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Comment by notlukesky | Hacker News Reader

The core issue is that they are unreliable when there is no wind or sunlight. Storage at scale is still not affordable or available for the whole world. The recent electricity issues that western Europe faced are indicative of the failings of unSustainable energy.

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"Renewables need to be supplemented" is a very different claim from "the only thing that would move the needle ... is reliable nuclear energy" (emphasis added).

Nuclear energy can't solve the problem on its own either, because you still need plants to deal with rapid changes in demand. We shouldn't be working towards a silver bullet, we should be using a lot of different technologies together to solve the problem.

You just need nuclear and existing hydropower, which boils down to you just need nuclear. It's not politically probable or realistic though, but we really just need nuclear technically speaking.

Nuclear can also follow loads, but there's no economical need to build them to do that (in almost any market).

The recent electricity issues are because Putin invaded Ukraine and reduced the gas supply. Which is nothing to do with sustainable energy.

"We said we were running on renewables, but we were also dependent on burning Russian gas, and we plan to keep burning gas for the foreseeable future, sans the buying-gas-from-Russia part" sounds like a pretty important detail to talk about sustainable energy, IMHO.

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