> The green folks have already started reinstating reactor licenses because of shortfalls in capacity and storage
Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.
> And it’s either that or fossil fuels.
...aside from wind, solar, hydro, etc which are all cheaper, safer, and do not represent anywhere near the danger and risk.
Not at all - solar isn’t base load, and can never be base load. Same with wind. And hydro has already been built out in almost every location it’s useful in the US. And your cost numbers are junk because they aren’t ’cost per kWh when we actually need it’, they’re ’cost per kWh when nature cooperates’. Which is not reliable. So over provisioning and storage costs start kicking in, and which, somehow, never get included in a those numbers. Weird huh?
Predictable base load is useful, as California (and other locations) has been finding out, again, now that they have to actually do the math and can’t just hand wave things away.
It’s going to take awhile and a lot of churn before this all stabilizes though IMO. A lot of folks haven’t had to do the math yet.
> Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.
In _nameplate_ GWs. If you actually want your power to work during winter time or polar vortexes, you need WAY more than that.
Hydropower accidents have killed far more people than nuclear accidents both in real numbers and normalized for energy produced. The ecological downsides to hydro are also hard to overstate.
Just this year there was a dam failure in Libya that killed between 5k-20k people.
And a series of dam failures on a reservoir in China in 1975 likely killed somewhere north of 200k, destroyed more than 5 million homes, and displaced more than 10 million people.
Earth filled embankment dams are used around the world for hydropower. The primary danger from hydropower is flooding due to dam failure, so it stands to reason you’d look at all dam failures when quantifying the risk.
Dam collapses are rare, but when they happen they can kill thousands. Go through the wikipedia list article "list of hydroelectric power station failures" and look for the ones that are actual dam collapses.
Then it's mighty odd that in the US, installed solar only counting grid-scale projects outpaces nuclear decommissioning at a 6:1 ratio in terms of GWhrs.
> And it’s either that or fossil fuels.
...aside from wind, solar, hydro, etc which are all cheaper, safer, and do not represent anywhere near the danger and risk.