3 ms·

I'm curious about the Mark Jacobson quote. Is getting rid of coal & natural gas possible without nuclear? I don't see how solar & wind can do it by themselves

• caoilte 7y ago
  Why not? We have enough sunshine and wind to power the Earth many times over. If you take the battery part out of the equation there is no advantage left for nuclear and many many disadvantages, - is hugely expensive to design, build and run (requiring eye watering government guarantees that encourage builders/operators to cut corners). - takes longer than the climate can tolerate to build - needs water for cooling that access to will be problematic once construction is finally complete (France is struggling to run it's reactors already, Britains will be under water in 50 years) - byproducts we cannot deal with and haven't even figured out how to safely bury. - insane de-commissioning costs that everyone pretends don't exist - small risk that there will be an accident and Hollywood will make a shockingly inaccurate hit tv series about it - huge geo-political risk that constrains use to countries that are not going to be de-stablised by global warming in 60 year life time of plant (name one...) - build more than a few and we will struggle to supply the uranium (it's surprisingly hard to find in high enough concentrations for economic strip-mining) And now that batteries are becoming affordable the last argument left for Nuclear is evaporating.