It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.
My point is globally. Globally we need nuclear.
the planet has a finite amount of uranium. It’s rare.
New nuclear power plants and current reprocessing can absolutely make this a non-problem. There’s plenty of radioactive material.
Australia has a perfect proposal -https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/2024/2024-integrated-system-plan-isp.pdf