Your comments are coming across as lacking nuance ("nuclear is the worst possible...", for example).
Nuclear has a place depending on how you weigh specific factors in your grid design. It's zero carbon. It's hideously expensive, particularly in capex. It's generally quite reliable and its availability is mostly uncorrelated with that of solar and wind. it's modestly dispatchable - you can scale down to 60% or so in many designs. (A little lower but let's be conservative).
If you place high weight on zero carbon, nuclear is an (expensive) way to get through the night. It can work pretty well in a grid mix if your grid is large enough that the loss of one nuclear plant isn't a really big chunk of your power supply (since, obviously, you want enough redundancy to handle a certain fraction of generation failures at peak load).
Are solar+wind+batteries on a much better trajectory? Yes. But batteries are not there _yet_ for 24x7, though I think we all hope they will be in the reasonably near future.
He does not care about these arguments, what matters is that there is no room for nuclear power.
In a past discussion I talked to him about how one of the important things to do was to diversify, as China has a lot of influence on the whole renewable sector (solar, batteries, etc.)
Needless to say, that's not a problem for him. For him to hope that batteries are the future is already a sure thing, without the slightest doubt.
> Hideously expensive and any plant announced today will not be online in time to have any material effect on our fight against climate change
False, we have 26 years to decarbonize, all the time it takes to build any number of nuclear power plants in any country in the world.
> Which means funding diverted from renewables to nuclear will prolong our fight against climate change.
We can say the same thing about renewables. Then come and tell me you are not ideological... Where is the mathematical certainty that batteries at scale will be available everywhere and for everyone by 2050? If you come from the future, prove it to me and I will agree with you.
About 20 years from being announced. Compare with renewables taking 1-5 years depending on if it is solar or offshore wind.
Say 5 years for renewables.
This means that investing in nuclear will have 15 years of cumulative emissions before anything is curbed.
Meaning, even if the renewable options ends up solving only 80% of the problem it will take until somewhere 2080-90 for the “perfect” nuclear solution to have less cumulative emissions.
Even if renewables are completely unable to solve the entire problem we can invest in them and then in 2060 and still be ahead of nuclear power, and then choose it as the final solution.
Today it is simply lunacy proposed by the fossil fuel industry or people looking for the perfect solution rather than piecemeal solving the issue.
These are lies you tell yourself and how you want people to see you. In a past discussion, you concluded by saying that those who support nuclear energy also support fossil fuels.
These are your ideological premises; you don't care about creating a better world, nor are you interested in facts and problems. You only care about your vision of things and making it prevail over others.
There's no need to know anything else to make any of your comments irrelevant. It's no coincidence that you are in every nuclear discussion, asserting how much you are against it.
Given how the rightwing conservative politics have shifted from pure climate change denial to harping nuclear as the non-solution to prolong our reliance on fossil fuels the link is clear.
Nuclear power derives its energy from the binding energy of ultra-heavy atomic nuclei, not fossil fuels. This energy can then be used to power electric cars, avoiding fossil fuel consumption. Furthermore, unlike wind and solar energy, nuclear power generation is not tied to the vagaries of weather, meaning that it doesn’t require burning millions of cubic meters of natural gas every overcast, calm day. For this reason, Russia historically was the largest single benefactor of Germany’s green euphoria: it prolongs fossil fuel reliance.
So often, emotional thinking leads to conclusions that are opposed to reality. You really have to watch out for it, if you want good results.
Work with the world, not against it.