Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread
Reply #304 –
The bottom line is that the decision-makers, that is, the corporates, banks, super funds, investors, economists, futurists, treasurers, heads of state, politburos, etc, have crunched the numbers and the end result is that they have decided that nuclear power is too expensive and has too great a lead time to make a meaningful difference to climate change. There will be ongoing minor growth in funds spent on nuclear power as small modular reactors and/or molten salt reactors replace some conventional nuclear power plants but there are no signs of a major take up. According to PwC's "The Future of Energy", it is unlikely that the global funds spent on nuclear power generation will rise above 12% of the total global power generation spend.
Not at all, that's a spin on the events, they have crunched the numbers but it's political numbers not economic numbers that are the issue.
In countries like Germany and Japan the dawning economic reality of moving too fast towards renewables for low carbon energy is stalling progress, the promises aren't being meet and the risk of doing long term damage to the effort significant. Even for the green politicians it's become too much of a hot potato and targets are being curtailed. Actions speak louder than words, unless people think residents in those countries are crap at math, economic math, environmental math, social math!
Wind energy slows and disrupts low level weather patterns, already shown to impact global warming by slowing surface air flows resulting in additional heating, and then it generates huge amounts of hard waste that as yet has no recycling pathway. There are new 100% recyclable versions coming on stream, but currently the cost of being 100% renewable is about 3x higher with 1/2 the operating life. They have to pull the plug on the 100% recyclable stuff early because if it wears out too much you start throwing parts away! A trick of green reporting is to mix 100% recyclable figures with non-recyclable performance and lifetime.
Solar PV as much as people think it will last like a pane of glass, doesn't, it's energy density drops continuously from day one, and the rate of diminishing return depends on the harshness of the environment. Put Solar PV in the outback or a desert and it will generate heaps of energy but last 1/2 as long, and if it's remote you need infrastructure to get it to where people live, often right through the guts of the best arable land! Then like wind there is the issue of legacy hard waste, not trivial amounts but huge volumes of it, none of it able to be recycled now or in the near future. Newer cheaper but less efficient Solar PV technologies like perovskite need 10x the land area and are made using toxic elements like lead, cadmium and arsenic, they degrade over time into the water table and underlying / surrounding land cannot be used for food production. They can be made without the toxic component, but then they need 30x to 100x the land.
Hydro, Tidal and Wave have massive hard waste legacies, and dramatically alter the local environments into which they are placed. For Tidal and Wave the economics of scaling are ambiguous at best, especially when the maintenance requirements for tidal or wave grow exponentially with size.
These are some simple realities of the current state of play.