Or, at least, more and more unavoidable.

This is the second post of a 3-parts series (starting here) in which I am going to aggregate and share some links, concepts and thoughts about the general problem of providing energy to contemporary society, and the role that appropriate, open, digital or at least digitally-enabled technologies have in solving that problem.

In the last ten or so years:

• we have all learned a lot about real-world, large scale deployment of renewable energies in many countries (see here)
• the same has happened, for better or for worse, with the “long term”, real-world performances of nuclear plants
• demands to quickly phase out fossil fuels have grown and continue to grow at increasing speed, from all sectors of society and for diverse reasons
• nuclear energy research and development has made interesting progresses
• personally, I have started to notice more and more voices observing that, if we put together all these facts and knowledge, nuclear plants look half better than renewables and half unavoidable

Among the articles making that point, these are the ones that look more interesting to me:

• “Coal and gas are far more harmful than nuclear power”
• “The Only Green New Deals That Have Ever Worked Were Done With Nuclear, Not Renewables”: “Had California and Germany spent on nuclear what they instead spent on renewables, both places would already have 100% clean power”
• “Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes”
• In the long run, nuclear would be:
• cheaper, because “70 to 80 percent of the costs of building nuclear plants are up-front, whereas the costs given for solar and wind don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams, or other forms of battery”
• greener because “it produces so little waste and none enters the environment as pollution.”

In my humble opinion, the real issues here, which in all those articles are totally missing, or pushed aside as minor problems, are:

• who controls and manages the day-to-day operations of nuclear “plants”, and how
• how much energy must be produced
• the interconnections between nuclear power and some digital buzzwords of our times, especially the Internet of Things and “smart” homes, cities and cars

Continues here. Please let me know what you think by email at mfioretti@nexaima.net or Twitter (@mfioretti_en).