Quote:
Originally Posted by grizy
Unreliable renewables are environmental disasters in their own right. Nuclear is really our best option (that doesn’t involve undeveloped technologies.) Solar and wind are great under favorable conditions but they can’t provide base load power reliably, at least not without huge costs, much of which will be borne by the environment.
This is true even if you use stuff like hydro storage or whatever you consider “natural.” We are talking about a lot of giant, and permanent, holes in mountains to store a fraction of the power a nuclear plant could generate in the same area.
While I do not doubt for a second the existence of climate change due to greenhouse gases (The effect of carbon dioxide can be replicated in the lab), what makes me raise an eyebrow of skepticism of whether or not it is an existential threat is the fact that essentially every nation that claims to be addressing the "existential threat" is putting its eggs primarily into the wind/solar basket.
Start with the fact that never in history there been an energy transition from sources of greater reliability and greater power and energy density TO sources which are less reliable and offer less power and energy density. Solar and wind fail miserably to fossil fuels on each of these standards. Then when you compare wind/solar to nuclear energy, the comparison becomes laughable.
All the storage plans for wind/solar struggle as well. You start with an inherently low power and energy dense source. Then you have to deal with whatever inefficiencies of storage that exist-and inefficiencies exist for all of them. These inefficiencies only serve to amplify the problems associated with lack of density.
More human intervention and more land use to capture less energy is regression. This is the base of the environmental problems associated with solar and wind. Their footprint is huge. They do not represent progress, and their problems cannot be fixed.
People like President Obama's Energy Sec Moniz and Deputy Secretary Koonin recognize this and try to warn, but for their trouble they get branded as heretics.
Just me, but if climate threat were truly an existential threat to humanity, some nation by now would have embarked upon a crash program to convert as much of its electrical generation as possible to nuclear by now.