> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.

“Cheap” only if you exclude indirect costs due to emissions (both localized effects and less-localized.)

> we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear

nuclear is not renewable (it is low carbon, a feature that is also true of renewables in general, but it is not, itself, a renewable.)

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mullingitover 2 days ago | parent [-]

> nuclear is not renewable

It can be effectively renewable for all practical purposes, but there's an aversion to breeder reactors. Over 95% of the existing 'waste' could also be consumed by breeders.

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dragonwriter 2 days ago | parent [-]

> It can be effectively renewable for all practical purposes, but there's an aversion to breeder reactors.

Breeder reactors reduce long-term waste issues, but they don't make nuclear renewable.

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mullingitover 2 days ago | parent [-]

They push the timeline out so far that it's effectively renewable. The sun will burn out at some point, too, but we don't say solar is non-renewable.

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dragonwriter 2 days ago | parent [-]

We don't say solar is non-renewable because using every single available bit of solar today has no impact on the solar energy available tomorrow. This is not true of nuclear, even if you increase the total quantity of available fission-derived energy by 50 or 100 or whatever the outer estimate is for breeder reactors compared to non-breeder fission.

	▲	mullingitover 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Based on the math in this paper[1] there's enough uranium floating around to keep the planet running on the order of hundreds of millions of years at modern energy consumption levels. The price of the material would go up compared to what it costs currently, but the raw material costs are a small fraction of bottom line anyway. [1] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...