I used to be on team “we really need nuclear”, and maybe that was true at one point in time, but the production scale of solar and wind and energy storage have reached the point where it is 100% viable to power a modern nation without it.
You can’t even complain about the land use taking away from agriculture anymore either - agriculture and agrivoltaics have advanced enough to make that a moot point too.
This is a worst-case estimate, a properly distributed system of storage gets an eroei of up to 15:1, which is equivalent to fossil fuels with far fewer externalities.
Nuclear can get more, true, but the externalities are pretty bad compared to panels and wind farms.
Perhaps, but in a country like mine there can be long stretches when it’s really cold so demand is sky high but the sun barely shines for months and when it’s calm too, solar and wind production drop to basically zero. Storage helps smooth things out, but that energy still has to come from somewhere.
I used to be on team “we really need nuclear”, and maybe that was true at one point in time, but the production scale of solar and wind and energy storage have reached the point where it is 100% viable to power a modern nation without it.
You can’t even complain about the land use taking away from agriculture anymore either - agriculture and agrivoltaics have advanced enough to make that a moot point too.
Solar with storage has an EROEI of 4:1, nevermind dunkelflaute. Too low to power a complex industrial society.
This is a worst-case estimate, a properly distributed system of storage gets an eroei of up to 15:1, which is equivalent to fossil fuels with far fewer externalities.
Nuclear can get more, true, but the externalities are pretty bad compared to panels and wind farms.
Perhaps, but in a country like mine there can be long stretches when it’s really cold so demand is sky high but the sun barely shines for months and when it’s calm too, solar and wind production drop to basically zero. Storage helps smooth things out, but that energy still has to come from somewhere.