It’s not difficult, but it is expensive and inefficient. There are very few financially viable battery technologies on the market currently, and although incremental improvements are happening on that front, there are also roadblocks (lack of raw materials like cobalt, toxic metals, thermal runaway fire risks), we really need a big breakthrough before we’ll see large adoption of batteries.
There are literally countries that went all in on nuclear power (france and switzerland come to mind), that now regret that play and are trying to transition away from them. Not for safety reasons, just because they are extremely expensive to operate and they become a money pit when renewables eat away at the base load that they were built to supply. You have nuclear plants paying people to take their power during the afternoons because they cant shut down quickly when the sun comes out.
This is wild to me, not because the company acted like this, that was to be expected, but what they were arguing over: whether the guy who got his legs chopped off deserved workmans comp.
How is that even a question, even if he made some mistake or ignored some rule, the man got his legs chopped off on the job, he should get workmans comp regardless. Accidents happen no matter how safe you make an industrial environment, rules are often made to be impossible to fully follow, you shouldn’t have to prove the company was at fault to be made whole for getting injured on the job.
Could it be worse than giving them to power hungry octogenarians?
Everything you’ve suggested is equivalent to re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Climate change is not driven by individual action and can’t be solved by individuals changing their consumption habits. Over 70% of greenhouse gasses are produced by less than 100 companies, companies that have lobbied for public subsidies, socialized their losses with bailouts, outlawed or bought out any competition, laid waste to our countries natural resources, ripped up efficient public transit and infrastructure, and suppressed any change to their fossil fuel monopoly. Changing our course on climate change will mean taking back control from a powerful and entrenched class of people and corporations who control all the legal means you think can be used to hold them accountable.
Reducing dependence on their aging expensive nuclear power infrastructure has been a campaign promise of every French president for the last decade. Switzerland just voted via referendum to shutter their nuclear fleet, Germany has phased out nukes almost entirely.
The reality of it is: They’re expensive. They generate waste which could theoretically be reused or even locked away in underground vaults, but it’s frequently just stored on site in reality. And whether the danger is real or perceived, no one wants to live next to a nuke, because if things go wrong, they go very wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see nukes make a comeback, I think they’re a valuable part of the energy mix. I actually know a guy in crypto who is trying to set up financially strained nuclear plants with on-site crypto miners to help them gain back some of that lost revenue from paying people to take power during light load periods. Which I think is a fantastic use case and a great way to make Bitcoin less environmentally destructive. There are other dispatchable loads that could fill the same niche (water desalinization, green hydrogen production).
But the unfortunate reality is that nuclear plants are dying right now, and unless something big changes they’re going to be driven out of existence by wind and solar.