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The IPCC's Shifting Position On Nuclear Energy
Lasrick writes Suzanne Waldman writes about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its stand on nuclear power over the course of its five well-known climate change assessment reports. The IPCC was formed in 1988 as an expert panel to guide the drafting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The treaty's objective is to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a safe level. Waldman writes: 'Over time, the organization has subtly adjusted its position on the role of nuclear power as a contributor to de-carbonization goals," and she provides a timeline of those adjustments.
I had to build a small datacenter (about 25 1u servers and some routing/switching hardware) that the client needed 5 days of reserve power. The battery unit for this was surprisingly small. It was about 5 foot cube, and packed full of lead acid batteries. This was in early 2003. I imagine today's battery technology can make that even denser. Tesla's battery technology has been released in to the wild, and it is light years beyond lead acid technology.
Once you factor in charging and discharging losses, batteries end up cutting solar's already-abysmal energy per $ ratio nearly in half. Pumped storage (pumping water uphill into a dam) is currently the best energy storage option, and even it sits at between 70%-80% efficiency.
Using the energy as it's produced (or in the case of fossil fuels and nuclear, producing the energy as it's needed) is always the best option. I mean hypothetically, if you're going to use PV solar to pump water uphill for storage, it's really no different from installing thousands of square km of cheap black-painted panels just underneath the ocean surface, raising the temperature of the top layer of ocean water, increasing the evaporation rate, resulting in more rainfall, giving you the same increase in water stored behind dams for probably a lot less cost. Why even bother with the intermediate lossy steps of converting solar to electricity, then electricity to mechanical motion?