this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized, require massively less infrastructure, have no millennium length waste storage dangers, etc etc etc. The only component still to be built out is energy storage to meet the baseload, and that's well on its way with batteries, water pumping, and other energy storage technologies.
It's just not even a question, renewables are the better choice for new construction.
All true.
Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact.
Neither does nuclear, really. Waste storage is a non-issue, that has had effectively zero observable impact over the decades we've been doing it.
But the bottom line is that this is a distraction. The longer we continue focusing on short term profit, repeating the previous generations' mistakes, the harder it will be to get to zero emissions. Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The more diverse our energy sources, the more robust our fossil-fuel free grid will be.
Distributed solar and agrivoltaics have 0 or negative land use and require less material than a nuclear reactor. Whereas low-yield uranium resource (like Inkai) has a lower area specific power than a dedicated utility solar install.
Distributed solar + battery also has the effect of massively reducing strain on transmission. A household that previously had a summer peak consumption of 20kW, a summer average of 2kW and a winter max daily average of 1kW can now be fed with 800W of transmission instead of 20kW. Results are less extreme in high latitude but it can still halve.
And if I might add: access to large amounts of water is also an infrastructure and France is already running out of it.
Also true.
Along with an enrichment industry (building one rather than paying russia will get your country coup'd, bombed or cyberattacked), and waste processing/permament storage (of which there is one small token facility in finland that might work, and numerous projects that failed to contain their waste and had to be cleaned for hundreds of millions to billions).
Then there is the milling and mining waste which is usually abandoned on indigenous land or in a developing country.