[kristopolous]

How so? Nuclear requires certain types of expertise and I'd hope, certain certifications for construction.

Also, historically, they've each been multi-year ventures.

These are likely different humans and different companies than people doing urban gardening projects and rooftop solar.

I honestly don't see the conflict here. I don't know too much about nuclear construction and maintenance but I'd imagine it takes years of specialized training and experience to be competent. If that's true, I can't imagine someone sliding from say, retrofitting insulation to older apartment buildings to nuclear in any reasonable time. I think we have to conclude they're as different as any other sophisticated skills; you're still starting at zero if you want to switch.

The GNDs problem has been the same since Jill Stein was talking about it in 2012 - it's too grandiose for a society and time that has rejected grand visions.

We would need to fix our systemic cultural inability to be able to subscribe to a collective imaginary before a GND is broadly entertained.

However, you crack and divide GND as separate goals, such as increasing the usefulness and efficiency of mass urban transit, most people are on board. And each of these concrete goals doesn't preclude Exelon and GE from building nuclear power plants.

Once you reframe the GND as simply a basketcase of low hanging fruit of city and neighborhood level projects, then we get into nuclear's real issue in this conversation - It is the biggest project of the bunch.

Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them. They think "big = broken disaster". Some american may even feel obligated to respond to this, "But it's true" and then my point will be made.

The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this.

[pdonis]

> These are likely different humans and different companies than people doing urban gardening projects and rooftop solar.

Humans can decide to enter different fields; more can choose to enter one field and fewer can choose to enter another. New companies can be started and old ones can go out of business. Resources are fungible; there isn't a fixed pool of resources that are suitable for nuclear but not for renewables, or the reverse.

What determines where those resources get allocated are economic incentives. If the government puts its thumb on the scale and gives lots of incentives for renewables and lots of disincentives for nuclear--which is exactly what the US government has been doing for decades, and what the Green New Deal would mean doing even more of--then resources will be available for renewables but not for nuclear.

[pdonis]

> Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them.

This is a valid point as far as the type of nuclear projects that have been done in the past is concerned. However, nuclear has progressed, and many of the designs being worked on now are not megaprojects and would not require the same huge up front investment that traditional designs have.

[kristopolous]

Sure. I've been hearing that for 20 years and I sincerely, eagerly and in good faith welcome their arrival.

However, until then, we have to go off of the existing historical reality. We can't run the numbers with any kind of integrity based on what is currently vaporware.

[pdonis]

> what is currently vaporware

Designs that are actually operating and producing power are not vaporware. The reasons those designs aren't already doing that in the US are political, not technical.

Anti-nuclear politics in the US has made people believe that every nuclear reactor is a Chernobyl waiting to happen. That was a pernicious lie even in the 1980s, and it is much, much more of a pernicious lie now. In terms of the fairest measurement, which is harm done per unit of energy generated, nuclear power, even with reactors of traditional designs, is orders of magnitude better than any other energy source, including renewables, which in turn are significantly better than oil and coal (coal is by far the worst). And with newer designs, not vaporware but actually operating today, that risk per unit of energy generated is even lower.

A sane US government policy would have had nuclear displacing oil and coal starting in the 1970s, as France and Japan did, and reprocessing the waste instead of beating ourselves over the head with a baseball bat by saying the only option was to store it for 100,000 years, which of course is not practically possible. Then we could have a meaningful conversation about how much of that nuclear base load capacity it makes sense to transition to renewables. Plus, if you really think CO2 emissions are a planetary emergency (I personally don't, but GND advocates do), there would be decades worth of CO2 emissions that the US would not have made at all. Not to mention decades worth of coal still in the ground where it belongs, and oil that could have been used for things much more productive than burning it for energy.

You say we have to go off of the "existing historical reality", and while it's true that we didn't do all those sane things in the past when we should have, that still is no argument for not doing them now. We have an obvious alternative source of base load power that would free us from oil and coal staring us in the face, and instead we're noodling about renewables that can't possibly meet the same demand requirements. That doesn't make sense to me.

[kristopolous]

Sure, you could handwave the "mass societal pushback" and change it to "cheering societal acceptance" and then fudge away the costs associated, but that's simply not what is going to happen.

You have to account for greenpeace and all the organized opposition. You have to account for the politics

That's why you need to go off of concrete material historical reality - if you're free to apply counterfactuals as you please than practically any conclusion is permissible because we can tweak and modify whatever we need.

Just like the "business as usual" advocates are hypothesizing a globally deployable massive carbon sucking technology to somehow exist in the future without a shred of evidence that it's at all plausible. It's extremely dubious gambling with the future of society.

Reality overrides counterfactual hypotheticals every time. When ambitious next-generation nuclear is ready to go, then there's a possible opening but right now it's simply not there.

[pdonis]

> The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this.

The GND proponents aren't even talking about specifically how individual GND projects would be executed; they aren't talking about whether it would be a collection of small bite-sized projects or a few large ones.

What they're talking about is the government putting its thumb on the scale even more in favor of renewables. And that means even more incentive to do those projects, and less incentive to do others. That's where the conflict is.

[kristopolous]

I've been a proponent of it for 8 years and no, that's inaccurate.

Instead, many advocate for oil, gas, and nuclear to no longer get tax subsidies, government insured loans, preferential treatment with land use, or be able to freely externalize on to the community the damage and debris their products leave behind.

These companies also shouldn't have a Right to profit guaranteed by international trade treaties or be able to sue countries in tribunals when the countries decide against their wishes.

Instead, oil gas and nuclear need to stand on their own two feet, take full fiscal responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their products and fund it not from government handouts but from the prices paid for their product. They should also get no preferential treatment and legal rights to their business interests.

Communities should have a right to say no without being sued in international courts.

It's the exact opposite. Take the thumb off the scale, include All the costs, remove all the special privileges and then let the market decide.

[pdonis]

> oil, gas, and nuclear to no longer get tax subsidies, government insured loans, preferential treatment with land use, or be able to freely externalize on to the community the damage and debris their products leave behind

I'm find with that, as long as it also includes no more government subsidies, etc. to renewables. Which have been given out for decades to renewables projects that, unlike oil and gas, do not even produce any actual energy, but are just "research" that promises to produce something Real Soon Now and has been for decades.

> let the market decide

I'm fine with that too, as long as it really is a free market. I do not think an actual free market is what the GND is proposing.

[kristopolous]

It's a big tent ... there's some people that want to push social justice, living wage and political equity in the program. I think that's utter folly.

Then it just becomes the DSA agenda under a cape labeled "renewable energy" and it's a political non-starter. There's no way.

The advocates show that each of the issues separately have broad support so they think that by putting it all together you'll get the union as a coalition.

I think they'll more likely get somewhere from the intersection to practically nobody.

It'd be as if Republicans were trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, end obamacare, and ban gay marriage as a single package. Good luck!

I'd almost cynically claim it's only political theater to be leveraged in their reelection campaign. The DSA has a pretty solid ground game but you need to toss them red meat to get them to come out for you.

People like say, hamburgers and ice cream, but not on the same plate. I don't think the AOC GND is good politics. And as we've seen, the support seems to be leveling out.

That's why I side on the mostly-libertarian GND camp which was closer to what Jill Stein was advocating for 8 years ago. Remove all protections, remove all subsidies, open up a market, give consumers choice.

Then they can fight for a living wage if they please, but separately, not together.

I think it's far more politically feasible and achievable.