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According to chemists and climatologists, burning fossil fuels is dangerous because it releases carbon dioxide which causes global warming. There’s a good chance that global warming could feed on itself and become self-sustaining by releasing methane stored in Arctic permafrost and in the deep ocean.
Solar and wind won’t be able to replace fossil fuels until someone invents a battery that is cheap enough to store electricity at the grid grid-scale. Right now, nuclear power is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels. But nuclear power has its own risks, as we all know.
Would we be safer if we shifted all of our energy production from fossil fuels to nuclear fission? Or would we be less safe because of the risk of meltdowns, nuclear waste, and weapons proliferation?
Everyone talks about global warming, but nobody does anything about it. I’m tired of the hot air from politicians, journalists, and academic blowhards who are only trying to advance their own careers. To solve global warming, we need to *actually do something* like using nuclear fission instead of fossil fuels. But would it be safe to do so?
I'll get in hot water (hah!) with many people on my side of the political spectrum for saying that modern nuclear is a logical choice for baseline production to backfill wind and solar. There are some very clever reactor designs out there that deserve a second look.
If you want to reduce CO/CO2 emissions caused by burning fossil fuels for energy, then nuclear fission is the natural choice.
However, I cannot see a path to practical nuclear fission consumer vehicles.
Our current direction is lithium. Lithium is a finite resource. How long until we reach peak lithium (demand exceeds production) and what will be done to the environment to meet those demands?
"If we would like to have a North American standard of living for everyone in the world – say, 1 car for every 2 people – then we would need about 3.4 billion Nissan Leafs. This would use 32% of the identified resources (all known lithium in the world), or 82% of the reserves (all lithium that is currently economic to produce). Even with widespread recycling, that seems like an unsustainable prospect.
Remember that the limits on battery capacity are fundamental. The only ways this percentage can go down are:
Battery capacity exceeds 73% of the theoretical maximum (unlikely)
New deposits of lithium are discovered and made economic (unknowable)
Smaller lithium-ion batteries are used (shorter range)
Fewer cars are built with lithium-ion batteries.
This suggests to me that if all the world's cars are going to be made electric, it is likely that a mixture of battery technologies will be used. It is certainly possible to build millions of electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries, but it may not be possible to make billions of them."
Solar and wind won’t be able to replace fossil fuels until someone invents a battery that is cheap enough to store electricity at the grid grid-scale.
It's a little more complicated that that. This past winter the Northeast saw about 2 week span with brutally cold temperatures, little sun and no wind. To meet that demand with solar and wind you would need both the generation and storage capacity for two weeks of electric prior to the event. Furthermore even if you did when you go two weeks and one day there is no more power unless you have the backup capabilities with nuclear, fossil fuels and hydro. Idle plants cost money.... This is and will always be the Achilles heal of wind/solar.
In an ironic twist battery storage could possibly make fossil fuels even less expensive than they are now. As it works now you have base load plants that are a mix of coal, nuclear and hydro that are pretty much run full time. Intermediary and peaking plants are only run according to demand, these plants can be eliminated if the capital cost for battery storage is less than to build the plant. Instead you would have a complete fleet of base load plants running constantly and store excess electric in the batteries to meet peak demand. Base load plants powered by coal are by far the cheapest source of electric.
What makes this completely different than battery storage for solar/wind is you have predictable amount of power generation.
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Would we be safer if we shifted all of our energy production from fossil fuels to nuclear fission? Or would we be less safe because of the risk of meltdowns, nuclear waste, and weapons proliferation?
Nuclear has proven safe for the most part, the issue is it goes from the safest to the worst with one bad accident.
I'll get in hot water (hah!) with many people on my side of the political spectrum for saying that modern nuclear is a logical choice for baseline production to backfill wind and solar. There are some very clever reactor designs out there that deserve a second look.
Not me, I totally agree. We can start developing technologies to deal with the waste as the plants are being built. Add to that the fact that here in CA we are most ikely going to have to build desalination plants which are gigantic energy users, and nuclear is the only thing that makes sense.
Fission is much much safer if they move to Thorium cycle reactors which were first proven in the 1960s. Uranium and plutonium create some very very nasty byproducts which much be stored for 100s of 1000s of years. And of course there is the occasional Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishima.
The sandal wearing poodle tailed clowns with their little signs marched around and around until the San Onofre Nuke Power Plant got shut down in SoCal. They were warned the prices of power would go up, they didn't care.
So, the plant no long generates power, the price of electricity went up............AND NOW THOSE SAME FOOLS ARE CRYING BECAUSE ELECTRICITY COSTS HAVE RISEN.
The warmers are insane. By the by over 90 percent of electricity in France is from Nuke........Put that in your crack pipe you warmers
at this point we have two options, neither one appeals to the warmer crowd.
we can end all fossil fuel use, eliminate all CO2 production, etc. and go back to a world wide agrarian economy, and that means no more cars, trucks buses, airplanes, etc.
we can develop alternative energies, like nuclear, solar, wind, renewable sources, etc.
both have issues that need to be dealt with. but remember the more restrictive the rules on energy production are, the more we pay for energy, and the more the costs go up on everything.
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