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seec • last Sunday at 7:03 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Thank you for that.

I'm always tired of the anti-nuclear zealots that make it look like it's an either/or situation.

We can (and should) do both. Even if renewable plus storage ends up being sufficient in some places, it is extremely unlikely that will apply everywhere. And at the current production rates, it would take multiple decades to transition everything. Even if we take forever (10 years+) to build new nuclear, as it happens to be right now, it would still be beneficial. And there is no good reason we can't build fast like China manages to do right now.

Replies

mpweiher • last Monday at 10:17 AM

Exactly!

For example, French nuclear capacity factors are currently rising. One reason, as far as I can tell, is that they can now use intermittent renewables for at least some of the peak load, meaning they don't have to ramp their nuclear plants up and down.

Win win!

Also, PV is absolutely fantastic for hot deserts: lots of sunshine and a lot of load that correlates almost perfectly with that very same sunshine.

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ViewTrick1002 • last Sunday at 7:24 PM

> Even if we take forever (10 years+) to build new nuclear, as it happens to be right now, it would still be beneficial.

Why would it be benifical to waste multiples more money on less results taking longer time to delvier? This seems like zeolotry rather than logic speaking.

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godelski • last Monday at 11:12 PM

  > I'm always tired of the anti-nuclear zealots that make it look like it's an either/or situation.
Same BUT I'm also tired of pro-nuclear zealots doing the same thing. There's a lot of armchair experts on both sides and neither are helping us solve the climate problem. They just cause fighting and ignore the complexities of the situation. It should not be controversial that climate change is one of the most complex problems humanity has ever faced, yet it is. We have tons of issues about the climate, tons of issues about the environment, tons of issues about each technology, tons of issues with manufacturing, and so on. It is mind boggling how complex this all is if you just start to build out the graph of dependencies.

Unfortunately public opinion matters, as every one of these power sources needs government subsides and funding to progress. From direct construction to funding of further research. *That is political*. It shouldn't be, but is because we decide where money gets allocated and with any complex issue it is easy to oversimplify and create malinformation to portray spending as wasteful when it isn't.

I'll make an analogy to programming since we're on HN. People are posting as if they have read all the code their computer is running. There simply isn't anyone that has done that, even the experts. We can only have a narrow understanding and hope that there's an overlap of people who have complete coverage over all the code. So we need to stop arguing "facts" and instead argue "my understanding" as it is just too fucking complex. I mean how many people have even run a very basic weather simulation?

It's totally fine to have opinions. I want people to have opinions! But I want the passion of peoples opinions to be directly proportional to their passion of understanding the things they're talking about. The worst fucking thing we can do is have very strong opinions on things we are not making an integral part to our lives. By having unsupported strong opinions we just drown out the real experts. The opinions that matter the most. For the love of god, it is absolutely apparent with the issue of climate as we're constantly raising voices that have no legitimate experience in the field and calling them experts. We've seen such disinformation campaigns happen for decades! Yet we're still here and we do the same fucking thing with a million topics. I'm just pissed off at everyone having strong opinions about everything. I'm pissed off at everyone wanting to be a know-it-all. Get your passions and dive into them, but recognize your own limits. You're not dumb for not knowing something and your opinion isn't a reflection of you, but rather the information you have. We don't have to waste so much time with all these dumb fights.