Disclaimer: I am an armchair energy policy enthusiast, and aggregate generator permitting, construction, turn up, operation, and decommissioning data for visualization and production siting.
Edit: Lunch bet email in my profile.
But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants.
More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3]
[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... [2] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... [3] https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forg...
You can make roof installs safer (process, hardware), utility installs on the ground are already safe. No one has any place to store nuclear waste, no one will insure it, and no one wants to tie capital up for decades in nuclear generators.
Nuclear, like coal, is a wonderful fuel if you can foist all of the externalities on someone else.
Modern Nuclear plants are very safe, and very cost effective... and can ramp up or down energy production on demand. Plus, they can be built wherever people want... not just where sunlight or wind patterns are suitable.
Solar Roof Panel installation is dangerous because people fall off the roof...yet, that alone has led to more deaths than Nuclear energy production.
The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat.
Nuclear is safe, and cost effective. Particularly when considering modern approaches to reactors and spent fuel recycling and storage practices. We, as a nation, are just irrationally afraid of something most people simply don't understand.
I think this is especially impressive considering the losses of the USS Thresher [0] and USS Scorpion [1]. Despite their loss, there was still no significant containment breach.
The only serious solution to our energy needs is nuclear. Everything else requires magical thinking.
Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.
Lithium doesn't get depleted.
> Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.
How does this contradict my argument?
You said that available land limits the power, but not the energy, available via renewables. If power is what you actually need rather than energy, that point is irrelevant, isn't it?
The gist is that after ~30-40% penetration, the cost of renewables, even with storage, is no longer cheaper than natural gas.
And while storage bends the curve, getting from 80% renewables to 100% without something dispatchable is very expensive.
I don't think this is necessarily important for nuclear, since we could have Gas+CCS, but I have lower hopes for pure renewables+storage.