Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants?
EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a piece of the plan)
[1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...
And nuclear is much much more expensive than most renewable now (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/)
Coming tech will improve that but we could get to carbon zero far quicker and cheaper with a mix of nuclear and renewables. One problem with nuclear is that safety concerns. However nuclear has caused less death than coal generation. It does require a huge capital investment but it pays for itself over the long run. Waste is an issue but it produces a tiny volume of waste compared to any other form of generation.
We could get rid of all current coal and gas plants and have power when it's required with nuclear. Until we have a better storage option the true can't be said of any renewables (unless you are lucky enough to have abundant geothermal options). With wind and solar you have too much during peak supply and too little during peak demand.
Even the article you linked states whole sale solar and batteries are not yet economically viable.
If there is a viable thermal storage option, I'm wrong but I've not heard about it. I would love to be wrong if that is the case.
I'll acknowledge that renewable generation costs have been falling at an impressive rate. However you're understating the problem for storage. Besides cost, there are far more complex regulatory and political hurdles. Just read about the public response to "smart meters" when they were proposed a while back.
We'll likely have price-competitive storage technology by the middle of the next decade, maybe even sooner, but it will take another two or three decades to deploy it thanks to the patchwork of regulatory complexity we're left over with from the 20th century.
Political hurdles... what is easier ? - Saying let's have reltively cheap 100% renewable energy that create a lot of job - Let's have super expensive nuclear energy, there are risk but those risk are small
Sounds misleading to me. A quick websearch and I found that currently they seem to be 10 x better than oil and coal etc:
> Making solar or photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. It even produces greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Still, the researchers found that if people switched from conventional fossil fuel-burning power plants to solar cells, air pollution would be cut by roughly 90 percent. Although manufacturing solar cells requires heavy metals, the researchers noted that coal and oil also contain heavy metals, which get released during combustion
https://www.livescience.com/2324-solar-power-greenhouse-emis...
> Mining the material to produce them ...
I think everything is off the table then, also your laptop or tablet -- websearch for "minerals laptop environment" for example.
It seems you don't like solar panels?
I never said that. I'm saying that based on AOC's 100% plan, pretty much everything is off the table, meaning that the plan needs to be revised. I plan to have 30kw of solar panels in my next home and a large collection of LifePo4 batteries that also have a dependency on strip mining. I also plan to do some of my own mining (drilling, blasting) for zinc and silver.
LiFePO4 -- that's lithium iron phosphate batteries, then, zinc and silver makes me confused. One can use zinc and silver instead?
30 kw sounds nice -- I think my oven uses about 3 kw, and I guess then that 30 kw is more than enough for your whole house :-) which I suppose is the idea, obviously.
What do your neighbors think about your plans to mine zink and silver?
Or maybe your nearest neighbors are far away? (Or maybe you'll drill & blast far away from where you and any neighbors live?)
We have finite resources. If prevention of a disastrous change in climate is your goal does it make sense to replace the older plants?
Yes it would be safer to do so but would the cost be worth it?
Is normal when the hype does not correspond with the reality and the promises of behaving well and to be responsible are replaced by "hide under a rug and find a scapegoat" five seconds after having the green light.
Citizens have the right to ask about how their taxes had been spent, specially when the construction costs increased exponentially, the whole structure is ruinous after 50 years and there are lots of new surprises in tiny characters in an appendix of the social contract that they signed, but never received.
Nuclear plants can only make a limited amount of money in this lifetime but the cost seems almost unlimited.
a) Help give future generations a reasonably livable and enjoyable planet. b) Help Americans by creating jobs.
I mean you can also say all code written by developers for for-profit companies exists to create revenue.
Both are true yet incomplete statements.