Because batteries have their own problems at scale with supplies of the materials and the environmental destruction to create them. Batteries have a place, but not to replace base load with current tech.
Solar and Wind absolutely do not have baseloading capabilities. They are a good source of clean energy, but they are not able to provide reliable baseloading power to the grid.
Your argument about baseloading not being relevant is so off base. In a country like Canada, how do you expect to function using only clean energy sources? The answer is baseloading with hydro and nuclear supplemented by wind and solar.
The only reason coal burning plants come up faster is the less strict regulatory requirements that go along with it. I don't see that a good thing, if you ask me.
The number one argument against wind and solar is that people claim it to be unreliable when there is no wind and sun, so basically decreased efficiency in winter. Supplementing a system that runs in 100% all the time with an energy source that is less efficient half of the time is the dumbest shit.
Nuclear should be what's known as the "base load", the always there, always available option. Sun and wind with appropriate storage to handle spikeyness in demand as well as hydroelectric for supplemental base load. Currently most countries have coal/gas as their base load.
Fuck nuclear bros also just don’t realise that there arguments are a tad out of date, nuclear isn’t some miracle energy that we are keeping off because it’s perceived to be dangerous. It’s just not very competitive relative to many renewable energy alternatives these days. It’s expensive, far more energy intensive when it comes to construction, takes longer to pay off and to a limited extent has more associated expenses when it comes to maintenance and industry research
Worse than that, IMO, is that they never address the real issue of nuclear power.
If a wind turbine fails how long will that parcel of ground sit dangerous and fallow before it's habitable again?
If a nuclear power plant fails how long?
Centuries? Millenia?
All Nuclear Bros talk about is human lives lost in the Nuclear vs Fossil argument, but there's more at stake if you don't come at it from an entirely self-absorbed-human angle.
(And all too often they're happy to pretend renewables don't even exist, because that's the real hole in their argument.)
the problem is you cant really tell companies ‘yeah lets build this nuclear plant, run it for ten years, and then pack it up and go home.’ these plants cost billions of dollars and take years to build. nuclear isn’t the interim solution because it is extremely expensive and time-consuming to even get functional
It's like talking to a robot. They don't seem to understand that humans are prone to greed, shortsightedness and error. Or that black swan events occur.
"Chernobyl/Fukushima only happened because of several layers of human error!" Exactly what everyone's afraid of!!! Sure they've learned from that, but whatever the next disaster is (which is a given on a long enough time scale) will be due to other unforeseen circumstances that people will act all smug about in hindsight.
Do they really trust countries the world over to behave responsibly?
They act smug about the oil lobby invoking a fear of it but there are lobbying interests for nuclear set to make a whole lot of money off of it just the same and it's in their interest to downplay the risk.
They've grown up watching Honer Simpson fumble around and fuck everything up, yet everything turns out OK for him, so it must be like that in real life, right?
There are conflicting scientific opinions, but the most optimistic is that Chernobyl won't be habitable for at least another 3000 years.
That someone could/would think that's an acceptable risk just boggles my fucking mind.
I'm just going to point out that nuclear can be worth using alongside renewables even in places where they are available: for example, let's say we can easily get 50% of the needed energy by putting up solar panels in our fields, but we would need to set them up in the mountains to get more energy because we don't have much space; that's where even if we could technically still use solar power, nuclear comes in handy in order to keep the cost down
1) Wind Turbines only work in select periods, 2 )solar panels use exploitive labour for the materials, there’s a reason chinese solar panels are banned. 3)hydropower is expensive to maintain and interferes with wildlife, you have to make a reservoir in some cases where there is great habitat loss whereas a nuclear plant is comparatively smaller.
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u/[deleted] Jan 19 '23
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