Environment & Energy

Solar and wind have soaked up trillions since 2015, for stuff that will need to be replaced every 20-25 years or so, albeit with lots of cheering, destruction of vast tracts of wilderness, unreliability, doing nothing other than to entrench the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste:

The result of this vast penny pinching exercise in selective attention was reported, in units of energy in the 2024 IEA World Energy Outlook:



World Energy Outlook 2024

Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

Note that combined, the multitrillion dollar solar and wind industry, so popular with antinukes for decade upon decade while the world burns, can't even keep up with the rise in the use of fossil fuels, never mind bulk energy:

The 2024 IEA World Energy Outlook has been released; World Energy Demand Grew by 13 Exajoules, Solar and Wind by 2 EJ.

It would appear that with all that cheering, and those trillions of dollars squandered on wind and solar junk that will be landfill in 25 years, spread over pristine wilderness, that solar and wind has failed to produce just slightly above half of the energy that nuclear produced in an atmosphere of dishonest catcalls.

The United States once built more than 100 nuclear reactors in about 25 years while providing the lowest cost electricity in the world, in the process saving millions of human lives that otherwise would have been lost to air pollution and climate change.

The Vogtle reactors were not symmetric in cost. The first came in at $17.6 Billion, the second, based on learning from constructing the first was about $12.4B.

We might drive this trend were we to build, say, 100 new reactors, or at least work to build the infrastructure to do so.

One of the fun things about people who complain about the cost of nuclear reactors is that they often function, to use my favorite metaphor, like arsonists complaining about forest fires. They have worked for decades to demonize nuclear energy, and succeeded at it, having managed to destroy the nuclear manufacturing infrastructure that might have saved tens of millions of lives that were otherwise lost to air pollution, not to mention saving ecosystems destroyed by the extreme global heating now being observed.

The asymmetry in the cost of the two Vogtle reactors is a result that the first required FOAKE costs, "first of a kind engineering" because the US, unlike China, which has built more than 50 nuclear reactors in the last 20 years, a work force needed to be trained, materials needed to be designed and fabricated, in most cases, long after experience and infrastructure was available to do so. Everything had to be built from scratch. When the second reactor began, the problems with the first had been partially solved, and costs fell.

These reactors will be saving human lives and be preventing carbon releases at the dawn of the 22nd century, fifty or sixty years after every wind turbine blade now in operation will be landfill, fifty or sixty years after every solar cell now working on the planet will be electronic waste.

As for whining about penny pinching, I have never, not once, encountered someone whining about the cost of Vogtle who has expressed a wit of concern about the cost of extreme global heating, extreme weather including extreme hurricanes, extreme droughts, and extreme glacial disappearances, which I personally regard as the outcome of the success of those arsonists complaining about forest fires. The costs surely dwarf the cost of the failed and useless trillions squandered on solar and wind.

The heating of the planetary atmosphere is accelerating, not decelerating:

2024's Disastrous CO2 Increased Readings Continue at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

Note that in 2013, the famous climate scientist Jim Hansen and his colleague, calculated that nuclear power prevented the release of about 64 billion tons of carbon dioxide, close to about two years of emissions while we live in the "Renewables will save us" so "we don't need nuclear" paradise in which we live, with the planet in flames.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

The current rate that I obtain in 2024 from the data at Mauna Loa, using a 52 week running comparator between weeks in 2024 as compared with the same week in 2014 (ten year trend), shows that the annual rate of increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, shows we have reached the highest value ever observed, 25.52 ppm/10 years or 2.55 ppm per year. This year's peak was 427.94 ppm. It follows that without nuclear, we would have easily seen 433 ppm this year. If one integrates the second derivative, obtained by subtracting 2.55 ppm/year from 2.09 ppm/year that was observed in 2014, twice with high school level calculus, one can derive a crude quadratic using the current readings as boundary conditions.

This crude modeling equation predicts that we will break 500 ppm somewhere around 2046, undoubtedly with antinukes whining about "costs" day and night.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a wonderful day.