Lady Fitzgerald wrote: ⤴Fri Feb 19, 2021 8:38 pm
MurphCID wrote: ⤴Fri Feb 19, 2021 6:02 pm
...done right, a nuclear power plant is safer than all other forms of energy.
And there's the rub (apologies to Billy Wigglestick); getting it done right. We've seen how well ERCOT manages things; would you really trust them to properly regulate nukes? I trust the Feds far more than I would trust ERCOT! Wind generation and, to a lesser degree, solar generation can be built for the same cost, or less, per unit of power, be safer, even if mismanaged, brought on line sooner than nukes could be, and will create far less pollution and contribute far less, if any at all, to global warming.
Well, think what you may of traditional nuclear energy, but it sure doesn't contribute anything to global warming. Zero carbon emissions. That's perhaps its only advantage.
The thing is, you need
some energy source to stabilize the unstable and irregular solar and wind energy. And not for a small percentage of the total power production, either....
Traditional nuclear can certainly do that, but I agree that it's undesirable because of its radioactive waste, that's dangerous for an outrageously and uncontrollable long time (millions of years). Plus you can make nuclear weapons with it, which is also a bad thing.
I think we both agree that burning wood ("biomass") isn't good as well, as we've discussed earlier in this thread. Nor is burning coal, because that's highly polluting. To a lesser degree, the same objection that speaks against coal, applies to oil.
For the short and intermediate term, that leaves us natural gas: the least polluting of all fossil fuels, cheaply and widely available worldwide for hundreds of years to come. You're very lucky that Texas has lots of it as well.
Green nuclear energy, with radioactive waste that's "only" dangerous for a
controllable period (in the case of Thorium: a "mere" 300 years), and which doesn't provide nuclear weapon material, is only decades away. So there's a long-term stable and green solution just around the corner.
Rushing the energy transition by too quickly abolishing
all fossil fuels, notably natural gas, will be perversely counterproductive and ruin our planet instead of saving it.