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It's simply a false dichotomy that we have the choice between committing to nuclear energy generation, or catastrophic climate change. We don't need nuclear en

• bradlys 4y ago
  In order to avoid catastrophic climate change (hard to say we even can at this point) - we need anything we can get. Nuclear is part of anything we can get.
  • Gwypaas 4y ago
    Following that line of reasoning. Considering we get 3-6x as much energy investing in renewables compared to nuclear then a single cent in invested into nuclear is an enabler of climate change right?
    • bradlys 4y ago
      You're using a false equivalency fallacy though - that economics matter at all in this. We need anything to get us to lower GHG emissions - regardless of cost.
      • Gwypaas 4y ago
        Of course it matters. Money and people available to do the work is not infinite. Or do you disagree? Therefore we have to optimize for the most impact possible. Is spending 3x as much as off-shore wind and 6x as much as on-shore optimizing for impact? Can straight up honestly claim that?
        • samwillis 4y ago
          My issue is really the lack of progress with and utilisation of Nuclear over the last 40-50 years. In my opinion the anti nuclear movement resulted in extending the time we continued to burn coal. Quite right, at the moment the larger impact would be with renewables. However my original comment was not only in reference to decisions we are making now but also those of the last 50 years. If we had concentrated on using Nuclear, and not succumbed to the fear about it, we would be in a much stronger position now than we are.
          • Gwypaas 4y ago
            It is simply economics. The anti-nuclear movement is insignificant but a very handy scapegoat. If nuclear made sense on a cost basis it would have pushed through somewhere globally. It's quite telling that not even authoritarian states, or very centrally controlled like France have managed that. I agree that nuclear would have been preferable to fossil energy. But today renewables is way cheaper than either alternative.
        • bradlys 4y ago
          You're using very poor arguments. A lot of whataboutism. A meteor is coming to destroy the entire world. Do you sit around and wonder, "Is spending money on this really in the best interest of our shareholders for this quarter?"
          • Gwypaas 4y ago
            Consider your example. You have two options proven to work by prior knowledge. Either renewables or nuclear at 3-6x the cost. What do you pick? There's a statement in the previous paragraph doing most of the heavy lifting: "proven to work". This means no risk, why double invest? We've already diverted meteors using both renewables and nuclear. Both work. Choose the cheaper option since it's not an one off event, it's an incremental change. Every nuclear plant or wind turbine is negligible in itself. But the effect is quantifiable and known.
            • liketochill 4y ago
              A robust electricity grid needs a variety of energy sources, wind and solar are great until it isn’t windy or sunny for a week. Are week long outages acceptable to you? Not to me. It is not inconceivable that a weather system results in calm weather with clouds for an extended period of time. So other energy sources are necessary. Nuclear is another practical low carbon energy source and it is worth considering as part of the energy mix. There are many nuclear plants operating and under construction in the world. That they are uneconomic in some countries speaks more to those countries than to nuclear.
              • Gwypaas 4y ago
                1. Geographical decoupling. HVDC connections are barely even newsworthy anymore. 2. Smart consumers. Electrified transports are perfect where you can shift the charging to any point in time it's not actively driven. This without having to pay the round trip efficiency loss since charging the battery is valuable work. 3. Better utilize hydro to compensate for the last bits of intermittency left. We're so far from a grid where large scale storage would be necessary that dwelling over it and putting forth nuclear as the only solution is ridiculous. You could make hydrogen from your renewable energy and then later burn it and still come out ahead of nuclear. That's how uncompetetive nuclear is.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      Does that include the batteries we'd need to have renewables take over the grid? But we should be dumping lots of research dollars into both, even if we want 95% of the construction budget to be renewables. Except scaling up starts to cost a lot more when you push it too fast, so we probably should be spending more than 5% on nuclear because it can work in parallel.
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  It's a tradeoff in the end, because the current generation of renewable energy is so much more expensive and involved than the equivalent in a nuclear energy plant. I mean in my country, the energy grid is at capacity due to increases in demand AND production. It's very attractive to get solar panels installed on your house, but the grid cannot handle the influx of new production. Whereas attaching a new nuclear plant to the main grid would be less of a headache.
  • brazzy 4y ago
    >the current generation of renewable energy is so much more expensive and involved than the equivalent in a nuclear energy plant. This may have been true 15 or even 10 years ago, but nowadays the exact opposite is the case. > It's very attractive to get solar panels installed on your house, but the grid cannot handle the influx of new production. Whereas attaching a new nuclear plant to the main grid would be less of a headache. How is that supposed to make any sense at all? The grid likes nuclear-flavored power better?
    • curtainsforus 4y ago
      The grid prefers smooth, even, intertia-backed turbine-generated power to the choppy screams of a million inverters.