By Paul van Son, President, Dii Desert Energy
Our ‘desert energy’ movement is each day host of interesting discussions among our professionals, staff, industry partners and other stakeholders. Recently the subject of ‘nuclear energy’ emerged in one of our WhatsApp groups. Participants are eagerly sharing rational and emotional ‘pro’s and con’s’.
I like the subject as I studied a.o. nuclear technology at the TU Delft (Nl) back in the 70-ties at a time that nuclear was extremely ‘hot’. Proponents then claimed the future energy systems would become nuclear dominated (!).
However after more than 70 years after the first nuclear power plant, ever since hardly any major fundamental improvement, nuclear power is still fairly modest. To me nuclear energy still feels like not much more than a limited and uncertain option. No carbon emissions is surely a strong argument for nuclear. However I can hardly imagine that nuclear will be able to structurally compete with the top renewables (solar and wind plus storage, hydro, biomass in combination with flexible demand). Today’s clean energy systems suffer from soaring new connection requests from data centers, EV quick chargers, heat pumps, and, what not. They require immediate expansion of energy production, enhanced transmission infrastructure, flexibility providers and decentralised or isolated concepts. Nuclear is unfortunately totally unable to serve these emerging needs timely. Energy markets, are, thus, valuing fast, small, agile, flexible and preferably decentralised approaches. The winners will, so to say, be the ants and the jaguars, not the elephants and tyrannosauruses!
Although nuclear is presently enjoying a sort of revival in several regions worldwide, I don’t believe this fascinating, but inflexible and costly technology will be able to gain finally a dominant position after 70 years of experiences….