When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very much part of American branding.
Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.
Exactly. I’m 100% on board with both renewables and nuclear, but the time to build nuclear would seem to have passed. We’re a few decades too late.
That’s not too say we shouldn’t be building any new nuclear plants - in particular modern designs like SMRs, but I think it would be wiser to focus our energy now on large, grid-scale storage to help smooth out intermittent generation from renewables.
If “we” meaning society could “focus our energy” on anything except profit generation, we could build hundreds of nuclear reactors in less then a decade. We could also eliminate cars and domestic flights, and all kinds of other utopian shit. While you want to live in the status quo but with magic batteries. I’d rather “focus our energy” and live in the Star Trek post-scarcity universe.
It doesn’t take 25 years to get a nuclear plant off the ground because people are too busy sitting around counting their capitalism dollars to finish the construction. There are a tremendous number of things that need to happen in addition to planning, approving, building, and commissioning a nuclear facility. I’m fact, is those economic forces that make it happen as fast as possible, because investors want to see a return on their investment. Nuclear plants - and large power plants in general - are not a back deck. They are enormously complex, and given the sensitive nature of their fuel, there are additional things that need to happen on top of what you would expect from, say, a coal or oil generator.
But I’m not sure what you are saying about “magic batteries”. How, exactly, do you plan to make intermittent renewable generation viable without some sort of grid-scale storage?
You don’t just click your heels together there times and find yourself in a star trek utopia. That’s not how things work.
Batteries exist yes. But batteries at the scale required to store the amount of energy that even a small country uses in one day do not exist, and would be by all accounts magic.
Nuclear reactors are not magic, they are real, and they can be built, and should be built both to increase our energy production and replace fossil fuels and of course supplement renewables. Because if nuclear reactors are not built, that supplemental energy won’t come from magic storage, it will come from fossil fuels.
When did I say anything about batteries?
That is a battery. But the type of battery it is describing doesn’t actually exist.