Windmills' technology has improved dramatically, like also nuclear fusion's.
We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency.
Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money.
We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.
Not true. Technology is making breakthroughs because that is what technology does. Solar and wind may not have moved along quite as fast but they would have moved along. We need nuclear for stability (as we don't have energy storage facilities that can handle extreme weather events for days or weeks) and we need solar and wind because who can afford to give up "free" energy that is there for the taking. Solar is the end goal (or fusion) of course but energy storage density at grid scale is decades off. There are several viable nuclear designs available now that can't go critical and are practical with just a little more work and government support.
We've sunk untold billions into nuclear, a very small fraction of what has gone into renewables. The major reason why so many countries wanted to have nuclear reactors was mostly because it was convenient cover for weapons research, and a way to make fissile material for weapons (Plutonium, for instance), not because it made clean or commercially viable energy.
France is a perfect example of this. When the oil crisis hit in the 70's they then used this knowledge to rapidly expand their use of nuclear power, which is now the highest in the world. But the reactors are aging, the waste is piling up and new construction has been delayed or halted indefinitely (and is already over budget).
Whether renewables are growing fast enough is something we control in a very direct way, and cranking out windmills and solar panels is really a mere matter of engineering. The latest iteration windmills make impressive power (8 to 12 MW design power is now a reality, something I did not expect to see in my lifetime), and can be mass produced economically.
They also tie into the grid at many locations, something aging grid infrastructure appreciates (the variability is another problem, but there are fortunately some solutions for that now).
And it is still true, wind will be never be able to compete with nuclear for the simple fact that wind blows when it blows and you need energy when you need it. Unless we develop a technology that is able to cope with the huge spikes that windmills put on the energy grid and store energy in a very efficient way (including gaining the energy back when we need it) wind will not be more than few percentage of the overall energy production with the cost of having gas turbines in the system to just to balance windmills. Solar is obviously far better, there are few things to sort out but the progress we made is definitely promising.
It wasn't that long ago that wind and electric weren't economically viable sources of energy. But after putting a lot of effort into making them more efficient they are now somewhat practical. As far as I know, similar levels of research and innovation haven't happened for nuclear fission. At least not yet.
The main power grid should be always from a predictable source. wind and solar are far from that. And there's the problem of disposing solar panels and old wind turbines. We came a long way, but there's a lot of space for improvements. Meanwhile, nuclear energy is a stable and mature technology.
In the absense of renewables, the promise of more efficient nuclear electricity production sounds great. It's just that this promise has been around since the 50s and instead we now have huge amounts of highly toxic nuclear waste.
The potential of wind, especially in the States, is so significant and threatening to anyone stupid enough to invest their time in developing nuclear power plants at a time when the price for renewables has undercut nuclear and coal.
You really believe it would have been possible to construct a modern wind turbine with the materials available in 1950?
Yes they do give a much better return than any thermal source according to any recent study of LCOE I've come across. Reflected in investment numbers - renewables account for 70% of new global capacity added last year.
Wind, solar and batteries are products of an energy intensive process NOT a combustion based process.
The shift to electricity as the primary energy source is well underway in multiple industries and sectors. Growth appears slow because industrial equipment is built to last decades. In transport (equally as energy hungry as industry), it's happening a lot faster as with domestic (induction cooking and heat pump sales).
Thorium molten salt, promising? You mean they were back in the 1950s/1960s in Oak Ridge? The first experimental molten salt reactor ran for a few days before springing a leak and being decommissioned. Or the later one in the 1960s which ran for 4 years (only managing to operate for 40% of the time)? There's a whole bunch of reasons that the PWR emerged as the dominant nuclear generation tech from forest of experimental reactor designs in the mid 20th century.
It mainly is the output, and we've had nuclear tech for decades. We could have built enough to go 100% green already and I don't think at the moment we have the necessary tech for wind and solar to satisfy everything going electric, let alone the current consumption. If wind and solar were cheap and reliable, people would have switched already.
The problem with nuclear is the slow iteration speed and extreme cost of failure.
Those are not good properties if you want to push technology forward quickly. The great thing about solar and wind is that we can iterate very quickly and catastrophic failure costs are nearly non-existent.
Nuclear still has great potential but the costs are just too high (and maybe they should be).
I think you're missing the fact that solar and wind, being quite mature and otherwise unencumbered, have been pretty well optimized to what physics and chemistry will allow. Further gains will be slow and incremental.
Nuclear has been around quite a while as well, but is heavily encumbered by public sentiment, sub-optimal regulations, and knowledge atrophy. There is much more room for optimization before running into physical laws.
Nor economically... it's very expensive, from cradle to grave, and far beyond (decommissioning and waste storage reaching out for centuries). Solar and wind have zero fuel costs (before mechanical/electronic conversion), have already proven to be very competitive, and can be quickly manufactured and installed (months, not decades).
And they create lots of jobs.
I've heard about promising new, safer nuke tech for decades. So far, no proof in the pudding. Solar and wind tech were deliberately held back, politically, for decades. Too bad, we would be in much less trouble if that hadn't happened.
How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in a country that has invested heavily in it. Where i live people has to use an app to see when they can afford to wash their clothes, run the dishwasher, charge the car. The government is praying to the weather gods for a warm and windy winter so that we might avoid rolling blackouts and insane energy prices. We as humans can simply not afford to rely on the current state of mother Nature. Who knows what might happen? Wind patterns could change over time or because of climate change, heck a super vulcano an asteroid or nuclear fallout could block out the sun for years. As long as we can't control the weather, plate tectonics or deflect asteroids let's invest in a technology that is very well understood and has stood the test of time, works in space, the most energy dense, the most efficient and there's enough of it on earth to keep us going for thousands of years.
30 years ago, wind and solar were pipe dreams. Now they are the cheapest AND cleanest forms of power generation. Nuclear had a chance, and blew it. They still can't be built on time and within budget. The waste is still not stored safely. The disasters are still hugely costly to remedy.
Maybe some new generation of fuel and reactors can change that. But there is no prototype yet that proves that out.
Why would the future point to renewables? There's tremendous progress which is still possible with nuclear technology, compare that with wind which is mostly a solved turbine technology now, I doubt I will see a 30% gain from wind in my lifetime.
We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency.
Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money.
We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.
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