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Jesus is this honestly how you think the world works? Oil is lobbying for their competitor? And why the fuck would any of these unfounded scenarios mean we couldn't, as citizens, push for both cleaner power options?

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.

Almost exclusively? No. Nuclear produces predictable energy and a lot of it in a small area, which is why things like data centers are being built on them. As another example, if you're above the arctic circle renewables straight up aren't a thing in the winter (unless you count geothermal, maybe).

Overall it's still probably the better choice, just because nuclear is hard, but it's not like it doesn't have a few remaining drawbacks.

That kind of thinking was wrong a decade ago and is still wrong now. If we have any chance of stopping climate change we are going to have to massively decarbonise not only electricity production, but also transport and heating. That's going to mean a massive electrification of those sectors and a huge increase in demand over decades. Putting off large fixed investment now as it wont help out immediately but will help significantly during the time that electricity demand is growing is just nonsense.

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.

It was 13 years and not 10. From your source the bid was won in 2009 and the third reactor started in 2022, with the fourth not ready for that article (middle 2023). Still not 20 years, but 30% above the claimed decade.

The graphic and comparison however are just clickbait. For one it compares a filthy rich oil-state without democracy and Denmark/Portugal where the government can't just push something like that through. Apart from that it's made to look like a sudden extreme increase from UAE that might continue that strongly, which it won't. Starting an NPP of course makes a sudden huge spike, while renewables are more incremental.

This comes as no surprise to me when the source seems to be highly subjective with a huge bias towards UAE:

Those who are critical of these high-energy nations ought to consider that they are not the countries to blame for climate change. Indeed, these countries ought to be applauded for taking measures to wean themselves off of fossil fuels

Of course one of the major oil-states that pushes against measures to slow down the climate change at every chance it gets is not to blame for anything... Sure...