Reply #54: Clearly have no response

[kristopher]

All you can do is avoid engaging on the merits of arguments - that's why they keep getting put into your field of view.

Try this:

You write yet again, "the proven technology that can replace coal today is nuclear. And since nuclear is a hell of a lot cleaner than coal why would you resist replacing coal plants with nuclear plants? You would be replacing evil with a much lesser evil."

"The proven technology that can replace coal today is nuclear."

The "the" in that sentence implicitly states that renewable resources cannot replace coal. There are literally hundreds of peer reviewed papers saying that renewables CAN replace coal; it is something that has been KNOWN since the late 70s.

Since those alternatives are less expensive and also have far fewer external costs than nuclear, and since nuclear requires much more time to build up, the alternatives are preferable to nuclear.

Now let me address directly your attempt to draw a distinction between renewables and nuclear on the basis of a claim that nuclear is somehow more "proven" than renewables. Like all the other arguments thrown about on the internet regarding the strong points of nuclear, this one is also self serving hooey that doesn't stand up to examination.

The nation's nuclear fleet is a mish-mash of uniquely designed facilities that provide no PROVEN design template from which we can definitively conclude price/performance statistics with any greater degree of reliability than we can with wind, solar or any other established renewable energy technology. In fact, the simplicity of design for renewable energy technologies means that we are much more sure of the long term price and performance of wind and solar than we would be of *yet another* design competition to find an acceptable cookie cutter version of a monsterously complex nuclear power source.

What I believe you are doing is conflating the similarity of large scale thermal steam generation via heat produced by nuclear power with large scale thermal steam generation via heat produced by coal. You possess the FALSE belief that this similarity is a valid basis to conclude nuclear is a better choice.

Meeting the challenge of energy security and global warming is going to require a vast effort that we don't want to have to do again any time soon. The way we approach the search for a solution to these problems starts with that idea and leads to this question: "If we were designing from scratch a system to power our culture, what would it look like?

Hands down that system is build around sustainable energy sources that have the least known external costs. Let me repeat that, since we are designing and building largely from scratch, it is inconceivable that we WOULD NOT buid that system around sustainable energy sources that have the least known external costs.

That then leads to questions of how to best maximize the existing infrastructure and resources in accomplishing this transition - and frankly that is the discussion we need to be having, not this repeated diversion down the dead-end path of the Republican energy preference for nuclear.