I completely agree that we have to go zero carbon now. With that in mind, wind and solar has a much faster time to production than nuclear. Finland needed 18 years to build their new Olkiluoto 3 nuclear plant, initially planned to be built in 4 years. Sure, we learn from failures, but what’s to say that the next attempt doesn’t have other issues? Each new nuclear plant seems like a huge decade long slightly risky bet.
Wind today is low cost, simple low tech to produce and maintain, and have a fast time to market. Cost and efficiency of solar has been evolving fast and will continue to do so. Maybe nuclear is slightly cheaper[0], but again time-to-production for a new plant is worse than renewables.
Another advantage of renewable energy sources is resilience. The current size of nuclear plants means that they are large single points of failures. In Sweden, both the Forsmark and Oskarshamn nuclear plants has had to have several unplanned production stops the last year. Each with an impact on grid capacity, due to the size of the reactors. Sure a wind turbine can fail too, but a single failed turbine isn’t as fatal when you have thousands on the grid as a whole.
What is lacking is manufacturing capacity for renewable tech. We also need energy storage and new systems to handle load stability. This can be addressed by manufacturing investments, which make business sense now when there is a clear demand. And BTW, it is not like we have a nuclear power plant factory somewhere right now, running on idle, either. Nuclear SMR:s are still unproven tech so far.
So, if we invested the same amount that a new nuclear power plant would cost to build, and instead put that amount into building new renewable energy systems, wind, sun, water, biofuel power, and complement that with energy storage systems to handle peak and base load, I’d claim that you’d get about the same bang for your buck and better grid resilience. That’s where we should put our money.
I completely agree that we have to go zero carbon now. With that in mind, wind and solar has a much faster time to production than nuclear. Finland needed 18 years to build their new Olkiluoto 3 nuclear plant, initially planned to be built in 4 years. Sure, we learn from failures, but what’s to say that the next attempt doesn’t have other issues? Each new nuclear plant seems like a huge decade long slightly risky bet.
Wind today is low cost, simple low tech to produce and maintain, and have a fast time to market. Cost and efficiency of solar has been evolving fast and will continue to do so. Maybe nuclear is slightly cheaper[0], but again time-to-production for a new plant is worse than renewables.
[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020
Another advantage of renewable energy sources is resilience. The current size of nuclear plants means that they are large single points of failures. In Sweden, both the Forsmark and Oskarshamn nuclear plants has had to have several unplanned production stops the last year. Each with an impact on grid capacity, due to the size of the reactors. Sure a wind turbine can fail too, but a single failed turbine isn’t as fatal when you have thousands on the grid as a whole.
What is lacking is manufacturing capacity for renewable tech. We also need energy storage and new systems to handle load stability. This can be addressed by manufacturing investments, which make business sense now when there is a clear demand. And BTW, it is not like we have a nuclear power plant factory somewhere right now, running on idle, either. Nuclear SMR:s are still unproven tech so far.
So, if we invested the same amount that a new nuclear power plant would cost to build, and instead put that amount into building new renewable energy systems, wind, sun, water, biofuel power, and complement that with energy storage systems to handle peak and base load, I’d claim that you’d get about the same bang for your buck and better grid resilience. That’s where we should put our money.