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'Limitless' energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Technology
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The quickest way to de-carbonize our grid is nuclear. Meanwhile the US closed Three Mile Island a few years ago and onlined more natural gas in the state and Germany closed several nuclear plants and onlined more coal plants. The anti-nuclear push is fucking stupid.
At least France is building nuclear like crazy. They have one of the most de-carbonized grids on the planet.
Building new nuclear capacity takes a lot more time than building wind turbines and solar parks though.
Sure shutting the existing ones off is a bad idea but building new ones isn't the way
Also the building part consumes a lot of CO2, too, so it takes a bit longer than with renewables until your are break even.
I feel like a lot of those pushing for Nuclear don't see how France is relying on neighbouring countries in the summer because of the rivers not carrying enough water or not being cold enough for protest cooling and that factor will only get worse - especially with ACs being absolutely essential in summer in the next 50 years.
Sure keeping a good amount of nuclear for base level is good but especially if you're also doing renewables it's far too inflexible to be good if you have a sunny day with a lot of wind - so you need huge energy storage anyway if you want to completely remove gas and oil and at that point renewables are better in using those than nuclear
If they perfect this cement battery concept a combination nuclear/solar/wind strategy would be the ideal. Solar/wind as much as possible and nuclear to react to deficit with excess stored into block foundations for all three of the above.