The best way forward is to reject parts of the consensus Green approach. In particular, investment in nuclear, and a plan to augment wind+solar expansion with a large nuclear (and later fusion) buildout is the way to go.
The rationale for this is that only by raising the living standard of the third world can the world’s population be stabilized without a major die-off (not to mention a reduced quality of life for just about everyone going forward). Further, only with massive amounts of clean energy can we clean up the ecosphere and effectively fight atmospheric CO2 buildup as needed.
There are plenty of resources on Earth if they’re managed well. Only with plentiful energy can we afford to have treat the Earth as the precious resource it is - as we begin to inhabit the rest of the Solar System!
> The rationale for this is that only by raising the living standard of the third world can the world’s population be stabilized without a major die-off
I don't see how pumping billions of tonnes of heavy metal tainted sulfuric acid into the ground water of Namibia and Niger for Uranium royalties that are lower than the cost of cleanup and then putting them into debt they can't service for power stations that can only be fueled by their colonizers' nuclear weapons programs is related to increasing their standard of living.
Especially when the fuel source can only service the US primary energy for under a decade.
No, they hinder the goal because they will never provide more than a tiny fraction of the needed energy and building one would tie up immense amounts of resources that could electrify many more households and cause permanent outflows for interest on debt that can never be paid off and fuel that they are not allowed to make.
I have an idea for a program where I pour lead onto your food and loan you $100k but you can only spend it on preordering a sports car I sell that doesn't work on unpaved roads for $150k which can only be charged at chargers I own and if you do anything I don't like ever I'll just ban you from using my cars altogether. It won't explode iff you keep up with perfect maintenance and I'll be removing all of the chargers in 2060 (or 2050 if I get lots of orders). It may arrive any time between 2028 and 2040 or maybe I'll just cancel the order (but you still have to pay back the loan).
The alternative is you buy a LEV that charges itself if you use it less than 30 miles a day, can accept any charger and costs $30k but you have to find a loan yourself. It might fail to charge up to 20% of the time with a few days' notice if you don't buy the $50k deluxe package.
Then ban polluting lithium mining methods along with ISL uranium mining anywhere near an aquifer, open tailings ponds, anything to do with coal, and anything else with uncaptured externalities. Please and thankyou.
Storage and renewables can be achieved in a much more scalable, cheap, and less resource intensive way than nuclear without anything more scarce than chlorine (although rarer elements in manageable quantities make them more robust and even cheaper for now).
Even when nuclear power was enthusiastically embraced as the future it suffered from cost overruns, hidden and underestimated lifecycle costs, security problems such the possibility of a worse Chernobyl event as a result of an ongoing war, nuclear proliferation enablement, etc.
Blaming the resulting skepticism about nuclear on the "Green approach" is backwards: Fix the things that made nuclear expensive first. Demonstrate that the lifecycle works, from mining to waste handling. Show it costs less than putting the same capital into renewables and can come online in time to be relevant.
>Even when nuclear power was enthusiastically embraced as the future it suffered from cost overruns, hidden and underestimated lifecycle costs, security problems such the possibility of a worse Chernobyl event as a result of an ongoing war, nuclear proliferation enablement, etc.
And here we are on an oil-based energy economy suffering from cost overruns, hidden and underestimated lifecycle costs, security problems such the possibility of a worse Chernobyl event as a result of an ongoing war, nuclear proliferation enablement, etc.
I would gladly change the source of the energy as the effects seem to be the same besides atmospheric emissions.
Capital investment is fungible. If investing in renewables delivers more power to the grid sooner, then that is the optimal path to freedom from dependency on fossil fuels.
other than the giant one staring at us 93 million miles away beaming massive amounts of energy directly at us all day, fusion reactors otherwise don't exist. Maybe not throw away all the other approaches until they do?
Solar and wind have many issues. Intermittency, the need for rare earths, and low energy density leading to ecological impact are some. It’s also under-recognized that as those technologies are built out beyond a few percent of global power, supply issues will likely lead to large cost increases and potential scarcity. Then there’s the waste/recycling problem, which is worse than nuclear.
I also was clear that fusion is a future solution.
To add to this, for people suggesting that renewables are sufficient and that we should abandon nuclear for some reason or another, this report does a good job of motivating nuclear as a critical part of the solution: https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon...
Please stop. The raw materials for any type of nuclear reactor are vastly scarcer than renewables.
Iron flow batteries exist at grid scale for $200/kWh (enough to beat nuclear total system cost where 90% of people live with higher uptime) and dropping.
Copper metallized PV uses a manageable amount of copper and nickel (100s of kgs per MW net) and less silver than the control rods in a fission reactor. The dopants are measured in mg per MW and the rest is fancy sand. Inverters tend to be GaAs, but the amount is minimal and they don't need high performance power electronics to outperform nuclear.
Multi megawatt wind turbines with no copper windings and no permanent magnets exist at commercial scale, and all Aluminum cabling is ready as a dropin replacement as soon as the few dollars per MWh maintenance burden can he justified. Concrete and steel per MW is still significantly higher for wind, but a mix is approaching parity.
> also was clear that fusion is a future solution.
It really isn't. Helion is a moonshot that might work (but requires large amounts of rare metals for exotic superconductors). Anything thermal will be 10s of times more expensive and more materials than fission.
so your argument is "go nuclear, problem solved" ? I'm all for adding nuclear at this point but I dont know that the research supports the notion that an "all in for nuclear, done" approach would be effective.
Go all in on everything. The investments required are a joke from what I can tell.
Make the state more efficient (probably by allowing more things to be handled by private entities), and voila, there's much more than what you need.
Germany's investments into e.g. wind energy topped out at €10bn/yr. The federal budget is €500bn/yr, add to that the state, county and community budgets and it's €830bn. Even if you paid for it by tax money only, it's not a budget issue. Neither would nuclear be.
The rationale for this is that only by raising the living standard of the third world can the world’s population be stabilized without a major die-off (not to mention a reduced quality of life for just about everyone going forward). Further, only with massive amounts of clean energy can we clean up the ecosphere and effectively fight atmospheric CO2 buildup as needed.
There are plenty of resources on Earth if they’re managed well. Only with plentiful energy can we afford to have treat the Earth as the precious resource it is - as we begin to inhabit the rest of the Solar System!