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Comment by ViewTrick1002 | Hacker News Reader

Or build renewables and storage and get massively more energy, in a few years rather than in the 2040s.

Not sure where this fixation on new nuclear comes from?

It's the magic bullet that will solve emissions, I suppose because it's advanced technology and the hippies are against it.

Ignoring the enormous cost, and long build times, plus the fact that when it gets hot they have to be turned off like last Summer.

Yeah, they have their place, but renewables are the real hero here.

I had Claude make this table of CO2 emissions per capita and nuclear energy share, from 1960 to today. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/9ef28451-1f6c-4809-b575-4...

I think people like nuclear because, over the last half century, CO2 emissions per capita have been drastically lower in the places nuclear has a larger energy share, like France.

Nuclear made a lot more sense back when solar panels and batteries were less mature.

With how insanely cheap solar and batteries are getting, it doesn't make much financial sense to build new nuclear plants anymore (for grid generation, they're still great for things like military ships).

Which is an argument for the Messmer plan half a century ago. Now what we spend our money on for the 2026 version of the Messmer plan.

When it began to dawn on them that their political "side" was intentionally ignoring climate change to boost fossil fuel profiteers they fell back to mocking hippies and silly women environmentalist for supporting feel good renewables instead of manly nuclear.

It made them feel much better, so now they need to desperately avoid learning anything about either renewables or nuclear power because their ego will collapse if confronted with reality.

Their side will never learn, as it isn't an education issue, but an ideology issue. Anti renewables is deeply ingrained in their identity and belief system. We just need to keep powering through the energy transition while ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. You're not going to logic and reason someone out of ideology [1] [2]. Same reason 100k churches are going to close over the next 5-10 years [3]. The ideology ages out, because it is rigid and in many aspects, unwavering versus being able to change.

Not many coal generators (~182GW) [4] and mines [5] in the US left to go. Keep going. Fossil gas gets pushed out next.

(If the US replaced all of the ag land it uses for biofuels, about the size of Oregon, with solar PV, it would produce more power than the entire country consumes while being wildly more efficient)

[1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/idaho-coun...

[2] https://www.datawrapper.de/_/vecRk/ ("755 counties have ordinances against renewables, and 61% of those counties are rural.")

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644302 (citations)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704064 (citations)

[5] https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=03b7a02fb9c24967918...

("Progress occurs one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck)

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