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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

There are no technological problems left, we just need to spend the money

This is false: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/be... and problems include disposal, birds, and the intermittent nature of renewables.

Germany has been spending a lot of money and if it had spent equivalently on nuclear it would likely have near-zero power emissions already; a brief note on that: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/bi...

Europe has the tools to go down towards zero CO2 emissions for power plants but, except for France, has not widely pursued nuclear.

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There basically _are_ no problems left, it's mainly economic and production volume now.

None of those counter points points really hold up under scrutiny:

1) Renewable power _is_ clean. It is also becoming baseload and dispatachable with the addition of batteries. Battery price is on a reducing price curve similar to solar experienced, during which we heard the following progression of arguments: It's too expensive for anything, it's too expensive to matter, it's too expensive for most regions, it's not a solution for everything, ok it's the cheapest source of power but we'll still need natural gas because... batteries are too expensive for anything! 2) Panel disposal is a TINY problem compared to climate change. Panel disposal is also TINY compared to environmental damage of other energy sources.

Nuclear would have been nice, but it's probably too late for that now, not worth the downsides, and also we don't need it (see battery price curve).

I don’t know if it’s too late for nuclear but in France the pair renewables / nuclear complement each other pretty well without batteries [1] (even if the renewable part can be improved).

[1] An interesting twitter thread with an analysis of how the systems adapt depending on the conditions (in French sorry) : https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432

France is an interesting look at an alternate future where Nuclear was done properly. If world energy production was more like France we'd definitely be in better shape.

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