Lightfoot2017 wrote:They are obscenely subsidised, both directly and indirectly.
All emergent energy systems have taken public subsidy, be it nuclear or oil. The oil industry emerged though massive subsidisation and continues to get it in all sorts of quiet ways. Picking on one energy source for being subsidised is an exercise in cherry picking.
If a fraction of the resource that's gone into windfarms over the past 30+ years had gone into wave and tidal power, then Scotland (with c7000 miles of coastline) really could be the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy.
I think there is a lot to be said for tidal generation, but they are not without extra challenges. Doing anything in water becomes an exponential cost. Just look at the difference in costs between a supercars and superyachts. Hell, a bog-standard family yacht that looks like your granny decorated it
dwarfs the cost of most top-end supercars. Whatever the R&D costs of windfarms is, you can add two or three or four decimal places to it,
easily, to get to the same stage at sea.
We literally know more about the surface of the moon than the surface of the seabed, everything in water is more costly and more difficult. I'm not poo-pooing the concept, but gambling on it alone (whilst ignoring solar, wind and battery farms) is a risky all-in bet.
For me the future has to be nuclear. Anyone who cares to research the issue thoroughly will see the sense in that.
When nuclear works it is great. Sure. The problem is when it doesn't work, well, it's a big problem. Even if the health problems can be managed, the current estimated Fukushima cost to the Japanese taxpayer is 200 billion, itself a doubling of the previous estimate - do not swoon with surprise if it doubles again. But Japan with a GDP of 7 trillion will be able to handle it. And that was a piddly little disaster. Chernobyl's cost was so vast it is literally incalculable, a 2016 review of the many papers on the subject casually puts the total cost at "hundreds of billions". Scotland's GDP is 200 billion. We couldn't even
begin to afford to clean-up after a nuclear disaster. Even a relatively mild one.
Part of the research should be risk management, the only way nuclear passes that is the expectation and requirement of no significant accidents.