Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star.
Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead.
I don’t think we have the time to wait on and expect breakthroughs anymore. A decade ago, sure, but if we end up having major issues with storage and don’t make those breakthroughs 10 years from now, and we start building nuclear plants then, we’re in for an even worse timeline.
Re: government support, sure. If this is a zero sum game and we have to choose one or the other, I’ll probably go renewable. From what I’ve seen, the zero sum mentality itself is the conservative trap. They keep us fighting against each other when we could just say “do both”.
When the IRA passed in the states, there was some amount of funding for nukes. Not a ton, but some. Yet there was skepticism of that, there were calls on the left to defund that among circles I frequented. Why? The support for nukes was much less than renewables and storage, and like an order of magnitude less. It was a hedge - keep investing in alternatives to renewables in case they don’t work out, because we don’t have a crystal ball. So why be divided on this?
The trap isn’t nuclear. It’s division and scarcity thinking. It’s zero-sum politics.
We aren't waiting for storage breakthroughs though. The current technology is good enough, cheap enough, and faster to build. And meeting the reaction times needed to use renewables correctly.
My understanding is that this is not the case for providing baseload to entire cities, and it’s unlikely to be the case as we increase energy usage (which has been spiking again, thanks to crypto and AI among other things). With current battery tech it would require massive amounts of lithium that would have far greater environmental impact, and still not really cover all needs. And other mechanisms, like stored energy (pumping water, spinning disks)are more theoretical.
I think I would be much more open to the argument once we have a full modern city converted at least partially to 80-90% renewables, with emergency services and other core infrastructure running off of storage instead of existing power plants. If we get there, then I’d probably stop saying we should invest in nuclear in parallel.
And to be clear, we should get there, if possible. We should push forward full throttle, because all of that innovation would be incredible, and I don’t want us to rely solely on one power source at all, be that renewables, nuclear, or whatever else. A smart strategy is have backups, which is why I think we should do both.
I agree with the end statement. We should be doing anything we can to reduce fossil fuels.
We need to think beyond lithium for grid storage. Lithium is great where space is limited as in a house or something similar. There will be multiple technologies that will provide storage on the grid.
I think the bigger problem for nuclear is reaction time. You need plants that can react quickly to compliment renewables. Storage is handling a lot of this but I don't know if nuclear could. It is my understanding that base load isn't really a thing.
Nuclear is cool. Has its pros and cons. I don't know if we should be pushing it so hard. It's too expensive, takes too long to build, and the decommissioning of a plant takes decades. I just don't see the future for it.
Hmm, I think of baseload as the following:
Some of these can be mitigated significantly, but some of these are just things that really can never be down and have to have like 99.999% reliability. As we electrify, I’m going to be looking at storage solutions for these things and seeing if we really feel confident in that up time and having extra reserves. Engineers usually over design, so if we expect to need like 0.1 gigawatts for a week for emergency services during an abnormal weather event, I would want to plan for 1 gigawatt for two weeks for instance.
If that can be done with storage, then that’s awesome, and once we start seeing that roll out widely I will stop advocating for the “do both” strategy.
