[nicolas_t]

One of the most frustrating thing is that whenever I talk to people who claim to be environmentalist, they are deeply against nuclear power and don't want to face the facts that Germany's decision to quit nuclear was not a net positive for the environment and instead had a negative impact by keeping Coal factories open longer than they should have been.

It's important to finance renewables research and there's a bright future for them but, right now, nuclear is the best hope for mostly clean energy with a lot less negative environment impact than Coal and Fossil Fuel.

[pm90]

Most people follow/mirror the views of the leaders they identify with. Unless environmental groups come out in favor of nuclear energy, people will continue to be against it.

For the environmental groups themselves, this is a rather complex topic since they will be forced to embrace something they’ve vilified for several generations.

Anyways I hope there’s a stronger push for nuclear but I’m not counting on it. There’s no subsidies/incentives in the BBB plan, no major political player seems to be embracing nuclear etc

[ModernMech]

Maybe you need to talk to more? I would say I’m an environmentalist who is in favor of nuclear power, and I know more. (Edit: I and my friends went to school for physics so maybe that has something to do with it)

[colechristensen]

Nuclear does take a long time to design, approve, and build. I would like to see somebody do a financial analysis comparing the cost and power generated timeline for spending the same amount of money on solar, wind, and nuclear. It doesn’t seem that research is really an impediment to majority renewable energy at this point.

I am pro-nuclear, but would like to actually see how an equal amount of resources would lead to what power and when to give arguments like this teeth or debunk them.

[throwaway894345]

Small Modular Reactor designs aspire to solve for this, but they're new and we need to actually get some experience building and operating them before we can really understand the economics and risks. We should be doing this stuff now so we can scale up quickly in the future.

[colechristensen]

You're not wrong, but any realistic outcome of going in this direction would take decades until it was at meaningful scale. We're more in a "we need to do things now" kind of situation, we should still put some resources towards things we won't have for decades, but that can't be the primary focus.

[throwaway894345]

Renewables don’t have a solution now either (no base load, remember?), nor do they even have anything concrete on the horizon, so they certainly ought not be the primary focus. So if not nuclear nor renewables, then what?

[colechristensen]

Renewables make up ~20% of US production.

In the summer months peak usage is near peak solar generation, and usage is as much as 60% higher than minimum daily usage. With the rise of electric cars, a whole lot of usage will be able to be scheduled for times of excess.

There is a lot of current room for renewables to displace carbon. There will probably always be some fossil fuel capacity for peaking plants and battery systems are already being deployed in places.

The point at which we have too many renewables and a gap in generation is a long time off, and possibly with battery systems and demand shifting will never happen. It seems like the time to solve that problem will be measured in decades, there's no need to say renewables aren't a solution now when they can solve a huge portion of the problem starting immediately.

[pm90]

Cost shouldn’t be the only dimension to evaluate solutions to planet-wide problems.

See https://youtu.be/KC7YD98HixM. It does cost more to generate nuclear power but it’s also the only viable clean and “firm” (turn on and off based on demand) type of power generation available to us.

[colechristensen]

Nuclear is definitely not very responsive to demand, if you shutdown you have to wait days before you can restart, and it has a slow response to output levels.

Demand will also follow supply, setting pricing to availability will (and has) significantly alter usage patterns.

Also, having too much peak power and not enough baseline power isn't a today problem and won't be until solar/wind sources are at a much larger scale. Rolling industrial blackouts (or price spikes) in the middle of the night might become a thing, but still.. meh?

Cost isn't the only dimension, but there is the question "how do we best utilize our available resources?" and we might be able to better find the best allocation if we had a nice comparison about the cost/reward of sinking those resources into wind, solar, or nuclear. We need all of them, but there is certainly a tradeoff between how much we put towards each.