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> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 2

> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle. Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more. If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon. If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.

dalyons 6mo ago
what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.
- simplyluke 6mo ago
  We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.
  - dalyons 6mo ago
    I guess I agree with your “should” in a world where we have infinite dollars to spend. Sadly we refuse to treat it as existential, so the dollars we have to spend are roughly fixed. In that world we live today any dollar spent on nuclear for 10 years from now isn’t spent on renewables today, so it costs us more emissions.
  - epistasis 6mo ago
    When we can't even get offshore wind to be built because the current Trump administration is setting the precedent of paying hundreds of million dollars to cancel good, money saving projects, while funneling reactor approval to corrupt companies that don't have the engineering chops to deliver on their promises, an "all of the above strategy" doesn't really work. Sticking with well proven technologies, such as batteries and solar which are deployed at massive scale by profit oriented investors on the Texas grid, makes far more sense than wasting precious few dollars and approvals on pie-in-the-sky nuclear projects that never meet their promises and might not even finish construction. Building nuclear is hard, risky, expensive, and slow, in the very best cases. It's a shitty technology unless you have zero renewable resources in your country.
strken 6mo ago
If you place the climate crisis into the context of every other potential crisis then yeah, the world is weighing up nuclear proliferation against climate change, both of which are potential extinction risks but not all that likely in the short term. I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.

dalyons 6mo ago

what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.

simplyluke 6mo ago
We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.
- dalyons 6mo ago
  I guess I agree with your “should” in a world where we have infinite dollars to spend. Sadly we refuse to treat it as existential, so the dollars we have to spend are roughly fixed. In that world we live today any dollar spent on nuclear for 10 years from now isn’t spent on renewables today, so it costs us more emissions.
- epistasis 6mo ago
  When we can't even get offshore wind to be built because the current Trump administration is setting the precedent of paying hundreds of million dollars to cancel good, money saving projects, while funneling reactor approval to corrupt companies that don't have the engineering chops to deliver on their promises, an "all of the above strategy" doesn't really work. Sticking with well proven technologies, such as batteries and solar which are deployed at massive scale by profit oriented investors on the Texas grid, makes far more sense than wasting precious few dollars and approvals on pie-in-the-sky nuclear projects that never meet their promises and might not even finish construction. Building nuclear is hard, risky, expensive, and slow, in the very best cases. It's a shitty technology unless you have zero renewable resources in your country.

strken 6mo ago

If you place the climate crisis into the context of every other potential crisis then yeah, the world is weighing up nuclear proliferation against climate change, both of which are potential extinction risks but not all that likely in the short term. I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.