Got a third of the way through before realising this was just the opinion piece of a decidedly anti-nuclear journalist.
There is literally no cleaner way to provide base-load. Storage is great for spikes in usage but is not a replacement. To retire the gas and coal stations we need to replace what they do, not what they are.
There is literally no cleaner way to provide base-load.
Renewables.
They’re cheap, proven, and ready. You can build a lot more renewables in the time it takes to build nuclear, so much that you can build enough of an excess to account for when it’s not available (or back it up with BESS, which is massively growing). Furthermore, with nuclear you have no generation until it’s finished, with renewables they’ll come online gradually over time.
Base load does not need to be supplied by anything in particular. The National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios report determined that the fastest way to net zero is to go hard on renewables. Building nuclear takes limited resources away from building renewables and will only prolong our use of fossil fuels.
There is still room for nuclear, but right now we need to get off fossil fuels asap. We should build a large excess of renewables (backed up with battery storage), then once we’re off fossil fuels we can build nuclear to fill out our energy portfolio. By the time nuclear is built, demand will have grown and that excess of renewables probably won’t be an excess anymore.
Source: am electrical engineer.
Didn’t even start reading because the title is very “yea…and?” A lot of the stuff we have are hand-me-downs from military research.
Also, until there is proper international nuclear disarmament (lol), we unfortunately need those skills.
It sucks but that’s the world we live in.
