One of the authors is known for heavily cherry-picking his facts, making some pretty extreme and outrageous assumptions, and suing fellow academic critics who point this out. Caveat lector.
Oh, that guy. Suing PNAS and the author of a study critical of his work is honestly quite shocking. One would hope the work would stand for itself, or at least the response should’ve been another paper rather than a lawsuit.
It is thoroughly inappropriate to respond to legitimate criticism, made in good faith, published in a reputable journal, with a lawsuit.
It doesn't matter if you're right. If you're right; arguments can be made to show that your opponents are wrong (and he was in fact allowed a rebuttal letter in PNAS). Filing a lawsuit breaks any semblance of civility of discourse and dispassionate pursuit of truth; and results in everyone worse off, as the discussion has become thoroughly toxic.
It's burning down the entire house because someone disagreed with your analysis.
Whether it was appropriate or not depends on whether the criticism was legitimate or not. That is the legitimate purpose of legal proceedings to determine.
I guess you would be a heretic to be someone who complains that while the rich want to pay for renewable energy and can afford to live in such a Friedman-esque society in which money buys your civil liberties from the legal system--or even just protection from criticism... meanwhile cost of living, suicide rates, homelessness, civil liberties continue to deteriorate for the working class.
Edit: maybe the downvotes suggest my guess was right.
It is pretty easy to find him doing just that in this paper.
Here's some examples
> Nuclear energy is often seen as a fundamental or bridging technology for future low-carbon systems (International Energy Agency, 2015a; Echavarri, 2013). While it is true that electricity production from nuclear energy is characterized by very low CO2 emissions during the operation phase of the plant, its full life-cycle CO2 emissions, including all up- and downstream processes, are typically much more CO2 intensive.
While this is true, the paper does not make an equivalent comparison to their scenarios. They do not include the upstream and downsteam emissions from PV and wind. Which should include their energy storage requirements. When addressing storage requirements they hand wave, pointing to two papers that also hand wave the requirement. They all but flat out deny the duck curve. But regardless, they don't include these parts into their own scenarios.
Later when they present their 6 scenarios, they assume no change in nuclear. If you do want to make a good comparison moving forward, you should have a scenario 7 that would shut down the current reactors and replace them with new genIII or genIV reactors. You might say I'm being facetious, but the issue is that this is what the nuclear camp wants. The nuclear camp does not want scenario 1 (business as usual), and agree that it is a bad idea. So to make a claim about which direction we want to move forward to be the cheapest and most environmentally friendly you need to address the other positions. While I wouldn't be surprised if this was still a more expensive option, by not addressing it the authors are creating a strawman argument. In reality they do even worse than this, they create scenario 6 which is scenario 1 but with decreased efficiency (which they don't cite evidence for the number they use).
tldr: I'm not sold on the paper. There's merit to it, but the study was not rigorous enough and did not consider the arguments of the opposing scenarios that it is specifically countering.
>Emissions are considered per kWh of produced electricity (kWhel), including emissions that occur over the complete life-cycle of a technology (cradle to grave). We use the following values (based on Sovacool (2008), Lenzen (2008) and updated values from Jacobson (2009); nuclear: 66 g-CO2/kWhel, onshore wind: 10 gCO2/kWhel, PV (no difference between utility-scale and rooftop): 30 g-CO2/kWhel.
That paper Jacobson (2009), the subject of the dispute mentioned above, factors in emissions from the burning of cities from nuclear war (at the high end, one city every 30 years), as well the "opportunity cost from planning-to-operation delays." The latter assumes 10-19 years to set up a nuclear plant, during which time emissions from a hypothetical incumbent coal plant are attributed to it. Somehow, PVs and wind have no opportunity costs from delays (though section 4b says they should take 2-5 years). Apparently PV production scaling will never bottleneck as they're deployed grid-wide.