I mean you get how nonsensical that argument is right? We don’t have solar cars either. Cars do not generate power. We’re talking about generation not consumption. We need electric cars for consumers and that’s orthogonal to how we generate electricity. The reason is that electric cars can take their energy needs equally well from energy generated by a coal plant, a nuclear power plant or solar. That’s why electrification is absolutely needed for climate change. It’s got massive difficulties obviously because it’s a huge load on the power grid (today’s grids wouldn’t be able to handle if everyone started driving electric). And electrification should also be used as a feedback mechanism where charging cars are used as distributed batteries to help solve the storage problem for renewables and that unfortunately isn’t happening on any real level.
I think we probably also need hydrogen fuel cells for fleet cars / trucking because they can eat the logistical and safety costs of storing hydrogen (hydrogen fuel cell consumer cars are a pipe dream IMO because you simply can’t have refilling stations scattered around everywhere - it’s massive explosion risk in population dense areas with untrained people dealing with it).
But if we’re talking about grid energy production, nuclear is the only real path for solving climate change. It sucks but that’s the reality.
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.
You get how automotive energy storage and grid scale energy storage are totally different right? Like a huge portion of oil consumption is automotive and shipping and that has 0 demands on the grid. Yes, we need storage solutions for portable energy and solar fails on that mark too (that’s why EVs are battery backed and don’t bother putting on solar panels to regenerate those batteries). So when we electrify automotive, energy requirement needs for cars are going to skyrocket. Solar can thankfully probably accommodate a huge part of that because we can time shift charging to happen during the day but that also means that a good chunk of solar energy construction is being dedicated to charging storage capacity we built and put into cars and not offsetting our already substantial and ever growing non-automotive grid energy needs.
I don’t know why you claim nuclear has no advantage if we’re talking about a country whose grid manages to achieve that only 10% of grid production is coming from fossil fuels. That’s a lot smaller storage problem to solve than the 60-80% that renewables has to solve (not to mention it needs to actually build that capacity which is going to take a long time because all the evidence is that that % mix by renewables grows very slowly over long periods of time).
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
You either seem to have a problem distinguishing grid-scale energy production from energy consumption or you're intentionally muddying the waters.
It kind of feels intentional because it'd be like me arguing that grid solar is pointless because ships still burn diesel. Like you get that at this point we need to get to negative emissions to start removing carbon from the atmosphere and carbon recapture is a really energy intensive process (you basically have to spend more to recapture than you spent burning in the first place & we've still today burn fucktons of fossil fuels).
Non-grid consumption is driven by many more use-cases. Even if you had 100% nuclear or 100% solar or 100% wind in the grid, you'd still see more oil consumption today than in the past simply because of transportation which even today is predominantly fossil fuel based. EV electrification will help bring that down & that's happening but you still have non-electric trains, planes, and shipping and we don't really know how to solve that for the latter 2 which are massive contributors (much more than cars).
In fact, if you look at your own graph, the share that is consumed by nuclear has a direct inverse correlation with fossil fuels. The same is not true for other fuel sources. If we get more solar, the percentage that fossil fuels takes up seems to be largely unmoved. If we get more nuclear, there's a direct reduction in fossil fuels. If we use less nuclear you see an uptick. The reason the numbers don't look as impressive for consumption is that there's a huge amount of fossil fuels being consumed that have nothing to do with the grid. But replacing fossil fuels in the grid is hugely important because otherwise your EV car would be an expensive toy and would be a marginal benefit to the environment (grid fossil fuel power plants are marginally better at generating electricity than your smaller car engine but it's like a small % improvement vs nuclear/solar/hydro/wind which all have 0 emissions generated per KWh).
It's fascinating that South Australia is the model you've chosen as "this can be replicated" when your talking about one of the most arid, deserted, and sparsely populated places in the world that has continuous sine shine year round. Like you get that's not actually a representative scenario right & renewables are hugely dependent on geographically specific conditions? Grid-scale renewables face substantial technical hurdles in addition to policy ones. Nuclear doesn't really have technical hurdles and faces much larger political and regulatory ones but given that the US has had a movement to impede civillian nuclear reactors globally, 32 countries are still operating 443 plants globally. We can always choose different policies and choose to build 5000 reactors even if we overbuild capacity and it costs us a lot of money. If we remain with the current status quo, solar will win in the long run, but that long run concerns me. Like I have doubts we'll get to 50% freedom from fossil fuels for production (not consumption - just production) by 2050 focusing on renewables like we have been. This is a problem because as mentioned all the investments we make in EVs are pointless if the grid itself isn't carbon free. It may make you feel good but it isn't solving the problem. And on the consumption side, we need to figure out how to switch all the largest ships to nuclear reactors cause I don't know what else solves that problem & that's a huge contributor. Plastics are another huge fossil fuel consumer and I don't know what to do there either. But none of that is relevant in the discussion of solar vs nuclear as a replacement strategy for existing fossil fuel dependence within the power grid.
