Michael norton, Sept 9, 09:17:
– I feel that with HDVC Interconnectors and a wonderful mix of renewable options, we may not always need base load.
That is one of the various opinions expressed in this interesting video I found yesterday:
Why nuclear power will (and won’t) stop climate change – YouTube, 40 minutes.
Other matters raised: construction of nuclear power stations is too slow these days to get us out of this mess. Solar and wind are particularly suitable in less developed countries that don’t have much distribution infrastructure.
I think nuclear’s place is amid heavy industry, in particular for producing large amounts of heat at high temperature for industrial processes.
China has twenty nuclear reactors under construction, and nearly another eighty planned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China
But due to their complexity each nuclear plant takes around a decade to construct, which probably helps explain why China’s coal consumption is increasing at present.
There is undue fear of nuclear power. Burning fossil fuels releases radioactivity comparable with the nuclear industry, it just does it more steadily – everything dug up from underground is somewhat radioactive. With millions killed in the last eighteen months and many more deaths still to come, and many times that number suffering long term symptoms, this pandemic should teach us that biological technologies are far, far more dangerous than nuclear power, because biological agents reproduce and spread whereas radioactivity decays and dilutes. Plus anyone can do genetics in their own kitchen; you can mail order the humanised mice that SARS-CoV-2 does so well in (yes, you really can).
Ammonia is a good way of “packaging” hydrogen; similar to methane, but with nitrogen as the central atom instead of the problematic carbon:
Hydrogen energy storage in AMMONIA: Fantastic future or fossil fuel scam? – YouTube, 12 minutes. That whole channel, “Just Have a Think”, is highly informative.
Maybe the government should hold up a bit on hydrogen deployment because ammonia looks more practical.