation in 2019 due to performance and cost issues. It appears to have restarted after the original owner filed for bankruptcy and sold the asset, but at a lower capacity.
It did start back up though. And we don’t know if further research could bring the costs down. I’m not proposing it as a magic bullet, just as one potential way to get nighttime coverage.
Putting all the eggs in the solar basket has risks, too. Like a large volcano eruption that reduces the amount of light that reaches the surface for a few years would be a double whammy, affecting food production as well as electricity production (which we’d need to rely on to try to offset the food losses). If we’re instead facing brownouts or full blackouts, that’s a recipe for a complete loss of stability. I suspect less solar energy reaching the surface would also reduce total wind energy (less localized heating would mean lower pressure differentials, but I could be missing other significant parts of this equation).
I’d be most comfortable with a nice mix of energy sources combined with mothballing instead of decommissioning some capacity as renewables are able to take over more and more of the day to day energy needs so that we’re prepared to deal with an emergency like that.
I’d also like to see more food production moved to vertical farms that can be powered by electricity rather than relying entirely on the sun and weather. But I do understand that the scale of food production would make doing that with a significant portion of the food supply very difficult. But with climate change (plus nutrient depletion of the soil), keeping so many eggs in the “just keep farming” basket also doesn’t seem like a great idea.
It’s a tricky thing, but renewables and nuclear fission plants are not two mutually exclusive things that can’t coexist. The issue with renewables is that, right now, they are not consistent enough to be relied upon 24/7, and we don’t have, right now, a good enough storage technology to solve the issue.
Without this, the only other option is to have renewables cover 30-50% of the production capacity, and another technology to provide a base capacity when renewables cannot be used. This can be hydro, if you have it, nuclear, gas or coal. Choose your poison.
This!
Problem is not producing electricity, problem is producing electricity ON DEMAND. That is something only Fossil fuels can do for now.
Nuclear can absolutely produce power on demand, once the reactors are up and running. I just wish we would have invested in molten salt reactors that cannot meltdown back when we invented them in the '60s. Of course you also can’t make weapons with those reactors, or the isotopes that we need for modern medicine.
We can’t entirely get rid of nuclear power because of the aforementioned isotopes, but I would be very happy to see all the for profit reactors shut down permanently. You cannot safely run a nuclear reactor when you care about profit.
Oh and those molten salt reactors are why China is probably going to start selling nuclear waste disposal services to the rest of the world in about a decade once they turn the ones they are currently building on.
There’s some promising research in using heliostats (mirrors to direct sunlight) towards a central tower to create molten salt, allowing solar energy to be stored and released at night.
It’s a cool idea, but has not worked well in practice. The plant referenced in the 2016 article you linked (Crescent Dunes) stopped operation in 2019 due to performance and cost issues. It appears to have restarted after the original owner filed for bankruptcy and sold the asset, but at a lower capacity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project
It did start back up though. And we don’t know if further research could bring the costs down. I’m not proposing it as a magic bullet, just as one potential way to get nighttime coverage.
Putting all the eggs in the solar basket has risks, too. Like a large volcano eruption that reduces the amount of light that reaches the surface for a few years would be a double whammy, affecting food production as well as electricity production (which we’d need to rely on to try to offset the food losses). If we’re instead facing brownouts or full blackouts, that’s a recipe for a complete loss of stability. I suspect less solar energy reaching the surface would also reduce total wind energy (less localized heating would mean lower pressure differentials, but I could be missing other significant parts of this equation).
I’d be most comfortable with a nice mix of energy sources combined with mothballing instead of decommissioning some capacity as renewables are able to take over more and more of the day to day energy needs so that we’re prepared to deal with an emergency like that.
I’d also like to see more food production moved to vertical farms that can be powered by electricity rather than relying entirely on the sun and weather. But I do understand that the scale of food production would make doing that with a significant portion of the food supply very difficult. But with climate change (plus nutrient depletion of the soil), keeping so many eggs in the “just keep farming” basket also doesn’t seem like a great idea.