[dane-pgp]

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.

While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them).

"Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions—and in poorer countries nuclear programs actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions."

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables...

[deepnotderp]

Isn't there an obvious hidden random variable there? The only countries that are really actively building nuclear power are growing developing countries like India, so of course their emissions are increasing.

EDIT: So yes:

> "The study found that in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions."

[manicdee]

There's also the confounding element that the CO2 emissions could have dropped faster if the money was spent on renewables instead, plus the infrastructure for large centralised power generation is not really compatible with distributed generation.

[DennisP]

This is a biased source but seems to make a good case that that study has serious flaws:

https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/we-need-both-nuclear-a...

[epistasis]

That's a weird world view. University of Sussex researchers are "biased" but you link to the Nuclear Innovation Alliance?

[mulmen]

I think the implication is that the Nuclear Innovation Alliance is biased but still making a good point.

[epistasis]

It would be good to do a bit more work to justify that, then.

The NIA blog post doesn't even address the core point of the paper. It looks at a correlation of existing energy by US states, where our nuclear was largely built in the 1970s and 1980s.

In contrast, the academic paper looks at what has happened to countries , globally, that have tried to build nuclear since the 1990s.

And this is a crucial distinction, because the problem with nuclear is that economies have changed since the 1970s and we have new technologies with different costs.

So what if we look at what has happened to US states that, since 1990, have tried to build nuclear versus those that have tried to build renewables?

Nuclear has failed since the 1990s in the US, even with construction project with very strong community support and federal regulatory support from the NRC.

So when you ask the question that the paper asks: "does building new nuclear or renewables decrease carbon more with modern economies?" We see that the US recapitulates the same correlation that researchers found globally.

This huge bias of nuclear proponents, the inability to address the cost issue and very basic construction issues, is far more problematic for nuclear than a corrective analysis of what has happened to grids that have pursued different strategies.

[mulmen]

I’m not making a statement to the validity of DennisP’s comment. Just clarifying the perceived meaning.

[epistasis]

Sorry, didn't mean to direct that at you. But since I had been downvoted so much I wanted to at least poke at the general narrative here. I still find it odd is that an unfounded accusation of bias is supported with a link to a clearly biased source, and that's somehow acceptable here.

[DennisP]

Yes, exactly.

[acituan]

> there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly

Please don’t ascribe causality without evidence. Even the authors admit upfront that this is a correlational study, with strong confounding variables like GDP.

[mulmen]

This smells like the old cliche. Correlation does not imply causation.

[acidburnNSA]

That author has been writing this for years and has had to do multiple retractions. A few top climate scientists are working on a rebuttal right now so we can expect this to be retracted soon as well.