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https://www.yahoo.com/news/switzerland-votes-phase-nuclear-energy-121710224.html
Swiss voters have backed government plans to replace the power from ageing nuclear reactors with renewable energy.
A total of 58.2 per cent of voters supported the phaseout of nuclear energy in a binding referendum on Sunday. Under the Swiss system of direct democracy, voters have the final say on major policy issues.
The plan will provide billions of pounds in subsidies for renewable energy, ban the construction of nuclear plants and decommission the country’s five existing ones, which produce about a third of the country’s electricity.
[...] The move echoes efforts across Europe to reduce dependence on nuclear energy and has been in the making following Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011. Germany has announced it will close all nuclear plants by 2022 and Austria banned it decades ago.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:46AM
Renewables are great!
They really are. They reduce the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, and SOx and NOx, and other nasty by products of combustion, and also reduce the burning of fuels contaminated by persistent organic pollutants (e.g. dioxins) and heavy metals. I'm all in favour of making renewables more efficient, and reducing the environmental effects of power generation.
However, we still do not have 'grid-scale' electrical storage. There is no battery (or other storage) technology available that can store the Gigawatt-hours of power needed to run a modern economy. Sure, some batteries are used for peak shaving and provision of power to remote areas that are dependent (in the main) on diesel-fired electrical generation - this is great, but nowhere near enough. Improvements in the cost-efficiency of battery-based storage can't come fast enough.
This lack of grid scale battery storage means that renewables need some method of 'filling in the gaps' (this is the 'intermittency problem*). Note that hydro power, while good, doesn't scale - there's a lack of suitable mountains, and hydro facilities are not exactly environmentally benign**. This is currently done by having gas-fired power stations (which are quick to spin up) available . Burning gas is better than burning coal, as some of the energy comes from production of water rather than carbon dioxide, so you do have a lower environmental effect than if you didn't use renewables - but it is not the cheapest method of providing power. Ideally, you use nuclear to provide power to meet the base load and renewables, topped up with gas and whatever electrical storage you can afford to deal with the demand peaks. If you don't use nuclear, you either use coal, or a vast amount more gas. Not using nuclear inevitably means burning more coal and hydrocarbons.
Don't get me wrong. I love renewables. It's just that the reality is that they really are not the complete solution now, and it will probably be some time until they can be. Until then, coal and/or nuclear and gas will be needed.
*The intermittency problem is gone into a lot of detail, using Germany as a reference, here: http://www.powermag.com/renewable-intermittency-is-real/?pagenum=1 [powermag.com]
**There are lots of schemes for storing energy: this document gives an overview, and is still not completely comprehensive: http://www.iea.org/media/freepublications/technologyroadmaps/AnnexA_TechnologyAnnexforweb.pdf [iea.org]