> On energy, they can promise clean, affordable power supported by reliable, high-wage jobs if they have the courage to champion nuclear energy over wind and solar.
The Levelized Cost of Electricity is highest for nuclear, and it's increasing too. Am I missing something here?
Is it not possible to bring that cost down substantially through deregulation without compromising safety? And is it not true that the state and Federal mandates and lavish subsidies for wind and solar have had a perverse effect on the economic viability of nuclear power? See https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-messy-necessity
But why would you try to bring down these costs if existing renewables already exist? Reducing energy bills, at least in the near term, isn't a good motivation to invest in nuclear if it's renewables already offer cheap energy.
I can see the point of investing in nuclear to have a base load clean energy source in case the growth in renewables at some point stops, and as a way to solve the intermittency problem (together with geothermal and storage). But for now, renewable energy is skyrocketing and making energy cheaper in many places, regardless of government support.
Nuclear might also be quite hard to pull off with high CAPEX before it even delivers energy to the grid.
I don’t think you can find a place where energy is actually cheaper to customers as a result of W&S. You can definitely find places where it’s more expensive, and increasingly so. See: Germany, the UK, California for starters.
South Korea is delivering new nuclear plants with VERY low cost electricity. The difference between there and here, I suspect, is that we have a nuclear regulatory body that is actively hostile to nuclear energy, because it’s populated with employees who belong to the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth.
You're attributing ("gave rise to") Trump's election to Dem environmental policies. Can you find any polling to substantiate that climate/enviro issues were top concerns for voters? In a Yale/George Mason U poll during the campaign, it ranked 19th in importance out of 28 issues; it was also low in Gallup and Pew polling during the fall. It didn't come up in the Presidential debate, and Harris didn't feature the issue in her speeches. You outline weaknesses in the Dem positions, and you may be right: but there is also the Q of whether anyone cared about that. What's the evidence that environmental issues "gave" us the current regime?
Very good post. In the recitation of monumentally bad ideas emanating from “progressives”, at least one more that should be noted is education. Indoctrinating children from an early age that capitalism is terrible, and reducing educational standards in a wildly misguided attempt to cater to under-achieving groups — among other flat-out bad ideas — has done enormous damage at both the individual and the national levels.
Looking from outside the US, it seems that the “normies” don’t like progressive policies because the mostly-conservative media feeds them a diet of slanted opinion. Seems to me that more Americans would actually benefit from a redistribution of wealth ie removing tax breaks for the rich. And longer term not drilling, baby.
I have bet against nuclear energy many times and I haven't lost a bet yet. Your blind faith that I'll lose the current one surprises me, coming from an otherwise brilliant writer.
The smiling jackass in the photo says a lot of things, but he has appointed Wright, Bergum, Musk, etc. who are all of the above energy types that will probably end up making a lot more progress on climate change than the green aligned people ever could. I just don’t agree that the right has no ideas- they just have a loud minority that runs around screaming “Chinese hoax”, but both parties have that type of problem in the US.
> On energy, they can promise clean, affordable power supported by reliable, high-wage jobs if they have the courage to champion nuclear energy over wind and solar.
The Levelized Cost of Electricity is highest for nuclear, and it's increasing too. Am I missing something here?
Yes!!
I'm writing a post about it...
OK, Soemano, this one's basically just for you:
https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-levelized-cost-of-horseshit
Is it not possible to bring that cost down substantially through deregulation without compromising safety? And is it not true that the state and Federal mandates and lavish subsidies for wind and solar have had a perverse effect on the economic viability of nuclear power? See https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-messy-necessity
But why would you try to bring down these costs if existing renewables already exist? Reducing energy bills, at least in the near term, isn't a good motivation to invest in nuclear if it's renewables already offer cheap energy.
I can see the point of investing in nuclear to have a base load clean energy source in case the growth in renewables at some point stops, and as a way to solve the intermittency problem (together with geothermal and storage). But for now, renewable energy is skyrocketing and making energy cheaper in many places, regardless of government support.
Nuclear might also be quite hard to pull off with high CAPEX before it even delivers energy to the grid.
I wonder if you think any different about this.
I don’t think you can find a place where energy is actually cheaper to customers as a result of W&S. You can definitely find places where it’s more expensive, and increasingly so. See: Germany, the UK, California for starters.
South Korea is delivering new nuclear plants with VERY low cost electricity. The difference between there and here, I suspect, is that we have a nuclear regulatory body that is actively hostile to nuclear energy, because it’s populated with employees who belong to the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth.
Have you read the article I linked?
You're attributing ("gave rise to") Trump's election to Dem environmental policies. Can you find any polling to substantiate that climate/enviro issues were top concerns for voters? In a Yale/George Mason U poll during the campaign, it ranked 19th in importance out of 28 issues; it was also low in Gallup and Pew polling during the fall. It didn't come up in the Presidential debate, and Harris didn't feature the issue in her speeches. You outline weaknesses in the Dem positions, and you may be right: but there is also the Q of whether anyone cared about that. What's the evidence that environmental issues "gave" us the current regime?
Very good post. In the recitation of monumentally bad ideas emanating from “progressives”, at least one more that should be noted is education. Indoctrinating children from an early age that capitalism is terrible, and reducing educational standards in a wildly misguided attempt to cater to under-achieving groups — among other flat-out bad ideas — has done enormous damage at both the individual and the national levels.
OK, back to energy.
Looking from outside the US, it seems that the “normies” don’t like progressive policies because the mostly-conservative media feeds them a diet of slanted opinion. Seems to me that more Americans would actually benefit from a redistribution of wealth ie removing tax breaks for the rich. And longer term not drilling, baby.
I have bet against nuclear energy many times and I haven't lost a bet yet. Your blind faith that I'll lose the current one surprises me, coming from an otherwise brilliant writer.
The smiling jackass in the photo says a lot of things, but he has appointed Wright, Bergum, Musk, etc. who are all of the above energy types that will probably end up making a lot more progress on climate change than the green aligned people ever could. I just don’t agree that the right has no ideas- they just have a loud minority that runs around screaming “Chinese hoax”, but both parties have that type of problem in the US.