Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

There are fusion reactor designs that don't use water. They directly convert to electricity with magnetic fields.

I've had an evolution in thinking over the last few years. I did a deep dive on both atmospheric CO2 reduction and energy requirements for full electrification of transportation, homes and industry.

At the time (5 to 10 years ago) it seemed like a very large deployment of nuclear power generation had to be a significant part of the solution. That isn't at all what I think in today's context.

At grid scale, today, I think wind plus storage seems to be the most logical answer at many levels:

    Energy production per installed GW:  
        Solar: 1.33 TWh/GW (solar is reliably off half the time)
        Wind:  3.07 TWh/GW

    Land use per GW:
        Solar: 3,900 acres/GW
        Wind:    750 acres/GW

    Land use to provide all Tesla Master Plan solar + wind:
        Solar: 12 Hawaii's
        Wind:   1 Hawaii (area of all islands)
    
        or,
    
        Solar: 30% of California
        Wind:   2.5% of California

    Annual Operations and Maintenance costs :
        Solar: 1.33 times wind O&M
        Wind:  1.00

    Initial investment in factories:
        Solar: $ 11 billion
        Wind:  $212 billion

    Storage required for 95% reliability:
        Solar: >12 hours
        Wind:    3 hours

    Wind requires 4x less batteries, with all the cost, 
    recycling and ecological advantages this delivers.

    Build supply chain origin:
        Solar: Heavy reliance on China
        Wind:  Diverse

    Long term supply chain (maintenance, parts, etc.) origin:
        Solar: Heavy reliance on China (forever)
        Wind:  Diverse

The above numbers come from parsing through Tesla's Master Plan Part 3 (MPP3) and several of their references. Of course, this is US-centric, yet, I think it scales well to other parts of the globe.

It isn't a case that combining solar and wind can't provide a good solution. It's that idea that wind has enough advantages that it can provide reliable clean power generation all by itself (with storage). In other words, grid-scale solar would not be necessary at the kind of scale proposed by MPP3.

I need to emphasize the above because there's a tendency to point out that the combination of wind and solar works very well. And, yes, it does. However, that misses the point entirely. The point is that geographically distributed grid-scale wind with storage does not need any solar to reach 95% reliability (power availability) [0] Table 2.

In short, it seems wind would have lower land utilization, operation and maintenance costs, startup investment, 1/4 the storage requirement, ecological impact (based on only needing 1/4 of the batteries) and, finally, the potential for a more favorable supply chain, both for construction and long-term maintenance.

Home-scale solar and storage has nothing to do with my comment (after all, we are talking about nuclear power). I am only referring to grid scale. Home-scale solar makes sense on many fronts.

NOTE: This is the only document outside of MPP3 I used to generate some of the above:

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Well, you didn't actually address my comment, which had nothing to do with solar working at night or similar. It's useful to keep separate arguments separate since jumping around if something doesn't suit your liking is not a sincere discussion style.

> If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival

FWIW, I don't believe that. Humans will survive, unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon, but that's not because of climate change. Not directly at least. Those of us in privileged will have an easier time adapting to a changing climate, the rest of our species won't have it so easy. And later generations will need to live with the consequences as well. But they will adapt too. If they've never seen a frozen north pole, it will not be odd to them.

Even if it was an existential threat to human survival, I wouldn't care. Why would I? It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other species survival. Did you recently check how many species we have brought to extinction? Over 90% of large predatory fish are gone (shark, tuna, ...). Buffalos almost went extinct. Gorillas, sea turtles, .. I don't think the human species has much moral ground to argue it should survive and I won't move a finger to help.

1) both

2) 200% of current demand, to account for the rise in demand caused by climate change

3) whatever we can build now

4) Only governments genuinely have the ability to build nuclear reactors without any outside intervention or help. Even when they are built supposedly privately there's government involvement to make sure radioactive material isn't diverted or dumped. I can't imagine anyone but the most extreme libertarian wants private unregulated nuclear reactors.

Probably a good idea to read the rest of the article. They explain why.

> Whereas nuclear power accounts for all materials through the decommissioning phase—and surprisingly, 90 percent of all materials from a nuclear power plant can be recycled—compared to old wind and solar platforms, which generate millions of tons of waste