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by carlosdp 2078 days ago
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.

The FAQ AOC released after the document explicitly ruled out nuclear energy, iirc.

2 comments

There is an economic reason you cannot have both: Nuclear power plants need to run near capacity to be economical. If you have a lot of intermittent power from wind and solar then nuclear plants will only be able to get a reasonable price for their output 40% of the time (at night when it's not windy).

Conversely, if the nuclear power plant is running anyway and has enough capacity to cover a windless night, you may as well get rid of the solar and wind.

This equation will change if we ever get storage to be cheap enough so we can store intermittent power, but there is nothing on the horizon that will do that.

No. It said we need to decommission our old reactors, which we do regardless. It’s linked in the first major thread in this discussion.