Right, this is what drives me up a fucking wall about the horseshoe types. I hear people talking about how I should think it’s a good thing that turnip opened up nuclear energy again. But his incompetence and grift will ensure it lives up to all the worst public fears about it. It’s going to set back nuclear progress immeasurably.

Probably the point of this kakistoctacy though, keep the oil prices up…

Good thing nobody screws up oil and spills it into the environment…

But how does it compare with installing a pool liner?

Tipping Nuclear Rod seems like Homer Simpson's level of blunder.

Well, yeah if we had bet more on nuclear two decades ago and kept building them, this would have been relevant.

But now renewables are expanding at a rate faster than nuclear power ever did, and unlike nuclear the growth rate is not flattening out yet. I don’t see how nuclear is much more than an irrelevant distraction when it comes to new energy production (existing is another matter, please don’t shut them down).

The base load problem is essentially solved IMO. Just a few years ago the duck curve was made to be insurmountable, and now it’s basically fully solved. Long term months long storage is also partially solved for colder regions where they are the most relevant.

But most importantly, this all ties into all the work we have to do to decarbonise industry. We have to make a lot of hydrogen and build a lot of electrical industrial heat production (which comes with free energy storage). Modern gas power plants are already hydrogen ready. We just need to build lots and lots of hydrogen electrolysis plants (for steel and ammonia production) near the gas power plants, and put some aside to use during dunkelflaute. That means many places already have much of the infrastructure needed to balance 100% renewables.

As dumb as Germanys shut down of nuclear has been, I think their strategy will be considered brilliant in 30 years time. The reason they have relied so much on gas is they need a that gas for the industry they specialised in anyway. The trick now is just to transition them to hydrogen and electric heating. There are already factories and fertiliser plants with on-site hydrogen production. It has started.

Not to mention, nuclear is GREAT for reliable baseline load. Pair that with renewable sources (which in many locations tend to be bursty) and grid-scale batteries/supercapacitors/some other energy-storage mechanism, and you’ve got a zero-carbon electric grid.

It has basically the same next-century issues like oil.

Maybe awareness of recent history