There is a good alternative, and we are already using it.
Solar PV and wind turbines are already the cheapest and greenest source of energy and are set to decrease in price more as they ramp up.
They're already causing the closure of existing coal and nuclear plants for purely economic reasons.
It sometimes feels like people with oddly strong opinions on nuclear power are posting from some alternate dimension where the only alternative is coal.
Nuclear is cool tech, so are vertical wind turbines and wave powered generators and concentrated solar molten salt generators. But they're all more expensive than PV and turbines.
Of course solar and wind are awesome, but they are dependent on external factors and thus not fully comparable. If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. Nuclear and fuel-burning power plants are not like that, and the difference matters.
You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
There are (at least) 6 solutions for the sun not shining.
In order of desirability.
1: A mix of renewables. Not solar or wind or hydro or geothermal, but a good mix.
2: A large grid. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
3: Over-provisioning. Size your installations for cloudy days and winds at 2km/h. Solar&wind are an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, so 1.5X - 3X over-provisioning is still a lot cheaper.
4: Indirect storage. If you're overprovisioned, then you will have lots of excess power, even more power than you can store in your batteries. (See 5). So use that power to hit several goals at once. For example, if you use it to produce methane, you can use that methane for carbon storage, use it to power peaker plants (see 6) or sell it for profit.
5: batteries
6: peaker plants. If 99.9% of your power is handled through 1-5, the emissions from the remaining 0.1% are negligible and can be offset with #4.
No wind or sun? What are we talking about here, an apocalypse? I know you're exagerating, but sun AND wind tend to balance each other out. If there's a freak occurence where there's "none" of either for several days.. well running some gas power plants once in a while is a drop in the bucket when it comes to CO2, and at such a small scale you could probably create the fuel renewably (biogas or synthetic gas from electricity+H2+CO2). I think finding a way to reuse the gas power plants we have already built in a CO2-neutral way will be a big key to solving the climate crisis quickly enough.
> You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun,
And/or just integrate the continent with more HVDC lines. Germanys main problem now is getting power from the windy north to the industrial south. But if they manage to construct some HVDC lines they should be able to get pretty close to 100% renewable. They could restart the nuclear industry too, but I don't see how that's an easier problem than building HVDC lines.
Getting more off-shore wind should also help, since the wind is more stable there.
And why just "AN" energy storage solutions? There are dozens of different ones being constructed commercially right now, and they each have their strong sides. Li-ion is better for fast frequency regulation, flow batteries for medium term storage, and pumped hydro, and possibly compressed or liquified air for long term.
> or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
If you mean the Scandinavian region, there's already two solutions that are working great: exchanging power with Norway (where you got tons of hydropower to smooth out long term energy fluctuations) and trash burning power plants (which also supplies heat to nearby homes and businesses). We don't need to move south, we just need everyone in the south to send us all their trash for us to burn during the winter ;) If we can move more plastics over to bioplastics, then it could even end up being renewable. Yeah, we should recycle/reuse as much as possible, but there will always be a huge stream of material that's just too mixed up or recycled too many times.
And finally there's deep hydrothermal. It has most of the benefits of nuclear, at possibly a similar cost if we scale it up. The great thing is we can re-use a LOT of expertise from the oil and gas sector, which I think will be important for scaling it up quick and to gain political support from worker in that field.
I'm not against nuclear, we should definitely use the expertise we already have to keep developing and building reactors. But I'm not convinced about a large scale global bet on it, and I don't think it's as essential to solving the climate crisis as some would have us believe.
They're fighting yesterday's battles. We should have been pushing nuclear hard 10 and 20 years ago. Today we have alternatives that are both much cheaper and much quicker.
We need to increase electricity production because of the transition to EVs and we need a way to guarantee supply whenever it is needed.
Renewables should be encouraged but they are not a panacea and I doubt that they are enough as things stand. In addition, most renewables sources have their own downsides so it's not all positives.
The beauty of EVs is you don't need guaranteed supply. If you only have power half the day you can charge during that half the day. Most EVs already support time mode charging and price based charging exists in a few.
For always needed power we can just over provision and for variable power we can just turn it off if it's a particularly calm night. A surprisingly large amount of electricity use can be adjusted by a few hours. For example see how car charging locations are now adding batteries to allow them to avoid high demand charges by time shifting loads.
You need to guarantee a minimum level of daily production because even if an EV can charge at different times of the day it needs to be charged every day. This is in addition to all the other electricity needs.
In the UK solar is not that great because of the gloomy winters (when heating demand is at its peak, and the UK wants to also move away from gas central heating...).
Best bets, IMO are tides and offshore wind. But wind can also be quite variable.
If you add all of this up "just over provision" becomes unrealistic. There needs to be extensive storage capacity but I don't think we're quite there yet. Certainly batteries do not seem a very environmentally friendly option. Even this may bot solve the problem.
All in all I think renewables can minimise the need for nuclear power but cannot replace it, at least for now.
Isn't there a high environmental cost to building PVs? (extraction of required resources from mines - I realise nuclear requires this too). I like green energy a lot, but don't believe they come at zero cost. Also PVs work for half of the day at best, and wind blows sometimes... What we need is all of the above. Diversity in energy.
When most vehicles are electric are need to be charged at night, I'm not sure PV and turbines will cut it.
There's a reason the anti-nuclear people want to talk about radiation and not mining. In terms of pollution from resource extraction nuclear is inconsequential (relative to our other available energy sources) because it requires an infinitesimal amount of stuff you actually need to pull out of the ground. Oil, coal, minerals for solar panels, minerals for batteries, etc. require orders of magnitude more environmentally impacting activity per output because you need so much more of them for the same capacity.
Disclaimer: Wind might be better than nuclear in terms of mining impact. I don't know enough about the supply chain for those materials to make a good estimate and I haven't read any analysis of it. Hydo is obviously the best in terms of mining but it F's up watersheds and river systems for different reasons so it's kind of hard to make a comparison. Geothermal is good too but we can't all live in Iceland.
Solar PV and wind turbines are already the cheapest and greenest source of energy and are set to decrease in price more as they ramp up.
They're already causing the closure of existing coal and nuclear plants for purely economic reasons.
It sometimes feels like people with oddly strong opinions on nuclear power are posting from some alternate dimension where the only alternative is coal.
Nuclear is cool tech, so are vertical wind turbines and wave powered generators and concentrated solar molten salt generators. But they're all more expensive than PV and turbines.