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.
Hi, pro-nuclear here,
That’s the eventual ideal, but energy storage technology isn’t there yet. The biggest issue facing renewables currently is the ability to maintain a base load demand that is increasing faster and faster each year.
Currently, the cheapest way we have to store energy is to store it chemically, in the form of coal, petroleum, or fissle fuel. Of these, the fissle option is by far the best. It’s by far the most energy-dense, doesn’t release any carbon into the atmosphere when used, and the amount of waste it produces is dangerous, but miniscule in comparison. All the high level waste ever produced since the late 50s could fit in a single building.
It’s not realistic to fully replace everything with renewables until some very difficult engineering problems are solved. So our choices right now are:
Pros: getting cheaper and more efficient but worse than current tech, no carbon pollution
Cons: experience more power failures as it cannot meet current energy demands
Pros: very cheap and very efficient
Cons: accelerate climate change, increase pollution
Pros: can easily meet base load demands, very efficient, no carbon pollution
Cons: expensive, special waste management is required.
As things stand now, I would like to replace aging petroleum power plants with nuclear while continuing to build more and more renewables. Then, once we’ve either found a way to reduce energy demand or improve storage, start to phase out the nuclear plants
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Yeah, I suppose it is. Although I would argue leaving the waste to future generations is definitely not what we’re doing. Basically, we’re just putting it in a deep hole. Once that underground storage is full it never needs to be opened again. There isn’t any shortage of radioactive elements underground that exist naturally, creating a man-made radioactive pocket deep underground isn’t all that different.
The power that gets sent out over the grid does a lot more that charging your iPhone or powering your computer. For example: Electric vehicles(including public transit) relies on it, food preservation relies on maintaining constant refrigeration which would lead to even more food waste, and if a hospital loses power for even a couple minutes there are real lives at stake.
The absolute worst of the waste is done being waste within about 300 years. I’m talking about the cesium and strontium.
Everything else that comes out of that reactor can technically go back in as fuel after a little reprocessing/breeding.
But that’s illegal now due to fearmongering in the 70s.
About 95% of what comes out of a reactor is uranium. One percent is plutonium. The rest is a mix of cesium, strontium, iodine, xenon, and a mix of trace elements that are there, but decay too fast to even begin to capture.
I’ve got an old video of the full breakdown. It includes how much those elements sell for in industrial/medical use.
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I’ve got an old video of the full breakdown
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We could do the alternative and leave a dead planet to future generations.
Look, we all agree that renewables are the future but they are still the future. Build nuclear now and we can slowly wean off of that. Nuclear waste is a much more manageable problem than “crops no longer grow”.
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The problem is that while personal renewables exist, they’re still pretty expensive and are largely untested at scale. We’re in that stage that computers went through in the late 90s, where it’s an expensive investment that is likely to be obsolete before the year is over.
Not many people would be excited to spend ~$30K outfitting a building with solar panels, turbines and batteries only to learn that they need to be replaced in 2-3 years.
The technology is promising, but it’s not ready for mass adoption yet. We need a stopgap
Agree. I’d wager the average joe would only invest in personal renewables if it was cheaper to run than paying an electric bill in the short term, was just as efficient, and was easy to install. Otherwise we’d be adding even more e-waste to landfills.
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One big con often goes unmentioned: nuclear reactors take at least a decade to construct, often longer and they are really expensive along the way.
We don’t really have time for that. We could do it in parallel to spamming as much solar and wind as we can, but in reality, more nuclear plants sadly mean less solar and wind.
Doing both sounds like a great way to finally put the reserve bank into action