Nuclear is also a good option. It has the potential to scale up to our generation needs faster than green energy, and it can still be environmentally clean when any byproduct is handled responsibly.
Do I trust my government (USA) to enforce proper procedure and handling? Not really… but I do think we’re less likely to have a nuclear accident in the present day. Modern designs have many more fail safes. And I think it’d still be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I think they need to coexist, though. I think a goal in the far-future should be a decentralized grid with renewable energy sources integrated wherever they can be.
Basically the one nation I would have most trusted to handle nuclear safely, Japan, couldn’t even do it. The issue these days is not that the plants themselves are unsafe, it’s that we live on a active and changing planet, and accidents can and will always happen because of so-called acts of God. The problem is that nuclear, when it goes bad, tends to go mega ultra bad in ways that are very environmentally destructive and heinously expensive to clean up. So even if there is only 1/10000 the accident rate at nuclear plants that there are at other power plants, the consequences can be a million times worse.
Love me some Thorium! It doesn’t address every natural-disaster type of concern as far as radiation leaks and environmental contamination, but is absolutely the better choice over Plutonium/Uranium in terms of meltdowns and nuclear waste.
Humans would never cheap out on health and safety, or reduce regulatory red tape just to try to bring costs (and maybe, though less likely, prices) down.
Unheard of.
Would you feel better about nuclear if we expanded these rebreeder reactors I’ve heard of (uses spent nuclear waate) to the point there is no spent fuel sitting around?
yeah if we could not stick shit in the ground that remains deadly for thousands of years, with containment solutions designed to last 20-60 years, that would be great. But we just keep pretending this stuff is cleaner than it is because we’ve learned how contain the waste safely for about a single human lifespan. But just read about the slow-motion disaster that are the US nuclear superfund sites and you’ll see that you can put off the consequences of this waste for so many decades before it comes back around. And there is no waste-free nuclear tech at this point, just less wasteful.
Sure hydro is a lot more pilotable, or better yet, batteries.
But actually, turning it off 100% is probably the least important property of pilotable plants : you almost never need that. What does matter, however, is that those plants can be engineered to generally follow the daily demand curve and France’s plants can do that at the rate of about 1% per minute.
Nuclear is also a good option. It has the potential to scale up to our generation needs faster than green energy, and it can still be environmentally clean when any byproduct is handled responsibly.
Do I trust my government (USA) to enforce proper procedure and handling? Not really… but I do think we’re less likely to have a nuclear accident in the present day. Modern designs have many more fail safes. And I think it’d still be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I think they need to coexist, though. I think a goal in the far-future should be a decentralized grid with renewable energy sources integrated wherever they can be.
Basically the one nation I would have most trusted to handle nuclear safely, Japan, couldn’t even do it. The issue these days is not that the plants themselves are unsafe, it’s that we live on a active and changing planet, and accidents can and will always happen because of so-called acts of God. The problem is that nuclear, when it goes bad, tends to go mega ultra bad in ways that are very environmentally destructive and heinously expensive to clean up. So even if there is only 1/10000 the accident rate at nuclear plants that there are at other power plants, the consequences can be a million times worse.
thorium is nuclear too… (and doesnt seem to have the same runaway problems!)
Love me some Thorium! It doesn’t address every natural-disaster type of concern as far as radiation leaks and environmental contamination, but is absolutely the better choice over Plutonium/Uranium in terms of meltdowns and nuclear waste.
Humans would never cheap out on health and safety, or reduce regulatory red tape just to try to bring costs (and maybe, though less likely, prices) down. Unheard of.
Would you feel better about nuclear if we expanded these rebreeder reactors I’ve heard of (uses spent nuclear waate) to the point there is no spent fuel sitting around?
yeah if we could not stick shit in the ground that remains deadly for thousands of years, with containment solutions designed to last 20-60 years, that would be great. But we just keep pretending this stuff is cleaner than it is because we’ve learned how contain the waste safely for about a single human lifespan. But just read about the slow-motion disaster that are the US nuclear superfund sites and you’ll see that you can put off the consequences of this waste for so many decades before it comes back around. And there is no waste-free nuclear tech at this point, just less wasteful.
Also you can vastly reduce the amount of battery capacity needed by having pilotable sources of energy like nuclear, hydro, geothermy and such
Except nuclear is not very pilotable. More than Solar or Wind. But can’t really be turned off either
Sure hydro is a lot more pilotable, or better yet, batteries.
But actually, turning it off 100% is probably the least important property of pilotable plants : you almost never need that. What does matter, however, is that those plants can be engineered to generally follow the daily demand curve and France’s plants can do that at the rate of about 1% per minute.