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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. |