Q. Can we depend on renewable energy such as the light of the sun and the velocity of the wind?
Wind and solar have an important role to play in our energy mix, and some locations are more suited to these technologies than others. But the key problem is that they are simply not able to scale to the point of being able to replace fossil fuels. Unlike nuclear, networking an electric grid to employ renewable energy requires a complete rebuilding of the entire energy infrastructure in order to make it operational at a level at which it can displace the use of fossil fuels. This is an extraordinary investment that no country has yet to actually take on.
And you still have to maintain the old fossil infrastructure to act as backup for when the renewable sources are not engaged. There are serious problems that are preventing renewables from actually displacing fossil fuels and they are not likely to be solved any time soon. Even Germany, which has invested more in wind and solar technology than any other country (20 years and hundreds of billions of Euros) is now 5% solar and 7% wind. They’re also still expanding their coal capacity, and thanks to their decision to close down their nuclear plants, their CO2 emissions are actually going up, as is true for Japan as well.
Wind and solar, once they get developed on a large scale, are also encountering a great deal of popular opposition. The argument that we don’t need nuclear energy because we can power everything with wind and solar is a dangerous fiction. If it were true, there’d be little need for so many intelligent people to be developing and supporting nuclear power at all.
I have no personal stake in there being more nuclear power. I don’t care about nuclear power as an end in itself. I care about it only because I see it as the only way for us to displace the use of fossil fuels which are causing death and disease, are acidifying the oceans, and causing the climate to start to spin out of control.
Nuclear is the far better choice, despite all of the dogma and myths put forth by anti-nuclear activists over the last several decades. Abandoning nuclear energy completely because of one terrible (and preventable) accident at a 1960’s era reactor that was flooded by one of the largest tsunami’s ever recorded makes no sense.
Japan should invest in replacing it’s current nuclear fleet with the latest and most advanced reactor technology on the planet. It will maintain energy independence, develop an entirely new export industry, and could become the envy of the world.
Returning to fossil fuels, as is currently the case, while squandering it’s wealth on renewable energy projects that will never provide energy independence would be a dreadful mistake, in my opinion.
