7 Comments

“None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see.”

Are you unable to draw a line from Renewables to Extreme weather (a la Texas Freeze), California’s annual blackouts, China’s Uyghur Muslim "education" camps & Genocide solar panels, Child slavery in the Congo (Cobalt supply chain), Energy Poverty & Racism, Germany Energiewende failure, Rising Global CO2 emissions, Prematurely shuttered US nuclear Plants (replaced by Nat Gas & more emissions), Off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, US Grid reliability declines (Industrial Energy Consumers of America) ….is it necessary to keep going or do you get the point? It is time to bring in Nuclear from the cold.

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A fundamental point about nuclear vs solar is the nuclear is highly reliable while solar is highly unreliable. You could put solar panels in the polar regions during their summers to could power from them 24 hours a day, but in the winter there would be no power generated at all.

This is a problem with no solutions as of yet.

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Terrible as the treatment of the Uyghur has been we should not conflate the issues. The world is too complicated for that. China has been mis treating the Tibetans and it’s own political dissidents for decades, but China is a lot better place for the vast majority of its 1.3 billion people than it was 40 years ago. The Chinese people are freer and richer. China has recently been doing much more than the United States to reduce emissions and has just announced plans to quadruple Nuclear Energy by 2050. I would not be surprised if they exceed this. Trump stopped Terrapower building an advanced reactor in China which China was going to finance. The US should vastly expand its nuclear program not because of human rights in China but because it is the most effective way of reducing emissions.

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Good points but incomplete. One ignores the end-game at your own peril. The issue is that energy choices have geo-political consequences now and in the future. In this respect, Nuclear beats Renewables across the board from energy independence to non-proliferation, Technology development, grid security and much, much more. People wiser than you and I are adamant: When you are in a hole...stop digging. Assisting China to entrap the U.S. in a no-win energy policy while ignoring human rights abuses, is not in anyone's interests, least of all the Chinese people.

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I do not believe China has a policy on entrapping the US in a no-win energy policy. Chinese entrepreneurs see that they can make money selling solar panels and will sell them to whoever is willing to pay the price both at home and abroad. That is the nature of all business. The question of forced labor is different from this and yes the US should take a firm stand against this whether the slaves are used to make phones or panels.

Conflating Nuclear Energy with this is over reach. If Mother Teresa not Xi Xing Ping was running China, atomic energy would still make sense.

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I respect your position. It is a question of opportunity cost, which I am not willing to pay. I have learned first hand in China, the CCP is not the chinese people nor are all the entrepreneurs not in the CCP. by the way, the latter makes very little difference unless it is a mom and pop business.

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In fact President Trump did expand funding for nuclear power, and several reactors will be built as a result.

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