| ▲ | pfdietz 2 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav Smil. But Smil used this argument to massively mispredict how solar would be go in the market. We don't hear him much anymore. Nuclear advocates increasingly resort to conspiracy theoretic reasoning to explain away the failure of their technology to compete. This should be a red flag. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | rayiner an hour ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
> The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry. We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | rs_rs_rs_rs_rs an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
>The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive I have a solution, take the subsidies spent on "renewables" and put them into nuclear! Easy peasy! | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||