It’s worth noting that he also fired many of the staff who know how to ensure that they’re actually safe, as well as the staff who would approve financing.
It’s worth noting that he also fired many of the staff who know how to ensure that they’re actually safe, as well as the staff who would approve financing.
If we got our head out of our ass and invested into battery tech - e.g. sodium-ion batteries or proton batteries, we could very quickly build sustainable energy storage instead of relying on technology that is potentially dangerous or continuing to rely on fossil fuels.
Nuclear has similar but opposite problem of renewables. Its hard to tune down and back up in power output, and its economics require near full capacity, and high market prices,to justify them.
Renewables are always better, because they don’t need as high market electricity prices, they have short and modular development times, modular battery addition.
Nuclear projects require suppression of renewables to ensure limited competition in supply, when they are finally built.
Nuclear doesnt need to ramp up and down. Just run them full tilt for baseline loads. Power use peaks during the day, when solar is most effective. Leave some extra unused nuclear capacity to pick up the slack when renewables cant meet demand, such as during winter storms. And then add batteries to smooth out the loads.
The right amount of nuclear is then minimum nightly demand. Right amount of solar might be minimum day time demand in spring. That would cut some nuclear sales. Which raises electricity price it needs for paying for its construction.
The economics of new construction favours renewables for any expansion of production, including future retirements.
And why important infrastructure should not be purely regulated by economics. Because corporations will always choose the most profits and not whats best for the people that use it.
What makes you think todays modern world where even cigarettes are battery powered we do not invest in battery tech?
We invest in battery tech that utilizes supply chains with slavery and child labor to make those disposable cigarette batteries - and they just go straight into the landfill.
Lithium-ion batteries are absolutely not anything to be proud of - it’s a rare material and not scalable like other emergent technologies.
Lithium-ion has the potential for fire/explosion, is hazardous, and has poor cold-weather performance when compared with sodium-ion batteries.
And earlier this year and late last year in Northern California, we had two lithium battery plant fires that very likely contaminated a significant amount of our agriculture and soil.
The contaminated farmlands produce 70% of America’s greens and vegetables (a.k.a. the Salad Bowl of America). We were ill-equipped to address this situation or remediate it - see Status Coup News’ reporting to see how it affected the health of residents in a 50-100 mile radius.
Even if we stored it properly (away from anything it could contaminate including people), lithium-ion is simply not viable for energy storage.
There are too many if-s in there. When you build energy strategy for at a country level, you can’t base it on if-s. And even if we had viable battery technology today, there are still problems building them at scale, their cost and their volume. As of today, the more renewables you have, more expensive stable energy gets or you simply burn coal or gas when required.
There’s only ifs because powerful forces (that do not represent the will of humanity) do everything they can to suppress or derail renewable energy efforts and divert our collective focus to war and conflict.
China is proving sodium-ion batteries are viable. Sodium is abundant and the batteries seem cheap to produce. Solar panels are also cheap to produce.
Instead of economic war or other forms of conflict, we could cooperate on these technologies and move forward as a species.
It’s all very easy when you realize that war and conflict are not in anyone’s best interest, with consequences that could spell the end of our planet’s habitability, and could cause death and suffering that make previous World Wars look like child’s play.
We already know fossil fuels are undesirable for the planet and we’ve already had plenty of nuclear disasters.
Let’s worry about expanding nuclear technologies when we achieve fusion and the world achieves stability.