I've no idea who either of these people are but it does seem like the author of the article that the OP was deleted from, Mike Solana, is undermining his very reasonable previous stance [1] by censoring counter arguments rather than addressing them:

[1] https://reason.com/2022/05/15/mike-solana-wants-you-to-commi...

Quotes:

It's just words on the internet, right? What do we have to be afraid of?

:

There's a broad cultural obsession with policing tone and thoughts.

etc etc

Nuclear can be used as peaker plants.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/nuclear-powered-peaker...

They just don’t bother because running at 100% is effectively free, due to the incredibly low cost of fuel. That brings me to the other problem with this article. Nuclear fuel is light and easily transported, so they could source it from multiple countries.

The incompatability of renewables and nuclear is often overstated.

The real issue is that all the solutions (storage, import/export, green hydrogen, batteries, curtailment etc.) would allow you to build lots more renewables than nuclear so it's silly to build more nuclear.

Doesn't have quite the same impact on existing, non-end-of-life nuclear though, though with continued cost reductions it is getting there.

Not just Kazakhstan but Australia has uranium, and excess electricity can be sold (as it already is). I'm all for renewables, but the arguments against nuclear aren't all that ironclad.

I'm glad the author posted their point of viewer however, it's always helpful to understand where others are coming from.

Nuclear is probably the most expensive energy source for powering a grid at present, and nuclear advocates have tried to get around this by calling for deregulation, but that's just not plausible. Given the catastrophic failure mode of nuclear power, the plants have to be over-engineered relative to all other power systems, and that greatly increases costs.

Let's take Fukushima as an example. If they'd just put the emergency diesel generators (very heavy) on the roof of the plant rather in the basement, there'd have been no hydrogen explosions and meltdowns, as the seawater would not have destroyed them. However, this would increase the plant's cost due to the need for greater structural stability for such a configuration.

Not only that, uranium fuel rods are expensive to manufacture and expensive to handle, and storing them after retirement is another long-term cost. Granted the ~21 tons of uranium fuel consumed per year in 1 GW output nuclear complex is much less that the equivalent ~4.2 million tons of coal in a 1 GW output coal plant, but the preferable option is a solar/wind/storage system that consumes no material at all (not counting battery maintenance and turnover, I suppose, but there are recycling options). On top of that, if demand is high uranium prices can fluctuate wildly as the pre-Fukushima years demonstrated.

So, let's agree there's no reasonable argument for cutting costs on nuclear due to the various scenarios (terrorism, accident, sabotage, cybersecurity, etc) that could lead to catastrophic failure. If the goal is to maintain a reliable electricity grid in a fossil-fuel free world (and even grow it as electricity replaces crude oil and natural gas for transportation and industry), it's hard to argue that nuclear is a better option than wind/solar/storage deployed at scale.

Of course, you need a lot of wind/solar/storage to equal the output of a 1 GW nuclear complex, and at present costs for reliable 24/7 year-round output from the two systems are roughly comparable. In the long run, however, the former is the far better option.

OP handwaves away issue of nuclear safety, incorrectly labelling it a straw man, and with it, the very real possibility of nuclear accidents. If there was a Chernobyl-scale nuclear accident in Germany, it would drastically shorten the lives of tens of millions of people, and it would make half the country uninhabitable. But all this is academic, because nuclear power can not economically compete with renewables.

> Nuclear is probably the most expensive energy source for powering a grid at present

No, not probably and not at present. Since the first experimental reactor went online, nuclear power has always been the most expensive way to generate electricity.

You're complaining about your comment to a blog post being deleted... I'm not seeing where on your blog I can comment ?

"Look, France had to shut down their Nuclear plants in the hot summer of 2022 because the heat wave made the river's water levels unsustainable for cooling. Even discounting the safety concern here, a melting-down nuclear power plant doesn't produce energy either."

Thrice untrue:

- that's a few of their nuclear reactors (your sentence means : "all of them")

- I'm not sure how/why you segue from shut down to melt down.

- that's not a set in stone thing, there are other ways to design and/or cool reactors. Assuming rivers would be flowing was a mistake, and isn't a hard requirement.

That's the one item on your list I'm confident about. Based on your abysmal take on it, I'll discount your other points too: you're either untruthful or incompetent, on top of being hypocritical about censorship.

After reading it, I'm not sure the original article deserved a response.

It's like an attempt at a comedy shock-jock blog for libertarian nerds about halfway down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. And apparently people pay money for this?

> From Statista, mortality rates per energy source (per terawatt hour): hydro, 1.3; natural gas, 2.82; biomass, 4.63; oil, 18.43; coal, 24.62; and finally brown coal, 32.72.

I was going to say that their stats must be out of date if it doesn't have renewables but no, they just didn't quote the figures for wind and solar from their own source as it makes a mockery of their entire argument.

Btw. I don't have a book in Nuclear/renewables. Not sure if my friend Mike can say the same.

He is very right you've convey almost nothing in your response. You mock people opposing the shutdown then say you have a more 'nuanced take'. Nothing wrong with clearing long comments that offer no actual value, but are so long and confrontational that they seem like they deserve a response.