Solar/wind/storage means getting by with orders of magnitude less energy usage. Maybe we should? I just think that asking people to vote for that is even more impossible than getting them to vote for nuclear.
GP still has a point: asking people to vote for nuclear sounds hard because of the perceived risks, but even if there was no perception of risk, it'll still be very hard to justify the costs to voters.
"You can't commute to work anymore because your car will be too expensive to charge. Or, rather it will be a luxury to use a car."
"Ok, I guess?"
"You'll have to live within a few miles of work"
"Well..."
"If you have a two income family and your workplaces are across the city, one of you will need to leave your job."
"That sounds difficult."
"You can't have a detached house in the suburbs. You'll bankrupt yourself heating it".
"I have to move? Hmm... what was that you said about nuclear?"
Yes it will be. There are many many more externalities to using cars as primary transit than their CO2 output. Noise, land use, inefficient use of energy in terms of kWh/personmile, microplastic from tires, accidents,...
> You’ll have to live within a few miles of work.”
There’s such things as mass transit that’s actually quite ok at solving that problem. Now, if you mean “we cannot all live in suburbs and everyone gets a house and a little garden.”, yes, that’s already true. The sprawl would not be possible to manage. It’s already not true for a large chunk of the population.
Heating a house is the least of our issues. Heat is something that we can store fairly easily: Take a large, well insulated tank in your basement, fill it with water (or a better suited liquid, but water will actually do). Heat it up during the day, either using solar panels or electricity driving a heat pump, use it during the night. Works with coolant, too. Insulation is a fairly well understood problem and in such a setting, losses are fairly low.
Hey, maybe you're right! Maybe we should stop using cars! Maybe you've convinced a couple of people to do that right now! Now convince 100 million US voters! Politics is the 'art of the possible'. That's what we're discussing!
There’s such things as mass transit that’s actually quite ok at solving that problem
But none of our cities in North America have been built with that in mind. Convince 100 million US voters to move to transit-serviceable neighborhoods.
Now, if you mean “we cannot all live in suburbs and everyone gets a house and a little garden.”, yes, that’s already true
With nuclear, you can continue doing this. Convince 100 million US voters to move out of the suburbs in the next 20 years. Maybe they will?
Heating a house is the least of our issues. Heat is something that we can store fairly easily: Take a large, well insulated tank in your basement, fill it with water (or a better suited liquid, but water will actually do). Heat it up during the day, either using solar panels or electricity driving a heat pump, use it during the night. Works with coolant, too. Insulation is a fairly well understood problem and in such a setting, losses are fairly low.
This is difficult in northern climates, with short days and shallow noontime sun. Or are we asking people to stop living north of some particular latitude? That's a tough sell too!
And its not just the US - politics is reflexive. As soon as your "impose a heavy carbon tax to make oil and gas prohibitively expensive and to encourage the deployment of solar storage" bill gets passed, you can forget about winning the next election - people will vote a guy in who repeals it as soon as it hits their pocketbook and their standard of living drops. Politics is the art of the possible. I don't see how you're going to convince people to vote for this.
Even then power generation for electric cars is really not a major issue with renewables: most cars will be charged during the day when for example solar power is quite abundant. So I don’t recognize the argument for nuclear power here.
political will
Yes! And money! Convince people to vote for that now! Convince 100 million US voters! Anyone who has taken an interest in municipal politics knows how expensive and inefficient it is to service suburbs with transit service. The suburbs themselves are the problem. Just don't tell the people living in them that!
Even then power generation for electric cars is really not a major issue with renewables: most cars will be charged during the day when for example solar power is quite abundant. So I don’t recognize the argument for nuclear power here.
On cloudy days, in the winter, do you just not go to work? Does everyone stay home from work? Or does everyone draw from the utility-scale storage to charge their cars? 3TW doesn't include cars - presumably we need to store power for them?
Nuclear. Note that I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just that it's a hard sell, even without risk perception.
The reduced number of new plants has resulted in increased costs for the parts required to build a plant. If we build more plants, capital costs will be reduced.
I agree that solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources are ideal for smaller installations. Although, battery technology, manufacturing capacity, and available raw resources will not be capable of supporting radical change anytime soon.
New nuclear can be a solution. Or, at least, it will need to be part of the process if we are going to replace large scale carbon emitting power production facilities.
And as I argued, renewables don't have to go 100% to kill nuclear. Just forcing nuclear to be intermittent, when the renewables and short term storage are not available, is sufficient.