Green Energy

Lemmy most of the time: Makes fun of people always bringin up "the economy" as if that's what's really important

Also Lemmy when it comes to nuclear: "But the economy!"

What happens in case of a sudden abnormal weather event that blocks out most of the sunlight? Picture a super volcano eruption covering the sky in ashes for thousands of miles. Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth the sun was blocked by dust for several years. Or just think about northern European countries that barely get any light in winter; Portugal is a very sunny country, we have invested a lot into solar, and sometimes we still get energy from Spain (who use nuclear btw).

Also, I've been hearing this whole "it takes too long to build nuclear plants" since at least early 2010s; imagine where we'd be if we'd just started building plants then. I can picture the same thing being said in 2035-2040, while fossil fuels still have not been completely dropped.

Most of those were very old. I'm glad we're not the ones who will find out how long you can really run one if those things before it fails.

A nuclear plant can be built in like 5 years.

Can you point to any nuclear plant in a Western country that was built in five years in the past thirty years or so?

And the supply chain is not the issue when you have lots of orders.

Seriously? Building reactor vessels is a very specialized task that only few suppliers are even capable of. Add to that uranium mining, fuel rod production, fuel logistics and a host of other components - and all that will just fall from the sky once enough orders are signed?

On the other hand many countries don’t have areas that have enough sun and consistent wind.

Germany is already at over 50%, many other countries are far ahead of that. Your point has no factual basis.

Id also say that the part you said that cost of renewables combined with storage would be a fraction of the cost, that is completely false.

Here's a source

Source? I was a kid in the seventies and the OPEC shit show brought a lot of fresh of discussion and investigation into peak oil, and that was expected to be around now , but nobody I heard from said it would run out. Have some wikipedia with that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
May I quote that the predictions were decent, however “It has been recognized that conventional oil production has peaked around 2005–2006. What has prevented peak oil from then on is US tight oil which rapidly increased since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Additionally, but to a lesser extent, Canadian oil-sands production has helped increase oil supply since 2008.”

So yes, more sources were found, however they were mostly obtainable by tight oil, AKA fracking, and as we all know, fracking is economically viable only when all environmental and other damage is externalised.

That's really really expensive unless you already have natural upper and lower reservoirs.