The reality is that, in case you don't remember, there was a sea change in policies in the early 80s and policies that worked (remember how oil use was significantly cut in the late 70s and early 80s?) were not sustained, or even reversed, when they should have been extended.

Reagan tore down the solar panels on the White House. That's not benign neglect, that's outright sabotage.

Governments stopped increasing gas taxes, they failed to react to Saudi Arabia flooding the oil market in late 1985 to get prices to collapse (predatory market manipulation to kill off competitors).

And they thought that the temporary reprieve provided by Alaska and North Sea oil would be eternal. There will be no North Sea today, no Alaska oil, and no Saudi flood to make us believe that fossil fuels are plentiful.

A change to our energy infrastructure requires 20-40 years of consistent policies, not 5-10 years. You need to change the existing assets, and you need to fight the incumbents all the way.

Just because it's hard doesn't mean it can't be done. (In fact, nukes require the same kind of commitment. If it can be done with nukes, it can be done for energy savings, renewable energy and storage or storage-equivalents like not-time-sensitive energy consuming industries)

Wind power

The rational reason for a nuclear advocate to oppose wind is economic - nuclear and wind servicing the same grid do not play well with one another at all - they both draw on long-time-horizon capital,

That just means they're both baseload. So what?

and in a zero carbon grid,

Which we do not have, and will not have within the amortisation time of any wind farm that will enter the pipeline for the foreseeable future.

the intermittent supply of wind electricity unrelated to demand is going to lead to supply spikes that have to be wasted

Not if you have proper demand-side management and hydro buffers.

and under a feed-in-tarrif-for-wind regime, which is the current rules, said wastage will be borne entirely by the nuclear operator

You can't do electricity provision without intermediate and peak load. Nuclear grid, wind grid, coal grid, doesn't really matter - if you don't have short-notice dispatchable power, Shit Happens with distressing frequency.

and turning off a nuke plant on a windy night does not save a nuclear operator a single euro-cent, so it is all cost.

So you make fixed-price take-or-pay contracts for nukes, just like you do for wind, other baseload generation modes and any other capital-intensive industry.

but currently, if you build enough nukes to get a carbon-free grid

Then every single country on the planet will have their own domestic sources of weapons-grade plutonium. What fun!

adding windmills to said grid just adds cost with no real upside.

Except of course for conserving nuclear fuel, reducing the effects of maintenance downtime and permitting electricity generation beyond the point where diminishing returns in the nuclear sector become prohibitive.

Wind has one set of trade-offs. Solar has another set of trade-offs. Geothermal has a third set of trade-offs. Nuclear has a fourth set of trade-offs. And so on and so on and etcetera. By combining these cost profiles, you can obtain a larger space for optimisation than by letting any one of them monopolise your policy options. This really shouldn't be a major and novel insight - it's trade theory for first-year students.

It is now 2010, and the side that argued that we should replace king coal with the atom, and sooner, rather than later, are feeling really rather massively pissed off that people are still advancing that same vison as an alternative to the technology that we know, without a doubt, can get the job done.

Except we don't know that until we try. Right now, we're running our nuclear reactors off decommissioned warheads, which are a finite resource. When they run out - which they will do even faster when we expand nuclear penetration - you are going to have to dig into ever more marginal uranium ores. The alternatives put forward - fast breeders and high-temperature fusion - are, at the moment, even more speculative as a full replacement of all baseload by solar power was in 1960.

The gut reaction, the vision I get when I hear people advocating an all renewable future ? I do not think "That would be nice" I think "If these guys keep winning, 2060 will roll around, and the grid will still be 50% coal".

And that is why you keep coming up short against the fact that for the full amortisation duration of all nuclear and wind projects currently in the pipeline, the baseload displaced will be coal. Wind and nuclear are not competitors for another decade or two.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

We were not wrong then, except that we now know we really underestimated the entrenched power of fossil and nuclear world.

There is nothing in today's technologies which couldn't have been developed through the 70's to 90'swhich would have meant we would have more, perhaps far more, than 20% of all electricity (and heat and transport) globally by now.

and we would be well on our way to settling warming back, instead of having already crossed the tipping point.

Go read Soft Energy Paths by Amory Lovins from Foreign Affairs (1974?) before you tar us with your Greenpeace pablum.  Then check his work on getting the military off oil this decade.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

They are complementary, of course, in terms of their mutual benefit from long haul transcontinental grid to grid "Electricity Superhighways" but there is enough legacy of conflict that the complementarity on that front cannot be tapped into very easily.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.