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.
My understanding is that those numbers for solar are installation and maintenance costs. They don’t include things like constructing the panels, mining the raw materials to make panels etc. additionally, to be comparable to nuclear, solar needs insane amounts of batteries so then you start having to include cobalt mining.
There’s no perfect comparison possible because it’s an interconnected system. We still use fossil fuels to build and transport solar cells for example, so what the “true” number is is very hazy and hard to quantify. The point is nuclear and solar do not compete in the same league. Nuclear competes with coal, natural gas, and hydro. Electricity sources that have 24h reliable generation capabilities. Hydro is arguably the safest but it is quite ecologically destructive and also limited as to where you can do it.
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.
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.
People are trying to find alternatives to cobalt. Lithium ion in general too cause it's density is not as good as we need it to be for grid scale & automotive use-cases. But that's all forward looking stuff. Nothing in your links suggests cobalt is getting removed. If anything it shows that the % of worldwide cobalt mining being used for batteries is growing - in other words, batteries are dominating the need for cobalt. I don't have any specific knowledge of mining, so I don't know cobalt specifically, but my understanding is that cobalt mining is more of a problem based on where the mines are and maybe ecological damage, not so much that mining it is especially dangerous (in other words, conflict prone regions where the mining has the effect of supporting unstable regimes / inhumane conditions / slavery). That's where I'd say uncounted deaths are happening.
Re deaths per tw, keep in mind that for solar 1 person would die every 50 years. So no one dying from carrying panels / laying panels is not really surprising or indicative the numbers are wrong. Also note that most of these numbers are for industrial power generation, not roof-top solar which has a higher fatality rate. But the point is that for wind, solar & nuclear, the death rate in a given year is basically 0 (same actually for hydro because the entire death toll comes from 1 accident). That's important in terms of understanding that the safety profile for this technology is very similar & way way way below oil & gas (& just the numbers attributed directly & ignoring the very large externalities). At numbers that low, it doesn't really matter so much.
> 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.
By that logic that's also true for nuclear getting cheaper. The point is not just one of cost (& these plants are fairly expensive but not prohibitively so per se). The point is that we simply can't convert raw materials into batteries fast enough. We're trying to rapidly scale battery manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible, but to date we have 3 plants worldwide right now (2 in Australia & 1 in California which sum up to 700 MW). That's just waaay to small if you're talking about getting things powered by solar reliably globally. Also remember that batteries degrade over time which means it's a 300 MW plant today but in 20 years it's probably a 100 MW plant. It's a pretty big maintenance cost that would need to get factored in. Now comparing batteries to power generation obviously isn't fair because they just need to absorb load for a set amount of time so I don't know if these are small plants individually, but a single nuclear plant can generate GWs of power very easily without any degradation in that generation capability 24/7. Yes - the plant needs to be physically maintained & that's not cheap either - there's no perfect answer. So over time could we get solar + battery to work? Probably. But this shit is going to take a very long time - like maybe by the end of the century we could be 100% renewables. I'm skeptical but it is a possibility - my skepticisim comes from the fact that there are several high temperature manufacturing applications for which renewables don't work at all whereas nuclear can 100% easily replace fossil fuels. Meaningfully investing in nuclear would also have a significant payoff in that we could probably get off of fossil fuels within ~30 years and nuclear tech itself would change massively (molten salt reactors or thorium reactors which fail safe & can't melt down, getting cheaper plants by building more of them because right now we do a single nuclear project after very many many years, direct energy capture to avoid the need of a turbine & water, etc etc).
I am talking for hours when there isn't much renewables. If you set the timeline to 24 hours and look at the hours, you have periods with 55% gas and also 20% imports. You can assume imports are dirty coal, because that is most of Australia.
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.
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.
That is the total energy of a Kg matter according to E=mc2, if I'm not mistaken. How exactly are you planning to convert that matter into energy? Do you have a Kg of antimatter laying around your house?!
Photons are the means for transfer for all energy sources at some level, so using that as a comparison for the actual generation method seems a little pointless.
