I have been pro-nuclear for more than a decade, but it is clear that it has lost politically at this point. I used to say that we needed a 40 years nuclear transition so that the solar tech could catch up. We are almost there. We sadly relied on oil and coal instead to develop these tech but we finally are here and it will soon start to make sense to advocate for a direct transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
I think we still need nuclear, including new nuclear, as a backup. It’s easy to imagine a scenario, e.g., a still winter night, where any amount of renewables would fail to provide enough energy, and in that scenario we’d want something we could switch on. Nuclear is the obvious answer!
It’s easy to imagine a scenario, e.g., regions of france for weeks at a time during four of the last ten years, where any amount of nuclear would fail to provide enough energy, and in that scenario we’d want something we could switch on.
The transmission, backup and storage requirements are no different for nuclear vs. renewables. Even a solution as bad as burning the gas and coal we’d use while waiting for nuclear to be built as backup over the next four centuries is much more sane.