DerGottesknecht

Thats very aptly put. I would also like to not only work the supply side and make demand more flexible to better work with renewables. And maybe get rid of personal cars and get people to ride more bikes and so on… And if we manage to stall/reverse global warming in the next 20 years we hopefully have fusion for all of the really big energy needs.

But most importantly, we need to do everything to get rid of fossil fuels as fast as possible. And that’s where I think we agree completely.

once you have reactor designs up and running, building a lot of capacity both cheaper and quicker.

But its the same with renewables and storage, they will improve as well and most likely keep their cost advantage.

And you seem to ignore Opportunity costs again. If we build to much nuclear plants and don’t need the energy later we could have invested the money better in other areas, like education. Again, money is a finite resource.

And another reason why I prefer renewables to nuclear is decentralisation. With renewables everyone can partake in energy generation, while nuclear is only for big corporations or governments. I’d rather have a robust decentralised grid where almost everyone is consuming and producing local most of the time than a grid relying on a few huge producers, which are a huge target for sabotage or vulnerable to natural catastrophes.

If the large governmental investments go into renewables and storage we have more energy faster.

Also nuclear doesn’t play nice with a energy network with a large fluctuating renewable part. As the running cost of a nuclear plant is minimal compared to the investment there is a huge incentive to let a nuclear plant run at max output all the time, thereby blocking the grid for renewables.

Building nuclear does not mean we stop building renewables, or that we build less of them.

Money as a finite resource as of now, so money spent on nuclear is not spent on renewables and storage. And that is the number 1 priority if we want to be carbon neutral as fast as possible. And if we manage to transition to an all renewable energy system and continue to need even more energy we can hopefully start with fusion in 20 years. But in the short term i would only invest in renewables.

Freefall, extremly good webcomic