My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.
My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.
Honestly, I know this is a polarizing issue, but nuclear is clean and pretty much safe and you don’t need batteries for it. Lithium batteries of course being an ecological nightmare. Bring it on I say.
Mostly:
So it has the feel of a plan to promise to spend a lot of money several years from now, and get a lot of PR points today, and quietly cancel the project later.
Well that is, indeed, wack. I appreciate your perspective, I can’t believe I missed the “corporations lying for money” angle. I’m usually on top of it.
Not that much. Do remember there’s a lot of oil money pouring into FUDing about nuclear.
They’re talking about 5+ years on the new nuclear in these. And they haven’t done it before, so a 30% deadline slip is realistic.
You can put up a lot of wind and solar in that time.
Which needs a stable baseline to counteract lack of supply and/or a lot of lithium. And space.
The existing large-scale batteries are largely lithium. There are a bunch of iron-chemistry ones and sodium-ion ones which have been deployed over the past year, with factories going up to scale them up. I’m not expecting to be limited by lithium availability for stationary batteries.
Mining for nuclear is an ecological disaster, and is often done in poor countries under awful conditions, especially lung cancer due to the radon emissions of uranium.
Arguably it is better than mining for coal, lithium, etc. since those have similar issues, but one gram of uranium contains energy similar to 3 tons of coal.
Try Thorium.
As long as regulation stays in place. Or, better, add even harder regulation (for from security standpoints as well as fiscal) to ensure these fuckers are forced to be actively responsible for the safety and give them no way to back off and abandon a plant.
Let them donate excess power to the grid as well. Eh, fund housing nearby for the homeless.