Nuclear power or Fossil power?

[JebediahK]

Will we ever switch over to nuclear fission/fusion power alone? or will we stick to the disgustingly simple fossil fuel combustion process? Share your ideas on where the energy industry is headed below.

[swansont]

This sounds suspiciously like homework.

 

Anyway, my answer to the question is no. You can't address all of our needs with fission and/or fusion alone. Availability and delivery are two issues. We don't have the capacity, and nuclear gives us electricity. We have needs other than electricity.

[Sensei]

Share your ideas on where the energy industry is headed below.

Every apartment should have its own solar panels 18 m^2 (at least) on roof or walls surrounding house. This is the most efficient way - it doesn't have to transform from DC->AC, then to high voltage AC 220 kV, then to lower voltage AC 230 V, then in home in each device transformed back to low voltage DC like 5 V, 12 V.. Many transformations, just to get energy to your home from long distance with as less as possible loses, is causing a lot of loses during transformation process (sending DC for long distance would be even worser). When you can have energy that you need just a few meters from you. Just everybody have to have his/her own "solar power station" and accumulators enough for 24h.

 

But this way nobody would earn money. Energy industry, companies developing power stations & fuel, government (vat tax, cit tax, excise duty). And ordinary people would have electricity for free..

[CaptainPanic]

We will always need carbon-based materials (and food). So, we will always have carbon-based waste. Since combustion is a good way to get rid of the carbon-based materials that cannot be recycled, I think it will be around for a long time. Therefore, nuclear will never be the only source of energy.

 

Will fossil energy ever be reduced to zero? Probably not in the near future, but in the far future it might. At some point, it might be too valuable to just burn such resources. Will nuclear be the only source of energy to step into the gap left by fossil fuels? No. Sustainable energy (wind & solar) are getting cheaper every day, and I haven't observed the same trend for nuclear power (which, I admit can also be due to poor searching on my side). Now that some countries decided to shut down nuclear power stations, and want to clean them up, we finally get an idea of the actual costs of cleaning up nuclear power. Cleaning up a nuclear power station brings huge costs with it, and judging by several news articles, those costs were severely underestimated.

 

Obviously, you can just build a nuclear plant, run it for profit, then run out of money or even go bankrupt and let the government pay for the clean up. But although that seems to be exactly how the nuclear sector runs its business, that is not a fair comparison, and I did not take that into account in my vision of the future.

 

Summarizing: We'll always be burning stuff because we need carbon-based products. Sustainable energy (wind / solar) keeps getting cheaper. Now that we learn about clean-up costs of nuclear, it appears nuclear is more expensive than we thought. Therefore the answer to both questions in the OP is "no".