If every home or building had a solar array or two or ten dozen on them a lot less additional land footprint would be needed. Tall buildings of course would not have enough roof-space to satisfy all their tenants energy needs. So, like I said previously, of course other energy sources like nuke would be handy. Meanwhile 100 or so years ago nobody said (because the country was way less developed then) hey oil refineries and gas stations and nuclear power plants and transmission line right-of-ways and gas pipeline right-of-ways are going to have a big footprint problem. The snowball is rolling downhill. Snowball being renewable alternatives. More and more money is going that way. We, mostly the future We, will make it happen because it has to.
I agree with everything you’re saying. Limiting future electricity generation sources strictly to wind and solar and simultaneously outlawing fossil fuels completely would be an environmental disaster.
How do solar farms kill birds again (keeping in mind mirror based concentrated solar is dead). You know what kills birds? Cats and windows. Orders and orders of magnitude more than solar panels or even wind farms.
My kinda film. I don't think the human race is really worth keeping going for ever. Mar's / Asteroid belt, would never sustain life without supply runs from the Earth, everything else is too far away with new tech which is unlikely to be real. Helium 3 mined from the moon is the best fuel source, enough to run the US for 100,000years, why the new interest in the moon.
What's the levelized per MHW cost of those technologies even if they achieve their wildest dreams? Less than $13.50/MWH? Because that's the latest unsubsidized solar tender result. Less than $36/MWH, because that's the latest solar plus storage tender result. And those are mature technology being built now with none of the safety and a fraction of the waste issues. I'm genuinely curious on that. I once believed we needed to keep nuclear around, but then I also thought thin film solar was a great thing until it's promised $4/watt price was made irrelevant by $.50/watt plain old silicon panels that were available by the time all the promised thin film guys made good on their $4/watt promises. By the time we get this nuclear technology to the point it can be put into widespread production, renewables plus storage will have made it irrelevant because it will be significantly less expensive. Unless they're honestly looking at sub-$10/MWH? And they can ramp up and down? As you know it annoys the heck out of me when renewables compare MW to nuclear as an apples to apples comparison. But MWH is fair game, and I'm guessing even this nuclear comes out way more expensive on a per MWH basis even before you take into account disposal costs and all the implicit subsidies of DOE, NRC, and the rest of the infrastructure necessary to make them safe. There's no shortage of roofs, brown space, and other minimally invasive areas to put solar and wind, so energy density is a bit of a red herring unless you flush out why it matters.
it's a shame really: https://fortune.com/2019/11/22/bill-gates-nuclear-reactor-china-trade-war/ ‘A 5-Year Setback for Technology.’ Bill Gates Says His Axed Nuclear Reactor in China Is a Trade War Warning
What is this magical solar generation and storage technology you speak of that allows for $13.50/WWH in the Midwest and Northeast US ?
I quoted $13.50 for pure solar, $36 for solar plus storage from Xcel in CO (https://www.greentechmedia.com/arti...solar-plus-storage-price-in-xcel-solicitation). The storage costs the same anywhere, and the difference in MWH/MW of installed solar between Boulder CO and Trenton NJ, for example, is less than 10% (you can play with the numbers at https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php). The question remains, what is the levelized cost of the latest greatest nuclear technology even if it meets the wildest dreams of it's inventors? If it's more than $36, or if you want to go worst case with the NE and say somewhere in the $40 range, then it's really dead in the water and from a purely financial perspective there's no reason to waste more money on it. Again that's before we talk about the massive cost overruns that virtually anything associate with nuclear has historically seen (V.C. Summer anyone?) and the hidden costs of waste storage and the agencies that support nuclear. And it's before we take a look at both the solar and storage cost curves and realize we're talking about something that has dropped in price by 20% or more every year for a decade and the $36 price is a real, mature product being planted in the ground now. How much cheaper will it be when this nuclear tech is ready for full scale production? The solar industry learned this the hard way with all the venture backed material science companies in the 2007-9 timeframe that just got bypassed by that relentless cost curve. Solar may slow down in the price decreases but storage is just starting down that same curve. If they have realistic sub-$30 levelized costs and reasonable expectations of a cost curve reduction I'd be all for it. I just not only haven't seen that, I haven't seen any pro-formas at all showing levelized cost. I'm not anti-nuclear at all, I still think we should be sinking pure research dollars into controlled fusion for example. I just think fission reactors are a dinosaur that's not worth pursuing purely on a cost basis. Funny, I seem to remember the nuclear and fossil fuel industry used to use that line, right up until they were no longer the lowest cost.....
Mmm, "storage". Why does electricity from the photovoltaics have to be stored, but nuclear not? Just feed the solar power into the grid, and when there's no sun, there's no power to store.