EmmaEngineer

You opened this thread with "I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem". Yet you are blind that in your canonical example of the effectiveness of nuclear, France, their energy is still mostly powered with fossil fuels. If France is the best example of success of nuclear I say it shows that nuclear is a failure as far as climate change is concerned. The French really tried in the 80s, but the outcome is a fairly nice train network with a 20% modal share, and more oil consumption today than when they started.

Now let's look to the future: solar is vastly cheaper and easier to install per TWh generated. It can be installed quickly and incrementally. Solar modules come in at around 1% of the cost per W of nuclear right now, and still decreasing, that's an enormous margin to work with: If you have a way to seasonally offset energy through efuels for ships and planes as you propose, and a fleet of EVs with 100kWh of storage, the effort to just solve the remaining grid fluctuations seems straightforward. Roughly speaking, without storage nuclear has no useful solution for transport, transport is the hardest part of emissions to mitigate, but any solution that uses nuclear derived electricity for transport will be far cheaper with renewables.

We have South Australia, which produced more low carbon energy this year from solar and wind than France did from nuclear, and without any significant storage as a counter example for your low carbon grid. It appears that the French model is harder to reproduce than the South Australian model, and the evidence is that it could be copied organically everywhere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7

I think you missed the point: without storage nuclear only gets to 70% of the grid, and 31% of the total energy demand. With enough storage to displace oil and gas demand, nuclear has no advantage. It's a pity that France never spent the money to migrate the non-grid portion of their economy to electricity, but that was probably a simple matter of the economics of nuclear never really panning out.

Do they have nuclear cars in France? It looks like nuclear is actually only 31% of France's energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

I doubt your numbers then, as when I googled I found “There have been no deaths caused by carrying panels or laying panels on a roof. Electricians are required to connect the panels and inverters as it is.” -- https://reneweconomy.com.au/trojan-horse-industry-angry-at-q... so in the 158TWh generated by solar in Australia, that gives an average deaths per TWh of 0.003, nearly an order of magnitude lower.

It's odd that you bring up cobalt, as https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in... and https://www.energy-storage.news/lfp-to-dominate-3twh-global-... both suggest that cobalt is no longer relevant. It seems that sodium ion is also poised to replace lithium ion. Is cobalt the most dangerous mineral to mine?

Why doesn't solar+battery provide reliable generation capabilities? There are any number of off-grid solar only projects, it's simply a matter of cost, not capability.

The nuclear deaths, unlike all the other sources, also ignores rest of system deaths (e.g. mining, enrichment, transport, construction and decommissioning accidents). Once you include those it looks far more like gas and oil than wind and solar (which invariably include the kitchen sink on the death toll). If you wanted to put solar on a level field with nuclear you'd only include deaths from skin cancer directly attributable to installation.

I've seen others point out that it's the average that matters for emissions and that was what the other commenter was posting. That makes sense to me, the peak usage only matters for cost reasons, and apparently gas turbines are really cheap.

Your link shows that AU-SA only used 12% gas in october, and no coal at all.

Solution: in summer we pump the tides higher with PV, and in winter we draw them down.

I think that website is wrong or using obsolete data. I compared with another https://www.pickhvac.com/hvac/furnace-vs-heat-pump-cost/ and it said that with exactly the same numbers the heatpump was 50% cheaper than gas. My own observation is that our heating cost reduced dramatically when we replaced gas with heat pump.

Sunlight: 90,000,000,000MJ/kg

$22B / 4.456B = $4.9/W, about 20x more expensive than your number for PV.