We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

Solar does provide a good way to mitigate carbon emissions in the meantime, even if it's role in a fully decarbonized economy is dubious. It's fast to build and makes a good complement for gas plants. Turn off the gas when the solar cells are collecting, and you can save a good deal of emissions.

Solar also has niche use cases that make sense even with nuclear power. Rooftop solar is a good way to offset air conditioning energy use. In this case, the solar energy collected by the panels are intrinsically connected to the power demand of the air conditioning unit. Plus the energy production and energy demand are co-located.

Nonsense. Please apply some intelligence and common sense. We're not talking about shutting down all other activities and only doing Green New Deal stuff. We're talking about the limited amount of resources that can be redirected by various choices of government policy. Given the magnitude of the resources that would be required for the grandiose plans for renewables touted in the Green New Deal, there wouldn't be anything left over for nuclear.

Potentially extremely dangerous.

Yup, precisely. You've conveniently ignored successful projects elsewhere, like the Hanul nuclear power plant and the Taishan nuclear plant. Also, you're incorrect that Votgle is the only nuclear project in the US, Turkey Point is installing two more AP1000 reactors.

> It includes such things as instrumentation, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and (most importantly) manpower and expertise.

Enrichment is not a substantial portion of nuclear power's cost. Almost all of it is in construction and fabrication of the plant. I'm also not sure why you think building a nuclear warhead translates into running a nuclear plant. A nuclear weapons designer wants a very violent runaway nuclear reaction. This is what a nuclear plant designer wants to avoid.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons don't use the same fuel. That's not quite true with recent plants: a few of the newer nuclear plants can mix in some weapons-grade plutonium - but the mix is still mostly uranium. This more about dismantling plutonium, as it's the only way we know how to get ride of weapons-grade fissile material - well, besides detonating the nuclear weapon.

> Investments are made on expected payoff. The expectation that renewables will do well is high. The off chance that they do not, oh well! Nuclear could be a backup in that case. There is no need to pump trillions into nuclear now to restore your putative golden age.

You continue to miss the point. With renewables and storage, we're talking in terms of hypothetical costs. What we think it will cost. Projected costs are cheap, because by definition they exclude the costs of unforeseen issues. Historical costs do include the costs of unforeseen issues that emerged in implementation.

Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale.

The cost of proposed storage technologies are hypothetical costs. Nobody has built a 1TWh storage facility, let alone a 10 TWh storage facility. We can make educated guesses at what this will cost, but they're still guesses. We'll only know the real cost after it's been built. And projected costs are almost always optimistic.

Comparing historical costs to projected costs is comparing apples to oranges.

> (I'd actually put carbon capture over nuclear as the backup plan. Nuclear would be the backup to the backup.)

You seem to be particularly determined to avoid the one solution that is actually proven to work.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora....