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gretch

I see a lot of the arguments from all sides on “the future is X, it cannot be Y!”

To me, this is a false dichotomy.

In my opinion energy is one of the most important pillars of society. It is so important that it must be hedged.

I don’t think we can afford to put all of eggs in 1 basket, no matter how confident we are in a single basket.

I support all forms of sustainable energy advancement and research.

We need more nuclear plants AND more solar/wind. And probably also geothermal, and tidal, and other things I don’t even personally know about.

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Yes, we need a mix of technologies. But at the current state of things, nuclear shouldn't be something to invest into. Yes, existing reactors should be used for their full life time, but there is far too much speaking against building new ones.

I think it still makes sense to do R&D on nuclear, for example new reactor types, just as insurance. There's a low bar to justify R&D.

Sure, I am always strongly in favor of doing R&D on alternative technologies. But it also is important to understand that this takes a lot of time. But we need to get our grid quickly off fossil fuels and for that we need to use the thechnologies which can be rolled out now. Which would be the renewables.

But any R&D we do now could come handy for the last step, to get the grid fully carbon neutral.

Or for niche uses, such as military naval propulsion, space, and actinide destruction.

Technologies with multiple uses beyond nuclear would also be worth looking at. A very interesting one is CO2 turbines, which could be much smaller (and cheaper) than steam turbines. These are available, but have not been pushed to their optimized limits like steam turbines have.

Other than the practical reality of it being expensive to construct nuclear facilities (which may or may not be solvable), what is speaking against building new ones?

Several reasons:

- it takes way to long to finish them, renewables can be set up much quicker

- as they are too expensive, they are binding money which could be used more efficiently somewhere else.

- we haven't solved the waste problem

- nuclear is the worst companion to renewables, as nuclear power plants are limited in their regulation capacity and you cannot afford to keep them not running at a high load or the electrictiy would become even more expensive.

Well said sir

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