A top to bottom look at green energy
I struggled with deciding in which forum to start this discussion. It could be germane to a lot of them. But since the Tesla thread has had so much activity, and Tesla's technology is central in the c...
Forum Discussion
agesilaus wrote:
Solar and wind both have the same problem. The sun doesn't shine 24 hrs/day and the wind doesn't blow 24 X 7. There is no practical storage method in soght. Battery storage is very very expensive, I saw an estimate of Trillions to finance a battery storage system of large enough capacity. Plus there just is not enough Lithium or Lead available to build the required batteries.
As you pointed out, batteries aren't a good choice for grid scale energy storage, but there are many more suitable options, and research continues to make them cheaper and more viable.
So you want to end air pollution build lots of nuke plants and hope for fusion power. Fusion plants by the way would be intensely radioactive after running for awhile. The fusion process produces lots of neutrons which would activate the plant structure.
Despite promising research, full grid scale Fusion reactors are still decades away, and as you point out still face the problem of disposing radioactive materials from the plant itself.
Solar intermittent and it has major waste disposal expenses.
If you're going to look at waste disposal, don't forget to include it for nuclear reactors too.
Plus a gigawatt sized plant takes up square miles of land compared to 100 acres for a GW fossil or nuke plant.
The advantage of solar is that it's distributed -- install solar on every house in the USA and you've provided half the USA's demand for power. The other half can go on otherwise undesirable land.
It also kills tens of thousands of birds.
solar kills comparatively few birds -- wind kills more but still a fraction of the millions killed by existing power sources (coal is the worst). But all of that pales in comparison to the billions of birds killed by domestic cats each year.
Nuke causes loud and irrational NIMBY battles.
There are both rational and irrational reasons to oppose nuclear, but the fact remains that it's going to be politically untenable for the next few decades, except perhaps some of the new small ~50 megawatt scale reactor designs that are coming out.
