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2 days agovs basically no risk with renewables
Except for:
- the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so if the world decides to seriously shift toward renewables, it will lead to competition for the metals and other materials needed to build them
- the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so it takes a huge amount of oil to extract them (oil that we’re running out of)
- the fact that they require an enormous amount of space, so current NIMBY issues will increase tenfold
- the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours, and therefore a 100% solar + wind scenario is science fiction
In comparison, nuclear has been proven to work reliably and cheaply for entire nations, its problems are political and therefore way easier and realistical to solve than the law-of-physics related problems solar and wind need to solve.
Solar needs silver, tellurium, indium, gallium, cadmium and other things. Silver is already close-ish to become scarce, tellurium and gallium are for most part a China world-wide monopoly. Rare earth elements are needed in inverters and power conversion, and lithium/cobalt/nickel are needed for batteries needed by solar to be viable without a reliable power source. All of that will be in competition with EV and other applications.
And nope, the amounts involved are not minor if we talk about all country phasing out of both nuclear and fossil.
Nope. I mean as of today, and for decades to come the highly globalized production will be entirely dependent on oil. No oil: no ore mining, no manufacturing, no transportation, no installation, and therefore no wind turbines and no solar panels. And that’s before we even get to batteries and the power grid.
So in a world where peak oil has already passed, the price of everything that relies heavily on globalization will keep rising, including solar panels and wind turbines. And let me remind you once again that we’re still only at the very beginning of solar and wind power: competition among countries hasn’t even started yet.
So you might say that without oil, we can’t build nuclear power plants either, and that’s true. Except that with, say, 1 million liters of oil, we can generate far more megawatts through nuclear power than through solar and wind, because it requires far fewer resources and far less reliance on globalization.
It’s entirely dependent on oil. Nothing get produced without oil, and oil will get costlier and scarce year after year.
Also, we would need most of the entire world lithium reserve just to convert our cars from oil to electricity. Powering entire countries with batteries, which necessitate magnitudes more storage, is just science-fiction.
I mean, if I seriously start building gen II nuclear reactors in parallel, I’ll have a dozen by 10-15 years, and have almost entirely decarbonated my electricity by 20-25 years with more than 50 reactors. That’s feasible, France proved back in the 70-80’s, humanity is not not dumber and less capable than then.
But again, you can’t tell when/if you will ever find some storage technology that you can scale up to TWh for capacity, and GW worth of power input/output.
Batteries are not up to scale and might never be, and you would need like 5 of the Europe biggest STEP to cover capacity, and 15+ for power output just for France’s needs in a windless night in winter. We’re talking about 60-70GW over 14h. And that’s assuming you somehow have enough solar and water the next day to pump all the water back in 10h, to be prepared for the next night.
Also STEPs can’t be built anywhere, it’s highly dependent of the geography of the country. Some countries will need to rely on batteries exclusively, which again, are just plain science-fiction as of today.
Overprovisioning does nothing when sun is down and wind is missing over most of the continent, which will happen even more often due to climate change. Once again, just to hold a single windless night of winter in France, you’ll need close to a TWh of storage capacity, and 60-70GW of power output. And that’s without accounting for the remaining 2/3 of energy consumption that is still fossil-based and needs to be converted to electricity.
So yeah, you need a baseline of controllable power production AKA fossils, nuclear, or hydro. Fossils are out for obvious reasons, as well as biomass which is just Germany coping for its bad energy policies, and not all countries have access to hydroelectricity. So we need nuclear in the end.