Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
GRA said:
Nukes are going to be around a long time, even assuming that we'll eventually be able to do without them, which is by no means clear. Many countries simply don't have the RE, so will be dependent on others if they're willing to be so dependent.
[Snip detailed reply]
That's a false dichotomy. It's not nuclear in-place of coal. It's get rid of both. Coal now and nuclear soon after.
'Nuclear soon after' isn't going to happen, anymore than getting rid of coal is going to happen
now. China has built more PV and wind than any other country over the past decade and also has the majority of PEVs, but they've also built large numbers of new coal, NG and nuke plants in the same period as well as NG pipelines from Russia, and need them to meet the demand. India has been doing much the same, and neither country is yet anywhere near the amount of electricity supply needed to bring them up to developed nation levels of per-capita energy use. India has enough trouble keeping the lights on.
As posted in another topic, California briefly hit almost 100% RE supply last weekend. We've been transitioning for decades, with the state government fully behind it. I had a look at California's off-peak electricity usage the other night at 9:45. Demand was 25,674MW, with 28.3% from NG; 21.6% (5,732 MW) from all renewables; large hydro contributed 11.3%; imports (sources mixed but not broken down) 27.3%; batteries 2.9%; Nukes (Diablo Canyon, the only operating nuke plant left in state)) 8.6%; Coal 0.0% (actually 8 MW, all but one small coal plant has closed in the state, and utilities were forced to divest their holdings in out of state coal-plants); and other 0.0%. Renewables broke down as follows: Solar, 1.4% (presumably Ivanpah Solar-Thermal, just 80MW); Wind, 72.2%,; Geothermal 13.8% (California has long had the largest geothermal field in the world; output at the time was just 793 MW, pretty much what it had been all day; total installed capacity is apparently 1,517 MW, with average production 63% or 955 MW per the Wiki); Biomass 4.5%,; Biogas 3.2%; small hydro 4.8%.
Now, after all the time, effort and money being spent, if California, the world's 5th largest economy if it were a country, is only able to produce less than 1/4 of its baseload demand from RE when solar is unavailable, and still needs more than that from NG, then it's clear that pretty much everyone else is in even worse shape, and will be dependent on coal/gas/large hydro/oil for decades to come. Absent mass seasonal storage of some form of RE, which will likely be incapable of using batteries given the amount needed so we'll need something else, which at the moment looks to be either H2 in some form (plus some pumped storage, maybe compressed air, etc.), or else we'll need nukes. If AGCC is a major concern, fission nukes are a least worst option compared to fossil fuels.
Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
Needing to dedicate space to store nuclear waste for 500 hundred years isn't a "short-term" issue that justifies proliferating nuclear power.
Short term, no, but reasonable term for humans to deal with, yes. After all, Notre Dame Cathedral's been maintained for over 800 years, the Pyramids several millenia. Monitoring and maintaining the safety of a repository of high-level waste for 500 years is within our competence and memory experience.
Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
Spending time and money on developing a means of producing hydrogen from a tech that will get sunsetted is diverting resources from other tech that doesn't carry the same long-tail of ecological damage.
Which assumes you or anyone else knows it will get sunsetted. Many countries and companies are forecasting the opposite, and putting their money behind it. We're stuck with nukes for decades yet.
Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
Who the heck is Lovelock that makes his opinion worth anything?
I'm assuming you consider him an environmentalist; since you are accusing me of not being one because I believe we need to keep nukes around to meet baseload demand until we
know we can do it some other way, I pointed out I'm hardly alone it in that. Do you hold similar disdain for Patrick Moore, former head of Greenpeace, or is he just another industry shill? Or Stewart Brand?
Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
In the 15 years between 2004 and 2019, wind and solar power has grown exponentially, and will continue to do so to the point that the IEA has earned a black-eye for how poorly they've forecasted the rise of renewable energy's contribution to the US energy infrastructure over the past decade (along with the decline of coal during that time).
Solar is available to just about any country, and battery storage makes it durable and reliable for most of the year. Wind, hydro, geothermal, and even green hydrogen fuel cells (made with excess renewable energy during the summer months) can supplement during the seasonal lows. There's no technical reason for relying on coal nor nuclear.
Glad to see you're now saying that H2 may well have a major role. You really need to read "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air", because Mackay shows the total RE resources available worldwide of each type, as well as points out factors that will likely limit the practical use of each, e.g. the need for shipping lanes, fishing zones that would limit tidal, wave and offshore wind power deployments to fractions of the total resource, limitations on land use, and so on. No, solar isn't available to just about any country; Mackay shows that the UK doesn't have enough, even combined with all other RE sources with absolutely no limits on deployment (e.g. using virtually all land and offshore waters areas in the U.K. for wind, or PV, or bio-fuel crops etc. and ignoring the need for people to live and eat). Most of Europe is the same, although Portugal and Spain are in better shape. that was why the Desertec plan was floated a decade plus ago, but do people in NW Europe really want to switch their energy dependency from fossil fuels from the Middle East and Russia to RE in North Africa? Australia and some other countries with small populations, lots of non-fertile land and sun/wind, and stable governments, sure.
The U.S. does have enough solar potential (given storage), but it needs it as all the rest of the RE resource isn't adequate to meet our needs. See chapter 18 for the UK, here:
https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml, Chapter 27 "Five Energy Plans for Britain"; Chapter 30, "Energy plans for Europe, America, and the World".
Vacalv Smil's "Energy Transitions" is also an excellent source, as he shows just how much primary energy is used and needs to be replaced, and how long such transitions have taken in the past. While we can build a lot faster now, as Smil points out the amount of energy that needs replacement is also a lot larger than it was in past transitions, with the total growing all the time.
