Peter Fairley opines that replacing fossil fuels to go 100% renewable is a dream within reach – thanks to new technology that keep things humming even when wind and sun aren’t there. To stand any chance of halting runaway climate change, we need to squelch carbon emissions down to near zero by mid-century. That means getting off filthy fossil fuels – and fast. Few scientists would disagree with that, but there is precious little consensus on how to do it. Nuclear fission power is expensive [but only when compared to natural gas] and mired in controversy [perpetuated by anti-nuclear, ignorant groups of misinformed people. Otherwise nuclear power is actually the best possible solution because it produces near zero carbon emissions and has a long safety record; even accidents causing meltdowns (Three Mile Island and Fukushima) have been managed with zero loss of life. Chernobyl has to be excluded because that reactor design was hazardous and was called out as such by the West well before that happened. The designs employed in the U.S. (and the SMRs to come in the future) have outstanding safety records]. Nuclear fusion, directly harnessing the kind of reactions that power the sun, remains a distant, [but now a very perceptible] dream. Meanwhile, renewable energy is too unreliable [with O&M too expensive] to meet all our power demands.
Or is it? Clean-energy technologies have come on leaps and bounds in the past decade or so. More recently, an impassioned debate has broken out among energy experts as to whether “100 per cent renewables” is now within our grasp and, if so, how we get there. “We can really mess this up,” says Dan Kammen, an energy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “Just because we can make the shift doesn’t mean we will.” But the path we need to take – and the hurdles we face – are increasingly clear.
The renewables revolution has gathered momentum in recent years thanks to free-falling prices [and Left-leaning politics yearning for wind mills and solar farms with no real concerns for price and stability]. And as clean energy becomes cheap, installation is surging [while nuclear power should be]. The world added 98 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy last year – more than any other energy source. Over half of that, 53 GW, was in China, which has long been the world’s biggest consumer of dirty coal, [but China is quickly converting to nuclear power with their current pace of some 20 new nuclear power plants currently under construction and more than 100 planned over the next 20 years.]
In California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, renewables already provide over a third of electricity and will surpass 50 per cent well before 2030. Germany is aiming to get at least …[but natural gas is providing back-up at an increasing rate, since the Californians have chosen to by-pass nuclear power by sutting down the last operating nuclear plant in the state. Time will tell about the actual cost of renewables].
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For further information on the biased media supporting anti-nuclear views, see: http://i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/ConfrontingBias.pdf
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