Experts are trying to come up with the best way to warn Earth's future inhabitants — whether 10,000 or 100,000 years from now — what precisely lies under their feet.
Spent nuclear fuel is absolutely an environmental hazard, but nuclear power is kinda the least-worst option for managing base load right now.
Practical fusion is decades away still, and while solar and wind are great, electrical grids don’t function unless they can exactly meet electrical demand 100% of the time. You need something that can rapidly scale up and down on demand, regardless of time of day or inclement weather, otherwise one good winter storm and everyone loses their heating (assuming you’ve managed to transition off gas and on to electrical heating). If nuclear is out then your other options are hydro (required very specific geography and has its own environmental impact) or gas/oil/coal.
You can make solar/wind more practical by using grid-scale storage, but the amount of grid storage required to fully decarbonise the grid world-wide just isn’t practical unless you can generate significant amounts of power through other means.
Personally, my hope is for a zero-carbon electrical grid in my lifetime. Ideally that won’t involve nuclear, but if the choice is nuclear or carbon I’ll take nuclear.
Spent nuclear fuel is absolutely an environmental hazard, but nuclear power is kinda the least-worst option for managing base load right now.
Practical fusion is decades away still, and while solar and wind are great, electrical grids don’t function unless they can exactly meet electrical demand 100% of the time. You need something that can rapidly scale up and down on demand, regardless of time of day or inclement weather, otherwise one good winter storm and everyone loses their heating (assuming you’ve managed to transition off gas and on to electrical heating). If nuclear is out then your other options are hydro (required very specific geography and has its own environmental impact) or gas/oil/coal.
You can make solar/wind more practical by using grid-scale storage, but the amount of grid storage required to fully decarbonise the grid world-wide just isn’t practical unless you can generate significant amounts of power through other means.
Personally, my hope is for a zero-carbon electrical grid in my lifetime. Ideally that won’t involve nuclear, but if the choice is nuclear or carbon I’ll take nuclear.
I’m totally with you on that.
Ah, baseload, the old saw. Worked really well in France last year, didn’t it? Do you think there will be fewer droughts in the future?