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by gnusty_gnurc 2473 days ago
When Bernie/AOC lead with rhetoric like "climate change requires WWII levels of mobilization", it strikes me odd that they think that level of change is feasible, but that the unprecedented mobilization and centralization of efforts can't be applied to nuclear technology. It's bizarre and makes me think that it's a blatant political agenda much more than sensible application of technology to solve problems in the world.
2 comments

What is bizarre about it? Not all options are equally good investments - some are clearly preferable over others. Why insist on new nuclear power when so much evidence shows it is not needed?
One of the main objections to nuclear is that “we can’t properly regulate it.” But the whole argument of Bernie/AOC/progressives centers around massive centralization and mobilization. It just seems to me that the super idealistic, unprecedentedly large plans they’re proposing would imply we could do the same thing with nuclear.
> Why insist on new nuclear power when so much evidence shows it is not needed?

Which evidence? IPCC reports nuclear as being highly needed.

Which IPCC report recommends building new nuclear power plants in the US?
does the IPCC ever recommend exact allocations of power production per country? It seems like their report on Mitigation Pathways suggests a really wide range for nuclear, with the high overshoot pathway having an upper-bound of 7x increase in nuclear generation, whereas 5x upper-bound for low overshoot.

I find this line pretty interesting cause it suggests that people may very well arbitrarily ignore nuclear: "There are large differences in nuclear power between models and across pathways (Kim et al., 2014; Rogelj et al., 2018). One of the reasons for this variation is that the future deployment of nuclear can be constrained by societal preferences assumed in narratives underlying the pathways (O’Neill et al., 2017; van Vuuren et al., 2017b)."

Aka double standard