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If we believe ExxonMobil to choose nuclear over wind is to choose a more costly technology. I fail to see how that would increase the speed of getting rid of coal and oil.

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by A swedish kind of death on Wed Feb 2nd, 2011 at 03:05:36 PM EST
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in 2025.The entire point is that by that date we should be finishing the paintjobs on the last bits of our carbonfree generation capacity, not just commencing construction. Also. not counting backup and storage, which are factors that do absolutely horrible things to both the economic and green credentials of wind. (most wind is backed up by gas. This is not a climate friendly policy)

I must be failing to communicate how very urgent I feel this problem is. I am not advocating that we should maybe build one or two more nukeplants. I am advocating that we should send construction crews to every major coalfired powerstation on the planet, build reactors next to them, (fast, thorium and conventional all, as supply chain allows) appropriating the grid connections and cooling water, and celebrate criticality at each new reactor by blowing the fracking coal station to kingdom come

by Thomas on Wed Feb 2nd, 2011 at 07:28:25 PM EST
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Thomas:
2025.The entire point is that by that date we should be finishing the paintjobs on the last bits of our carbonfree generation capacity, not just commencing construction.
So we should be commencing construction of the carbon-free generation capacity now. The political reality is that we have a bunch of morons in charge who think a massive investment in carbon-free generating capacity would be inflationary and we cannot have that because we're not in a debt deflation environment.

In addition, the same people will say that because of the economic crisis we can't afford to internalise the costs of fossil fuels.

Whether that is just successful policy capture by vested interests in the fossil fools industry or just economic obduracy by politicians, I cannot say. At the very least it is likely that the idiots in charge are easy prey for the skilled lobbyists of the incumbent fossil fool industry.

I find it extremely unfortunate that nuclear and wind advocates snipe at each other rather than making a common front against coal and gas, which both say at every turn is the real enemy. That's also a political reality.

Keynesianism is intellectually hard, as evidenced by the inability of many trained economists to get it - Paul Krugman

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Feb 3rd, 2011 at 03:58:47 AM EST
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