I’m all for lessening our environmental impact, but “renewables” are still stupid. Nuclear is the answer.
Discussion
Doesn't nuclear require centralization? Geothermal would be more decentralized, right?
Not sure what you mean by centralization. Nuclear power plants can be enormous or tiny. Typically in the past they’ve been built huge because that generated cheaper power. Does that answer your question or another topic?
If we went nuclear, would there need to be a plant on every county, or a plant in every state? I've not researched this but I've never heard of a nuclear plant that could service like 10-100 homes which to me would be as decentralized as it gets unless you can have 1 per household.
You have fourth generation “micro” reactors as small as a few megawatts:
Or you can build gigantic ones where you might only new one or a few per state or anything in between. There’s no scientific limit in that regard. Just a societal choice.
I think the answer is that having your own solar, wind or geothermal(where applicable) as your own private energy node should be more common. We should provide our own food, water, and energy and only suppliment with stores, water mains, and grids when absolutely necessary. That way mini-reactors could be in every city and town and not have to scale up because the citizens provide 70-95% themselves.
I think it’s a cool idea, it’s like just exorbitantly expensive. Redundancy isn’t free.
Well, I think that's kind of my point, it wouldn't be redundant, it would be primary. When buying or building a house "How does it generate its own power?" Would be a much more commonplace question. 12, 100AH 48V LiFePo batteries, 20, 400W solar panels, BMS, Charge Controllers, and 2, 3-phase inverters. That comes to about $23,000 if included in sales price or build cost it's much more reasonable than retrofitting a house not optimized for its own power generation. Every rural house could do this and even send excess energy back to the grid( If they don't want to use some of that sweet sun energy for BTC mining.) Decentralization strengthens every system you apply it to, if done correctly. Don't be a survivalist, connect with others, but take care of yourself first.
Yeah I think it’s a cool ideal and great if you have the money but very few Americans let alone any folks in other more modestly wealthy country have a spare $23k lying around or even the monthly equivalent for a loan. Housing is already ridiculously expensive and that would be an large extra burden, if you do that for every house in America you’re talking $23k each household times let’s say roughly 130M American households = roughly $3 trillion. That’s WILDLY more expensive than the existing electrical system. I think it’s cool if rich people want to opt into it, but it’s not an option for the vast majority of folks.
The distributed cost of $23k for 130 million people is definitely less costly than the 7,300 power plants, nearly 160,000 miles of high-voltage power lines, and millions of miles of low-voltage power lines and distribution transformers for usage and cost, shipping of fuels and piping of gas. We just take that for granted because it's already here. THAT cost has already been paid but also continues to be paid for every year. The solution will present itself at this price for only so long before the fragility of the US electric grid shows itself. Then there will be a rush on energy because everyone is squabbling over which "One-size-fits-all" solution should be the main point of centralization. Coal and gas, so called "Renewables," or Nuclear. They all share the same problem a centralized point of failiure. I am not saying sovereignty is easy, I am saying it is necessary.