‘Limitless’ energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots::New research shows densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa could harvest effectively unlimited energy from solar panels floating on calm tropical seas near the equator.
Just… Freaking… Deploy nuclear plants! We have the tech, we know they work, their footprint is small. Why the frack do we feel the need to chase these ridiculous zany ideas that face obvious fundamental engineering flaws, like, oh I don’t know, STORMS and corrosion??? Maintaining these would be a bloody nightmare.
That’s interesting you say that because building nuclear plants is also a “bloody nightmare”, see Vogtle, Hinkley Point, Flamanville, etc
They have been dumb, that’s for sure. However, a large part of the reason they were dumb is because of the regulatory process being, well … stupid. Not engineered well for actually executing projects. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely need regulatory oversight, but it can be done in a more thoughtful way than it is currently.
These floating solar panels though, strike me as a general engineering nightmare.
That’s not strictly true at least of Flamanville and by extension HPC. They were refining the design as they were building Flamanville and kept having to rework whole sections which put a delay on HPC. Now granted there was funding issues and government flip flopping involved but the regulatory process is pretty clear in the UK around these kinds of things.
The quickest way to de-carbonize our grid is nuclear. Meanwhile the US closed Three Mile Island a few years ago and onlined more natural gas in the state and Germany closed several nuclear plants and onlined more coal plants. The anti-nuclear push is fucking stupid.
At least France is building nuclear like crazy. They have one of the most de-carbonized grids on the planet.
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If nuclear was in any way comparable in terms of cost to renewables + storage you might have a point, but it isn’t, so you don’t.