alt Hacker NewsThis hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good.
In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid).
But instead they decided to massively overpay for wind & solar. This bootstrapped the insane cost reduction we've seen in wind & solar over the last 30 years. Today solar & wind are significantly cheaper than natural gas, and orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear.
> coal (see Germany)
Which dropped from 55% of electricity from coal in 1990 to 23% today. From 400 million tons to 130 tons.
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Ok, but if they had instead bootstrapped industrial nuclear technology into our known design-space we’d have actionable scalable solutions to transportation fuel generation (OPECs geopolitical sway, Chinese economic stability), mass desalination, environmentally friendly electrification of industrial processes, and industrial heat applications that could save incredible amounts of greenhouse emissions on a yearly basis. Instead we are reliving the oil dynamics of the 70s because of our poor industrial accounting, doubling down on emissions heavy tech in energy intensive operations, and maintaining harmful environmental chemical pollutants in our processes farmed out to the developing world…
Renewables in isolation have an entrenching effect on other aspects of our global emissions footprint & some likely causes of WW3. Humanity has an energy and greenhouse gas crisis, not an electrical generation crisis. Transportation fuels are central. Delaying our high energy future results in, among many other things, intensely polluting data centres instead of the obvious pairing of 24/7 large scale steady energy with no emissions to our increasingly digitally dictated economies.
Wind/wave/solar is nice, cheap enough anything pays for itself, but there is a bigger picture. Tribalism and anti-nuclear sentiment are not in line with our short to medium term environmental goals and are only marginally relevant to the long term and existential ones. We have already cursed generations by our trepidation, reluctance, and submission to monied interests. We cannot get an iPhone 20 without building and iterating on 19 models first.
But had they invested in nuclear perhaps coal would be down to 0% today, and the same cost reduction would have applied to nuclear instead, with nuclear being orders of magnitude cheaper?
> Which dropped from 55% of electricity from coal in 1990 to 23% today. From 400 million tons to 130 tons.
And how much lower would have it been if they had chosen to keep their existing nuclear and reduce/retire their coal and/or gas? Certainly if they did not want to build new nuclear that's one thing, but they chose to keep the emitting stuff, which was really stupid IMHO.
Even now it'd be viable to re-start some of Germany's nuclear if they really wanted to reduce emissions:
* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...
* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...