In a recent study, researchers from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) questioned the planned development of new nuclear capacities in the energy strategies of the United States and certain European countries.
Profitability is so much not the point here and also, there’s no reason for different energy production sources (especially ones that are base power vs incidental power) to be in conflict. Do both of them.
We don’t have to like it but unfortunately profitability is by far the number one driver for…well everything. So little is accomplished by way of altruism. People are greedy. The best way to successfully incentivize climate action is for environmentally friendly actions to become the most profitable and be advertised as such.
So I agree with you that both options should be used. But I disagree that profitability is not the point. Money is always the point and always has been.
Yeah exactly. None of it is profitable if you can’t meet instant demand changes at any time of day. Build the nukes to meet full demand needs and supplement them with “more profitable” options for redundancy.
None of this is profitable if you can meet demand power at will either.
It’s just a scarcity game that those in power use to keep things ticking along.
What is infrastructure to most, is a tuned revenue machine to a very few.
The purpose of a system can be determined by its output, and it’s working quite well in that aspect.
I’ve never had a rolling black out or brown out but we burn coal around here and there are proposals for some small nuclear sites. Yes there’s some solar and wind as well but we are a net exporter of energy to the western states.
There is, actually, a conflict. Renewables are more dynamic in production. You can turn them on and off quickly, you can scale them quickly too. You can’t do that with nuclear plants. Baseload is not a goal, it’s a limit. That’s why the nuclear energy sector is friends with the coal sector.
Example of Nuclear-Coal friendship from Poland: https://twitter.com/stepien_przemek/status/1642908210913853442
Example of Nuclear-Coal friendship from the USA: https://www.energyandpolicy.org/generation-now-inc/
A deeper understanding here: “The duck in the room - the end of baseload” https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/the-duck-in-the-room-the-end-of-baseload
I would love to know what oil company you heard that from, since it’s absolutely not true. You can both turn them off quickly (faster, in fact, than LNG or Coal), start them up quickly (sub minutes) and change production quickly. These have all been features since 1960’s era reactors, and we’re around 10 generations past them.
I think they might be referring to turning down the reactors, which I think is an actual difficulty with them. By no means however is it a reason to not use them, it just means you employ it wisely. Have it meet most of the demand, and use solar and wind and others to supplement to full demand.