First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
$35 Billion dollars. That could have been used to place solar arrays and batteries on approximately 1.5 million houses. If they did that, they wouldn’t need all the reactors at all. With investments in promising storage innovations, it makes more and more sense to decentralize and give power to the people. The boys at the top don’t like that idea though. They want to keep you under their thumb.
You need a schedulable power source if you want to fully replace carbon. A lot of batteries with super high capacity (that may exists in the future) could stabilize solar enough, and a lot of solar arrays may give enough power, but in summers you you will be forced to throw away some of the energy, which is a big waste. And this is an hypothetical scenario, nuclear is a technology that already exists, we could have decarbonised decades ago using nuclear. -> Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that we should rely on nuclear power alone, but we should first cover the base energy load with nuclear, then use solar and wind for the rest
I’m definitely all for some decentralization, but our power grid would need to be overhauled drastically to support solar/wind at a large scale. A cloud going over a bunch of solar panels, for example, is a massive engineering problem and can bring down a grid temporarily.
Our tech just isn’t ready to go full steam ahead into renewables. Storage tech will be a large step closer, but remember the scale we’re talking about. I understand that investing in renewables invests in research, but I fail to see how nuclear isn’t the off the shelf answer.
Cheap - sustainable - steady power - thorium reactors are even renewable. Modern designs and computers make nuclear disasters far less likely (to the point where it’s not really a valid concern). Nuclear waste isn’t even as big an issue as people believe. Most of the waste can just decay on-site. The Boring Truth About Nuclear Waste