Hmm, I think of baseload as the following:

• Hospitals and emergency services
• Data centers and communications
• 24 hour transit needs
• 24 hour lighting in cities
• Ventilation, heating/cooling for certain climates

Some of these can be mitigated significantly, but some of these are just things that really can never be down and have to have like 99.999% reliability. As we electrify, I’m going to be looking at storage solutions for these things and seeing if we really feel confident in that up time and having extra reserves. Engineers usually over design, so if we expect to need like 0.1 gigawatts for a week for emergency services during an abnormal weather event, I would want to plan for 1 gigawatt for two weeks for instance.

If that can be done with storage, then that’s awesome, and once we start seeing that roll out widely I will stop advocating for the “do both” strategy.

My understanding is that this is not the case for providing baseload to entire cities, and it’s unlikely to be the case as we increase energy usage (which has been spiking again, thanks to crypto and AI among other things). With current battery tech it would require massive amounts of lithium that would have far greater environmental impact, and still not really cover all needs. And other mechanisms, like stored energy (pumping water, spinning disks)are more theoretical.

I think I would be much more open to the argument once we have a full modern city converted at least partially to 80-90% renewables, with emergency services and other core infrastructure running off of storage instead of existing power plants. If we get there, then I’d probably stop saying we should invest in nuclear in parallel.

And to be clear, we should get there, if possible. We should push forward full throttle, because all of that innovation would be incredible, and I don’t want us to rely solely on one power source at all, be that renewables, nuclear, or whatever else. A smart strategy is have backups, which is why I think we should do both.

We don’t have a set amount of money and resources, fundamentally.

We have an abundance of food, water, and shelter.

We have a lot of smart people who are currently spending their lives making money on made up markets and apps.

We have plenty of steel, concrete, and any other resources that would be in contention.

When it comes to money, if we raised taxes just a little, we’d be fine. I’m kind of an MMT person, but point is, we could get money, print it, tax it, etc. as it’s an abstraction on top of the other things above.

The mindset of “it’s gotta be one or the other” is a false choice presented by the fossil fuel industry and conservative politicians. They say we can’t raise taxes and we can’t increase deficit spending so they can get us to fight. And I guarantee you, if we all agreed to do nuclear, they would flip the script and start investing in renewables, because what they want is to kill momentum. After all, who do you think was behind all the scare mongering after three mile island?

I don’t want to kill momentum for renewables, but I want to start building it for nuclear at the same time.

We can do both.

Sure, both can be true though. What I don’t see very often from the pro-nuke crowd, right or left, is that we should defund renewables. Pro-nuke types tend to be pretty technical and very in the weeds so they see the benefits of both. They just get bent out of shape by their pet project being defunded.

On the pro-renewable side, there’s more partisanship because it’s a wider base, it appeals to the crunchy side of the left, AND nuclear has been character assassinated with fear around meltdowns. Most people with concerns around timelines and technical constraints on nuclear, like yourself, are flexible too.

It’s the crunchy folks and the moderates we need to convince. If they log onto a post here on Lemmy and see a bunch of pro-nuke people and pro-renewable people arguing and not agreeing that both forms are awesome and we should do both, those people are much more likely to fall for one of the forms of propaganda from the fossil fuel lobbyists. After all, we can’t even agree!

Again, we can do both. This is not a zero sum game, there are nuclear physicists and people who are passionate about nuclear who will either be working on nukes, OR pivoting to software engineering so they can make money on the crypto/AI/whatever boom. I have met them.

The enemy is not the person who wants to build a parallel solution to the same problem. The enemy is the person who says “oh oops, there’s just not enough money 😬 we gotta fund only one, which one should we do? Figure it out and then we can move forward, in the meantime we’ll just keep using these fossil fuels.”

They are playing us with divisive politics. My expectation if we fund both is one of the following happens:

1. We reach 20 years from now, and between storage breakthroughs and renewables scaling out we are 100% renewable capable. We stop construction of new nuclear plants, we keep the few that came online for a while and then we decommission. We win.
2. We reach 20 years from now. We have made significant progress on renewables and storage, but we still haven’t been able to replace base load entirely. Storage breakthroughs didn’t happen, and we have to keep funding more research. In the meantime, we’re able to decarbonize and rely on nukes instead of fossil fuels. We win.

Hedging bets is smart in all cases, especially when it’s not a zero sum game. Don’t let them divide us.

We can do both. There’s nothing preventing us from doing both, and the most effective way for the oil and gas lobby to get what they want is to divide us.

If pro-renewable people say “we must only have renewables, nothing else!” It makes us seem like ideologues. If we seem like ideologues, moderates get confused because they think “well I do like to hedge my bets and try all things out.” And pro-nuclear advocates (who are all over the spectrum) get louder, complain more, and swing more moderates and politicians back toward nuclear and away from renewables. Then you can repeat the cycle in reverse.

The conservative trick is not to substitute something that doesn’t work for something that does. It’s to keep us divided, blaming each other, and going back and forth between different solutions so often that we never get anything done. Chaos is a ladder.

Japan for one, whose coal and natural gas consumption has gone up significantly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan

Germany has stayed fairly steady, fair enough. Imagine if they had just focused on replacing fossil fuels instead of nuclear, they would be nearly carbon free by now.

I have no problem with the majority of funding going to renewables and making progress right now, but I also don’t see why we can’t break ground on new 4th generation nukes and continue investment in nuclear research at the same time. We can hedge our bets, make progress on both. If the 100% renewables + storage plan pans out, cool, we stop the nukes. If they don’t, then cool, we have our carbon free baseload production and we aren’t a decade behind on it when we need it.

I don’t think we have the time to wait on and expect breakthroughs anymore. A decade ago, sure, but if we end up having major issues with storage and don’t make those breakthroughs 10 years from now, and we start building nuclear plants then, we’re in for an even worse timeline.

Re: government support, sure. If this is a zero sum game and we have to choose one or the other, I’ll probably go renewable. From what I’ve seen, the zero sum mentality itself is the conservative trap. They keep us fighting against each other when we could just say “do both”.

When the IRA passed in the states, there was some amount of funding for nukes. Not a ton, but some. Yet there was skepticism of that, there were calls on the left to defund that among circles I frequented. Why? The support for nukes was much less than renewables and storage, and like an order of magnitude less. It was a hedge - keep investing in alternatives to renewables in case they don’t work out, because we don’t have a crystal ball. So why be divided on this?

The trap isn’t nuclear. It’s division and scarcity thinking. It’s zero-sum politics.

I just don’t see it in terms of fundamentals. We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels. Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand, baseload is still necessary, and we don’t have other options.

We should absolutely keep investing in renewables and pushing forward, they help. There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.

Yes, definitely agree it should require the doctor to approve as well, and the child should also consent. The point is that the government is interfering with both parents and doctors by stepping in. Feels very much like your body, my choice here.

Obviously it would only be if the doctors and parents approved together. Point being, the government is stepping in and overriding my parental rights and my doctor’s recommendation just because someone else does not agree.

And I don’t see parents voting for bans, none of these have been initiatives. These are law makers.

Why are we debating this at all, shouldn’t it be the decision of the parents? You don’t agree, that’s fine, you can tell your kids no. If someone else looks at the evidence and believes it’s true, and believes this is hugely beneficial to their kid, why should the government have a say in their kid’s medical treatment?

This is why I’ve been thinking we should focus on changing the voting system within primaries rather than in the general to start with. The general election is going to require massive amounts of effort and political will to change, but primaries could be changed more easily since it’s mainly up to the party itself (still could require some legal changes to update voting machines, etc)