[eldaisfish]

There is a major part of this debate that keeps getting brushed under the carpet due to decades of fear-mongering. Nuclear energy.

It is a large scale solution that works today, not at some indeterminate point in the future. Yes there are problems, yes there are limitations, yes there are risks and yes it is expensive but many of these can be addressed by governments and through regulation.

A major part of reducing carbon emissions is to transition Asia and Africa away from coal and towards nuclear energy and not by the free market but by government supports. This can be supplemented by the plethora of technologies available today viz solar, wind, demand response etc.

What is of prime importance is that we limit carbon emissions today and keep doing so even as economies grow and energy consumption increases.

[bryanlarsen]

The cost and time scale of nuclear make it completely infeasible. Wind and solar are cheaper than just the thermal side of a nuclear power plant. IOW, if the nuclear part cost $0, it would still be cost-ineffective.

And nuclear plants take >20 years to build. That's too long.

And the batteries that solar/wind need are cheaper than HVDC power lines.

Of course tearing down existing nuclear is silly, but building new ones is a non-starter.

[eldaisfish]

Please be careful with labelling wind and solar cheaper. They have zero fuel cost which is true however there are a slew of other costs - mostly balancing the grid and dealing with the uncertainty and unreliability of wind and solar - that are not paid for by the wind and solar generators. Those costs are paid - by consumers but if you add them to the wind and solar farms, they suddenly aren't as cheap.

Nuclear power needn't take that long to build. China is building them in five or six years. Standardisation helps immensely with timelines and safety.

Batteries are not an energy solution. The current largest batteries around the world can only provide minutes of power for typical western grids. Yes, minutes.

[beached_whale]

One huge factor that affects the environment is land use footprint. Nuclear has the smallest, by far.

[bryanlarsen]

> costs

Solar is an entire order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. That's a lot of wiggle room for incidental costs.

> Nuclear power needn't take that long to build. China is building them in five or six years. Standardisation helps immensely with timelines and safety.

That's only counting the time from when shovels hit the ground. Even in China they spend 5 years before that in planning.

> Batteries are not an energy solution. The current largest batteries around the world can only provide minutes of power for typical western grids. Yes, minutes.

Neither is nuclear. Current nuclear designs cannot provide peaking power, and new designs that can are even more ridiculously expensive than current designs.

[TheAdamAndChe]

What you said is absolutely true under the current regulatory regimes.

Its important to note though that significant progress has been made on compact nuclear. It's safer, easier to produce, and can be centrally manufactured and delivered onsite, relieving much of what causes cost overruns. The largest hurdles involve allowing such nuclear plants to be deployed, which requires regulatory change.

[bryanlarsen]

That's why I phrased the cost comparison the way I did. Even if the SMR modules were completely free, the rest of the plant would still be more expensive than solar.

[misiti3780]

safe* nuclear energy.

[rayiner]

It doesn't have to be safe. If we reduced safety regulations to the point where we were having a Fukushima-scale disaster every year, to enable a massive increase in nuclear power deployment, we would still come out massively ahead if it allowed us to keep to a 2C versus 3C outcome.