Christian, the British experience with fast breeder reactors hasn't been an unmitigated success.
So what? Introduction of cars haven't been one either. Same goes for airplanes, space shuttles, etc. Should we stop each and every project or new technology as soon as we run into problems?
Also keep in mind that quite a lot of such fast breeders "back then" had a dual use purpose: to also breed nuclear material for military purposes. Taking that dual use out of the picture and focusing only on civilian use should make things a bit easier. And lets not forget the massive pressure of the wannabe-greens that caused massive cuts in research funding in that sector.
No matter how one looks at it, there simply is no other viable solution, and won't be for quite some time to come, to satisfy our energy demands. I have seen plenty of "studies" (if one wants to call them that) and other stuff that claims that using 100% renewables to meet our demands is possible, even in a very short time (like, 10 years from now or less). But whenever i read them carefully, they all turn out to be full of flaws, deception and outright lies.
People who think that throwing a bunch of windmills and solar panels at the problem will solve it are utterly mislead by that green propaganda. Quite the contrary is true. Building more windmills and solar panels is just the beginning of even more problems. All one needs to do is to apply some simple math to see that.
Lets take wind power for example. In 2010 we had 21,607 windmills installed with a total capacity of 27,214 MW, that is, 27.214 GW. Purely theoretical, that would produce 365 * 24 * 27.214 = 238,394.64 GWh = roundabout 238.4 TWh per year. However, since the wind does not blow all the time, they only fed 37.7 TWh into the grid, while 50.5 TWh was expected. Now, lets be gracious and take that 50.5 TWh number. 50.5 / 238.4 = 0.21. That means that from the nameplate capacity you get only 21% out in reality, over the course of one year.
Now lets assume that the total electricity demand for one year would also be those 238.4 TWh. To just reach that capacity, one would have to install 5 times as many windmills as their nameplate capacity tells, that is, 238.4 * 5 = 1,192 TW capacity. And here is where the problems start. Just throwing 5 times as many windmills in the environment does exactly nothing to meet that demand. We need storage capacity as well. Filling and emtying a storage has losses. Let's be gracious again and assume 85% total system efficiency (which is way too good to be real). Now we need to install 1,192 / 0.85 = roundabout 1,402 TW.
But wait, that calculation assumes at least a somewhat constant wind with only little outages. However, that is not how reality works. In fact, we can have one week without wind, followed by one day with wind, and again a week without wind. That means that we have to install a multiple of that capacity just to be able to fill all the storages quickly enough during that single day, while there must be enough storage capacity to hold for one week. And we still need even more windmills, because the current demand does not go to zero just because we want to use the windmills to fill the storages.
Of course this is only a simplified example, but it shows where the real problems are. One would need a huge multiple of installed capacity, just to handle storage and all that. Then we have transmission losses, offline times for servicing the units, etc, etc. And i used wind energy because that is what has the more efficient numbers. Solar power is much, much worse in that regard.
Now, it's easy to calculate such things (which the greenies did not really do anyways) and throw around the numbers, and then say "hey, see, it's possible". Yes, on paper it is. But where do you want to put all these windmills? You can not pack them together too dense, or the overall efficiency goes down rapidly. You need a lot of land to place them. Plus a lot of wiring to connect them. And then you have to build massive amounts of storage. I'm wondering what the greenies will say when they are told "hey guys, we have to flood your village because we have to build a hydro storage dam there".
Here you can see a map with the distribution of windfarms in Germany. All these windmills contribute to just below 10% of the total electricity demand we have. That means that to be able to satisfy _just_ the demand, we need 10 times as many of them. And then again we need multiples of that to supply the storage systems. Plus the storage systems themselves.
No, i'm sorry, but saying that 100% renewable can be done is just a big pipe dream, one that right now already costs me a lot of money due to the EEG in Germany, that forces me to pay a premium that is used only to subsidize wind and solar.
Greetings,
Chris
ETA: The numbers i used above are for Germany, of course.
ETA 2: And i completely left out the problem with the grid in that calculation. If we really would need to be able to fill storages that hold for one week in only one day, we would obviously need at least a 8 times higher grid capacity (7 times to fill the storages plus one for the current demand). And that for only the periods where it is necessary. What an enormous waste of resources.
