American conservatives are contemptuous of solar and wind power but love nuclear power. They have no particular opinion, as near as I can tell, about tidal or geothermal power.
Why?
59 thoughts on “What’s the deal with conservatives and carbon-free energy?”
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I wouldn't presume to speak for all conservatives, but I am contemptuous of wind and solar because they are much more expensive than conventional generation.
Beyond direct cost, they are non-dispatchable, which means we must maintain a dispatchable generation fleet equal to maximum full demand in order to avoid outages. In other words, even if windmills and solar panels were free, we'd still need all the fossil-powered generation capacity we currently have, although it wouldn't all have to operate all the time.
As far as nuclear, I'm less contemptuous because nuclear has been demonstrated at scale. The technical problems have been solved. I'm not sure it can ever be operated economically, but it is a feasible path to zero emissions. Anyone who claims that emissions elimination is the most important priority but rules out nuclear is unserious.
Good grief.
Solar and wind power are currently way less expensive that conventional generation. Solar is 33% less expensive than gas and wind is 44% less expensive (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-03/solar-is-now-33-cheaper-than-gas-power-in-us-guggenheim-says).
Nuclear power has decided NOT solved all its problems. Take it from a physicist. As long as we continue to insist on boiling water and pressurized water designs from the 1950's, nuclear power is intrinsically unsafe. Its default state is meltdown, and it has to be actively maintained in a state that doesn't do that. There are more modern designs that are intrinsically safe, whose default state is turned off and have to be actively maintained in a state of being turned on. If the former case, if maintenance technology fails it is a disaster. In the latter, if maintenance technology fails, the laws of physics turn the reactor off. In a pebble bed reactor, for instance, Doppler broadening of the neutron absorption cross section as the temperature rises lowers the reaction rate, bringing the temperature back down. There's one big problem with these designs.
None of them have been approved for construction and the approval process is lengthy, expensive and tedious.
Even so, the waste problem has not been solved and in a very real sense cannot be solved. No matter what you do with it, you have to tell people 10,000 to 100,000 years in the future not to go there. How do you propose to do that? Put up a chain link fence and a sign?
On one point, I agree. Nuclear power is a key piece of the decarbonization puzzle. But lets not kid ourselves about how great nuclear power is. The ONLY thing it has going for it is the fact that climate change is a global problem and nuclear waste is a local one. Fill a place with high level waste and 100 miles away is perfectly safe. Fill the atmosphere with carbon and no place is safe.
Regarding the Guggenheim claim:
“Solar and wind now present a deflationary opportunity for electric supply costs,” the analysts said, which “supports the case for economic deployment of renewables across the US.”Gas prices have surged amid a global supply crunch after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while tax-credit extensions and sweeping US climate legislation have brought down the cost of wind and solar."
https://energynow.com/2022/10/solar-is-now-33-cheaper-than-gas-power-in-us-guggenheim-says/
So, solar is cheaper with current elevated gas prices, and including the benefits of subsidies. This isn't my idea of cheaper.
I'm not exactly a supporter of nuclear. Politically, I doubt that any plant can ever be approved in this country. Insurance is likely to be unavailable commercially under any circumstances, and utilities won't try to build without it. Safety issues are not zero, but the worst accident in US history resulted in no radiation release.
My position is that no great action is needed. Worst-case warming in the next century or 2 will be mild, and easier to adapt to than to prevent.
American conservatives are pure id. Liberals love wind and solar and are unreasonably terrified of nuclear. Therefore conservatives love nuclear and are unreasonably terrified of wind and solar. Nobody cares much about tidal because it is of marginal utility anyway.
The opposition to nuclear power is largely irrational. It's typical of a soft headed lib to be afraid of nuclear power. Opposition to, say, tidal power for environmental reasons is largely rational and just comes with the usual trade-offs.
Not sure if the performative anti-renewables represents conservative opinion. In very red Texas, EIA has noted that:
"More than 75% of the 20.8 GW of utility-scale battery capacity that owners and operators reported that they plan to install from 2022 to 2025 is located in Texas (7.9 GW) and California (7.6 GW).
The large amount of existing and planned solar and wind capacity in California and Texas present a growing need for battery storage. More utility-scale solar capacity is located in California than in any other state, 16.8 GW, and developers expect to add another 7.7 GW between 2023 and 2025. A total of 10.5 GW of utility-scale solar capacity is located in Texas; developers plan to install another 20.4 GW between 2023 and 2025. In addition, 37.2 GW of wind capacity is located in Texas, more than in any other state, and developers expect to add an additional 5.3 GW over the next three years."