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frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

See, that’s a trap that keeps the argument within a frame where you can win. That’s not how it works.

What you’re doing is focusing on a singular solution, and then showing why it can’t solve all the problems. Each individual solution is attacked on its own, and then nuclear ends up being the only option.

Except that’s a dumb way of going about it.

Each of these solutions has pros and cons. You use the pros of ones to cover the cons of another.

As one example I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Brazil has an HDVC line 2400km long. With that kind of reach, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, wind in Nebraska can power New York, and every single existing hydro dam along the way can provide storage. What you end up with is the possibility of not needing to build a single MWh of new storage or hydro dams. If nothing else, you don’t need very much.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from “No Miracles Needed”, written by Mark Z Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering:

On July 11, 2011, I was invited to a dinner at the Axis Café and Gallery in San Francisco to discuss the potential of renewable energy as an alternative to natural gas hydrofracking in New York State. Little did I know it at the time, but that dinner would set off a chain reaction of events that turned a scientific theory, that the world has the technical and economic ability to run on 100 percent clean, renewable energy and storage for all purposes, into a mass popular movement to do just that. The movement catalyzed an explosion of worldwide country, state, and city laws and proposed laws, including the Green New Deal, and business commitments. Ten years after that meeting, critics were no longer mocking our ideas as pie-in-the-sky and tooth-fairy-esque. They were no longer claiming that transitioning to more than 20 percent renewables would cripple power grids. Instead, the discussion had changed to what is the cost of 100 percent renewables, how fast can we get there, and should we leave a few percent for non-renewables?

This was from the first edition of the book published in 2023. So quite contrary to your claim that “there’s no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025”, the technology has existed for over a decade. We just need to build it. And we are building it, just not as fast as we need to.

Meanwhile, the NRC continues to stamp permits for new nuclear, but nobody is building. There’s a reason for that, too.

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