These arguments, where you only look at current deployment and not growth and projected trends, aren’t worth very much. It’s like asking whether you should invest in smartphones or dumb-phones back in 2008: looking at that year’s ownership data might have convinced you that smartphones didn’t have much of a future, and then you would have made a very stupid bet.
The question is whether going forward there will be a huge increase in deployment of solar and wind, and answer is that every expert projection says that due to surprisingly reduced and reducing costs there absolutely will be. There are questions about whether this new generation will eat all of fossil’s market share (due to storage improvements and coordinated grid improvements) or just an enormous fraction of it. But both are devastating to the industry.
Similarly, worrying about edge cases and specific geographies doesn’t matter when you’re looking at aggregates. The claim here is not that renewables are perfect or will even be able to supply 100% of our needs. It’s simply that even at 75% of all power generation that’s a terrifying kick in the teeth for fossil corporate interests. The nuclear industry has nothing plausible on the table that can do this: outside of a few countries that invested heavily while building a nuclear weapons program, nobody has the political will to launch the sort of “Interstate-Highway System” government projects that would be needed to subsidize nuclear into that level of deployment. And even if we did, building the plants would take decades.
I do think nuclear has a clear role as baseload to help with the intermittence issues, and that renewables and nuclear deployment are natural allies. But that happens in a world where renewables have been massively built out and nuclear happens at the margins. The advantage of this plan is that it involves building a lot less expensive nuclear (maybe even less than we think now, if there are new storage tech improvements) and it’s not such a disaster if nuclear takes another 15-20 years to build. However: this pathology where nuclear advocates preen about an all-nuclear world is harmful and dangerous. It’s bad that so many advocates have mistakenly identified renewables as their competition and are spreading bad arguments trying to politically dissuade/delay people from adopting them. While it may not be intended that way, this line of argument reads like pure fossil-industry FUD.
Renewables don't need baseload help, they need dispatchability. So nukes would not help at all. Nukes will be mothballed in a few years as they become unable to attract bids sufficient to continue operation. (In some places they will continue getting their massive tax- or rate-payer subsidy.) As operation time falls, cost of every kWh they ever produced grows as the massive construction cost is amortized over fewer lifetime kWh.
Fortunately, most storage technologies are nimbly dispatchable. They are not being built out much, yet, except for extra-short-term load shifting, and hydro cheaply retrofitted with a pump, because there is not enough renewable capacity to charge from. Until there is, combined-cycle NG turbines fill shortfalls. Build-out gradually reduces that expense, but not to zero.
Instead, solar farms in the tropics fixing ammonia for export mean nobody needs more than a week of storage. The NG furnaces will be converted to burn ammonia, or maybe hydrogen extracted from ammonia. Catalytic fuel cells might enable retiring the gas turbines when they get cheap enough.
The question is whether going forward there will be a huge increase in deployment of solar and wind, and answer is that every expert projection says that due to surprisingly reduced and reducing costs there absolutely will be. There are questions about whether this new generation will eat all of fossil’s market share (due to storage improvements and coordinated grid improvements) or just an enormous fraction of it. But both are devastating to the industry.
Similarly, worrying about edge cases and specific geographies doesn’t matter when you’re looking at aggregates. The claim here is not that renewables are perfect or will even be able to supply 100% of our needs. It’s simply that even at 75% of all power generation that’s a terrifying kick in the teeth for fossil corporate interests. The nuclear industry has nothing plausible on the table that can do this: outside of a few countries that invested heavily while building a nuclear weapons program, nobody has the political will to launch the sort of “Interstate-Highway System” government projects that would be needed to subsidize nuclear into that level of deployment. And even if we did, building the plants would take decades.
I do think nuclear has a clear role as baseload to help with the intermittence issues, and that renewables and nuclear deployment are natural allies. But that happens in a world where renewables have been massively built out and nuclear happens at the margins. The advantage of this plan is that it involves building a lot less expensive nuclear (maybe even less than we think now, if there are new storage tech improvements) and it’s not such a disaster if nuclear takes another 15-20 years to build. However: this pathology where nuclear advocates preen about an all-nuclear world is harmful and dangerous. It’s bad that so many advocates have mistakenly identified renewables as their competition and are spreading bad arguments trying to politically dissuade/delay people from adopting them. While it may not be intended that way, this line of argument reads like pure fossil-industry FUD.