[breeny592]

> Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point.

Construction of new nuclear plants takes on average 7.5 years, and are extremely prone to cost overruns and delays. Renewables are a much faster and cheaper option to come online, be profitable and allow for shutdown of legacy infrastructure in the same period of time.

And they are viable now - several countries have run for days and weeks on renewables alone. Several regions of Germany are also fully renewable powered.

[blake1]

Also, nuclear power plants are very slow to start up/shut down (ramp rate), and need to be periodically offline for refueling, many technical issues require the reactor to shut down, and they need a huge staff a highly trained technicians and engineers.

The slow ramp rate, and lower reliability means the power they output is less economically attractive, and the other factors makes the price higher. Combined, they mean that nuclear plans sit around idle a decent amount of the time, so much so that some locations just flat-out subsidize them (like Illinois).

I used to work in power markets.