[marcosdumay]

Just to add to the two very insightful replies you've already got, yes, nuclear power could have been a great contributor on the fight against Global Warming, 30 years ago. And yes, it is a shame that "environmentalist" movements made so much noise that they ensured we took the most harmful possible path. Those movements should be shamed, and very loudly so because they still didn't give up on fighting improvements and waste the popular focus on useless feel-nice ideas.

But, well, today is not 30 years ago, and the same way that nuclear power never could be the complete solution to carbon based fuels, today it is too late for them to even be a large component of it. So, today pushing for nuclear does more harm than good.

[keldaris]

I mostly agree with you (with the caveat that pushing for nuclear has different cost/benefit ratios in different parts of the world, the U.S. is merely one extreme), but this is exactly why I pay very little attention to public debate regarding energy policy and emissions control.

Outside of IPCC reports (which for all their process issues are generally fairly comprehensive and well written) and a small number of other scientific publications, there are few serious attempts to conduct objective cost/benefit analysis, rank order policy measures, etc. Instead, we have people who pretend science doesn't exist on one side and many of the same "environmentalists" who are, by virtue of their ideological stupidity, just as culpable for this mess as their opponents on the other. Given this state of affairs, I see no reasonable prospect of prevention. Instead, we will simply have more or less local mitigation solutions, which will work fairly well in the rich parts of the world and probably fail miserably in many of the poorer parts. The only silver lining here is that localized measures are far easier to implement as they require cooperation on a much smaller scale and, for the most part, will happen to avert dangers that will by then have become obvious to all.

[whatshisface]

>So, today pushing for nuclear does more harm than good.

You made the case for why you don't think nuclear can do any good (because it's too late), but what's the case for harm?

[gizmo686]

Every dollar invested into nuclear is a dollar not invested into solar/wind/etc.

Building new nuclear just usn't the most effective use of limited capital to reduce emmisions at this point.

[tick_tock_tick]

Every dollar in solar/wind/etc is wasted since it can't support the population without falling back to coal and gas. Renewable are a crapshoot relying on new storage technology that doesn't exist to make then viable. Why not focus on something we can 100% guarantee will fix the issues instead of leaving it to chance?

[marcosdumay]

It is not only a distraction, but pushing a non-viable technology reduces the credibility of everybody that is trying to solve the problem with technology.