Im not saying any Th-MSR reactors are available today. And Im NOT saying you need to stop fighting climate change by other means until they are ready. However: Return-On-Investment for renewables goes down as they saturate the grid, so Im trying to intercept the moment where building an additional wind turbine or deploying an additional solar panel on a grid is no longer attractive. A second solar panel on a neighbors house will peak-and-trough identically... once the grid is saturated that peak has zero value (sometimes negative value). . AP1000 are acceptable for any industrialized nation with a body of cooling water available. Thats essentially a zero-carbon solution offering gigawatts of energy. Power being supplied by coal to a grid? Thats an straight-forward replacement. There are many opportunities to do this around the world. . You might find, however, like the Breakthrough article mentions, that your supposedly cheap intermittent energy source deployed in developing nations will be abandoned after construction. Because the people youve built it for would rather have 24/7 energy once that becomes available. . Solar is solving problems in Africa every day! . I make this case in another video. Sorry I dont have time to cram every nugget of info into every video. For having watched this video 2x, you are aware there are other videos in this series? . Yes. Im happy to see solar deployed around the world. That has no bearing on my trying to educate people about different forms of nuclear reactors. That has no bearing on me trying to show why we should try lower the cost of carbon-free energy. . But you see that deploying a windmill or solar panel doesnt fundamentally drive the technology forward, right? You can lower manufacturing costs and optimize deployment strategies, but fundamental R&D problems (such as energy storage) dont get tackled simply because another solar panel has been deployed? . Developing nations (and developed nations) burn coal and natural gas. They do this because it is cheap. Thats why fundamental advances are needed. Im trying to enable that. If you want to focus on deployment and not R&D then go for it. Im hardly alone in thinking thats an uphill battle. . Bill Gates (for example) supports R&D into solar. Hes spending his own money on that because he sees a fundamental opportunity to improve the technology. (As he does nuclear.) He does CAUTION against a deploy-deploy-deploy strategy. Gates says far too little is spent on R&D and too much is spent deploying expensive energy, and this needs to be re-calibrated. https://youtube/watch?v=nQpuGwWyFQ0
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 23:51:19 +0000
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