[spenrose]

Like most climate hawks, I am a passionate proponent of maintaining existing nuclear and one who hopes that new nuclear will reach the market. But the operative words in your post are "thinks" and "mid-2020s". Every ton of CO2 we put out now warms the earth now and for centuries. Please read this [1] and see that renewables plus storage are doing now what you hope nuclear will do years from now.

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/13/1755187...

[DennisP]

I completely agree that we should keep rolling out renewables as fast as we can.

But we should also fix the unnecessarily difficult regulatory environment for advanced nuclear, because so far, we don't have a single example of a country running almost entirely on wind/solar/storage, and current storage technology isn't scalable or cheap enough to get large populations through windless nights.

You can say that we'll get there, but that's no less speculative than Terrestrial Energy saying when their reactors will be ready.

[spenrose]

"[1] we should keep rolling out renewables as fast as we can. But [2] we should also fix the unnecessarily difficult regulatory environment for advanced nuclear"

[1]: sit on hands and watch existing markets follow their current trajectories. Odds of success: excellent. [2]: make a major change in the existing political economy of energy, beating all the entrenched interests who will oppose it. Odds of success: ___________.

[toomuchtodo]

Costa Rica, Iceland, and Uruguay run almost entirely on renewables. Other countries are catching up quickly.

[DennisP]

I said wind and solar, not "renewables." Countries with large hydro and geothermal resources can easily run on those, because they're always available.

We really need two different words: one for hydro/geothermal which are steady supplies but geographically limited, and another for wind/solar, which can be installed anywhere but are unpredictable and require massive storage or fossil/nuclear backup. The use of the same word for both has been a constant source of misleading rhetoric.

[3rdAccount]

Iceland is a tiny country with lots of geothermal energy. Comparing that directly to the US, makes zero sense.