Cheap, safe batteries
Oh you sweet ignorant child. Industrial scale battery storage to offset solar for continues power during night time hours is horrifically expensive when you’re talking gigawatt grids, to say nothing of the severe safety hazard they are.
Nuclear only has one caveat is the price.
It’s the safest, bar none. More people died constructing the Hoover Dam than died in relation to Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.
It uses the least amount of land per megawatt produced. This applies both in raw terms of reactor size to generators, turbines or solar panels, or if you include all land needed to mine, process, refine, construct and decommission a form of energy. Cadmium based roof top solar is the only thing that comes close, which is not just niche use as no single building footprint can hope to produce enough power for a single floor, let alone high density structures, but cadmium based solar is also ridiculously expensive. And this metric fails to mention how inefficient battery storage for things like solar is, which further inflates the land use.
In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, be it carbon, methane and other climate devastating, Nuclear is the lowest in terms of emissions, and those emissions are all front loaded as part of the construction and mining process, which can theoretically be lowered with more RnD into greener practices for those industries.
So we have a source of power that is safe, efficient and proven that would allow us to put more land aside for conservation efforts which would help with carbon capture as well as lower emissions. And the only major downside is the higher upfront cost? Take a guess what’s going to happen to energy costs if we continue the current course and climate collapse continues to happen.
Wind Turbine’s problems is we have to replace the blades every 3-7 years depending on the model and there is no good way to recycle or break down the fiberglasse components. So every every 3-7 years you have 3 XL tractor truck trailer size turbine blades going into landfills.
Wind and Solar are still good, don’t get me wrong, but lets not pretend they have no downsides or drawbacks.
We’re just gonna set up a vat of molten metal and send it out Terminator 2 style. /s
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Nuclear land use is still below all other forms of energy generation when you take the whole lifecycle, from mining to refinement to production and construction, lile I said in my above post.
Most nuclear plants contain all their nuclear waste during their lifetime operation and transport after decommissioning. Yucca mountain was designed as a backup and assumed 30 years to fill if fuel rods were not reprocessed.