I won't go for low risk when it comes to nuclear and not let my family grow up next to it. Only no risk would be acceptable to me when it comes to nuclear, quite some tail risk in this case.
I don’t think “no-risk” exists for any power gen tech, fwiw. There are always going to be trade-offs.
For interviewee points to the fact that new nuclear is significantly more expensive than solar and wind. In fact, even existing nuclear’s base running costs are higher. And here’s the kicker. Solar/wind + existing battery tech is also cheaper than nuclear. And we don’t even need battery until solar/wind generation has increased by an order of magnitude.
So $1 spent on nuclear will do a lot less to reduce CO2 than $1 spent on wind/solar. Further, that $1 spent on nuclear will still take up to a decade to start helping reduce CO2, while the solar/wind options will likely be active within a year or so.
The article may be wrong about all these facts, but in a response to it one needs to at least show why they are wrong instead of pretending the claims were never made.
Plus, what never gets factored into this, is a sane discussion about industrial uses. Switching off industrial users in extreme events (light winds/cloudy for multiple weeks) has a cost, but that could also be factored in to the costs of relative power strategies. We already have these kind of contracts — perhaps we should be more aggressive in pursuing that?
There is no storage solution for this. How do you store daily power needs of a large metro area x 3 days? Batteries? Thermal? The capacity isn't there today for a viable installation. Maybe in rural areas that can give up a ton of land mass for a relatively low population.