[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.