[epistasis]

This was true 50 years ago, but has not been true in the last thirty years.

The technology has changed. Within the past 30 years, nuclear has become more expensive than alternatives, and a dollar invested in nuclear correlates with seven-fold less drop in emissions than that same dollar invested in renewables:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/53376

Note that the above story has been criticized as being correlative, but that correlative reasoning is the same reasoning that's used when saying that France and Sweden have decarbonized with nuclear. (And Sweden owes a lot to hydropower, which is 45% of its electricity)

[jakehop]

You are simply not correct.

I have read the study you cite. I don't question whether you've read the full study or only the news story, but the study has quite a few flaws and (what I view as) false assumptions. I'll argue against the news story, so I'm sure not to exclude anybody.

>Nuclear and other renewables don't co-exist well, and both lead to lock-in and path dependancies

Why should they co-exist? If you have 100% of your electricity generated by nuclear power, that is literally zero sense in buying wind turbines.

The path dependancies are obvious: Wind farms require infrastructure that can handle 100% of the total power output, but will only see around 30-40% average capacity used. This requires a larger, decentral power grid, with a ton of resources poured into additional load balancing, as well as storage in times of low wind.

Modern nuclear power has a capacity factor of >90%. It requires the grid to be dimensioned to the needed power; not huge spikes in production. It doesn't require storage and it doesn't require expensive balancing systems, needed for intermittent sources of energy.

>Countries with high GDP and nuclear lower their CO2-emissions slower than similar countries with other renewables

In Denmark, our taxes on energy has increased tremendously alongside the roll-out of "cheap" renewables. This obviously changes demand, which is why the study is indeed correlative.

And in Denmark we're cheating right now: Our biofuels (mainly wood from Estonia and the US) count as zero emissions, since they "grow back in 60 years". This type of fraudulent behaviour changes our balance sheet. And even with our massive expansion of wind energy, our average CO2-emissions per kWh of electricity used is still around 3-6x that of Sweden.

To the question of something being "true 50 years ago, but not true in the last 30 years", look to figure 2 in the link below and you will see how your statement is not correct.

The figure (and the article it originates from) clearly argues that e.g. my country of birth, Denmark, which has spent an incredibly large amount of money (relative to the size of our economy) propping up the wind industry and constructing large wind farms, have been much* slower at adding non-carbon energy sources to the production of electricity.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6299/547.figures-...

I know how Sweden produces its electricity, but I don't know what makes hydro relevant here? I am purely talking about the Swedish expansion of nuclear power, which was the fastest expansion of stable green electricity production in the world, to date. That it happened more than 30 years ago only begs the question, as to how no one has caught up to that yet.

Having asked the Swedish state nuclear authority about the possibility of expanding nuclear power, they state that given a positive political climate (e.g. removing red tape and vetocracy, but keeping a high level of safety), they could roll out new reactors in around 5 years, at $4100 pr. kW capacity. This is 10-30% cheaper than 2020 off-shore wind farms – without solving the storage issue!

For me, climate change is a serious issue, requiring serious solutions. This is where I see nuclear energy. All the talk of "slow roll-out" simply goes against the facts and oddly enough, the same people are also against rolling it out – talk about correlation!

Nuclear has the stability, economics and climate factors right. And newer technologies will only make this better. It must be done in a safe way. We can't have old plants not being maintained properly.

No new power plants have been built in the EU or US for the last 30 years, which has lead to brain drain in the industry. Newer plants might cost more in the start, but that too will level off. The same argument that one uses for their own preferred tech mustn't be forgotten for the opposing side.

I understand that you are invested in this debate, but it is simply indefensible to make these types of straw-man arguments. If you want to criticise nuclear power, try making a steel-man argument and argue against that. This is far more efficient – and respectful to your debate partner - than speaking against concrete facts.

[epistasis]

Your criticisms about the paper are not criticisms of what I cited. I agree that the authors speculations about path dependence are less than convincing. But the paper is clear that they are speculations, so refuting the speculations does not refute the core observation: investing a unit of capital in nuclear results in less emissions reductions than investing that unit of capital in renewables. We can speculate about technology changes which would change this, and make nuclear competitive with renewables for reducing emissions, but let's be clear about those technology changes, and also estimate the probabilities of the technology changes given our current learning curves.

A Western government that they can build new nuclear at $4000/kW is living in a fantasyland. It has been tried again and again across the US and Europe in the past 20 years, with similar claims, and failure at every attempt. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those are plausible numbers at the moment, any more than $5/MWh solar in 2021 is a plausible number. Perhaps it can be done, but when we have recent attempt after recent attempt that's coming in at more than a factor of two difference, it is not a credible claim.

I view climate change as the most important challenge to humanity, and I daily regret that I did not choose a career path that let me direct address it in my workday, leaving my research to only a couple hours a day in the evenings.

And 15 years ago, I viewed nuclear as probably the only route forward, as many others did at the time too. I closely followed construction projects started then. And by following, I have become absolutely disillusioned about the possibility of nuclear. The time to build and perfect designs was 15 years ago, so that we could deploy now. Instead. The opportunity was squandered with incompetence, and we are now further away from building large nuclear reactors than we were in 2005.

And I'm the same time period, we have had an absolute revolution in costs for wind and solar and storage.

Please point out a straw man argument that I have made. I have tried to be respectful here, and apologize if I haven't. But I do not find you to be realistic about nuclear's current prospects, and current costs. If you believe that nuclear could be a climate solution, I urge you to investigate both its recent history and the recent history of our newer, better technologies. We are no longer living in 1970 and we can not apply its reasoning.