I've been seeing an uptick of anti-renewable sentiment, either coal or nuclear is probably doing a media buy at the moment.

So much of what we see in news outlets are driven by dedicated PR drives, and these dying industries are trying to hold on, or trying to unload stranded assets on the next biggest fool. (For example BHP announced their exit from coal: https://companysavingexpert.co.uk/2020/08/19/bhp-to-exit-the... )

It happens to vegans, too.

There was recently a campaign against soy milk, because cows can eat grass and grass is better than soy on certain metrics. That much, alone, is true.

But if you're drinking equal volumes of soy milk and dairy milk, dairy is worse on every metric but price - Animal cruelty, health, clean water polluted, space needed, energy needed, carbon and other air pollutants released, etc.

I can't speak for the UK where the campaign was, but in the US the cheap dairy milk is probably not coming from grass-fed cows. The cheap milk is coming from factory-farmed cows that are probably eating lots of soy, and then the government also subsidizes it to drive down the cost in a misguided attempt to give poor people cheaper food without giving them any agency in their decision-making like an actual welfare program would. (I'm upset about this)

To further muddy the waters, some of the Amazon rainforest fires were started to clear land to grow soybeans - To feed to cattle.

Nuclear is low-carbon energy being killed in the US by cheap fracked natural gas. It's a low-carbon partner with wind and solar. Wouldn't make sense for the nuclear industry to attack renewables.

Attacking fracked gas would make more sense.

Unfortunately, that is not how the political or lobbying allegiances have played out. Nuclear support is often virulently anti-renewable and anti-efficiency. The divide comes from the 1970s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_energy_path

Huh, that's one way to put it I guess. I always understood this story to be that Amory Lovins was virulently anti-nuclear and invented the Soft Energy Path as a nuclear-free utopia vision to underpin his anti-nuclear activities.

One of the biggest actual challenges with Soft Energy is its low EROI. As you have to start buying huge batteries and transmission lines at a certain point, it dips below feasible levels in some studies, like [1]. Because of it's astronomical energy density, nuclear is amazing on EROI (and also effectively carbon-free).

[1] Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100399

Energy density is one of the faux relevant talking points of the nuclear propagandists. It's irrelevant as a metric from a consumer point of view.

Oh, and EROI is another failed anti-renewable argument. EROI of renewables are just fine.

Energy density is a physical argument that is pretty sound. If you get more energy from less material and land, that can lead directly to a smaller land/material/waste/emissions footprint and therefore a smaller overall footprint. Nuclear being borderline magical here due to E=MC² is the key argument in support of splitting atoms for civilian power. The large land and material footprint of low-density renewables is only barely beginning to be noticed, though they still produce less than 5% of the world's energy. At scale it will be serious, mark my words.

EROI for renewables, especially as it decreases substantially with added storage at scale, is by some accounts (the paper linked) troublingly low. If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues. This is another good physical argument for nuclear.

One can state they're failed arguments, as anti-nuclear propagandists always do, but that alone is not, as David Deutsch would say, a "good argument".

Energy density is only important insofar as it affects cost. So, if we have cost data (which we do), pointing instead to energy density is pointless (and is likely a deliberate attempt to distract from cost numbers that the person making the argument does not like.)

> If you have to put in roughly the same amount of energy into a system as it produces in its full lifecycle, you run into issues.

Renewables are nowhere close to that. Claims otherwise are lying. For example, they pretend that massive storage is needed and then poorly optimize the storage system so building it requires lots of energy.

No the natural alliance right now is between gas and "renewables" because they're synergistic in that gas is the only technology that can paper wind/solar intermittency/variability today.

We have a very good synergy between nuclear and renewables in France, see:

- https://electricitymap.org

- https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...

- Illustrated example with real data: https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432?...

While it works I am not sure what the point of (wind/solar) renewables is when the grid is already low-carbon. My understanding is that it increases the cost of nuclear plants by reducing their load factor (since they have to reduce their output power to give way to renewables), but I don't see what we gain for it.

Maybe some additional usable capacity when coupled with reversible hydro?

France, like most other countries, has not been able to successfully build new nuclear, so there is no other option as their current fleet ages out. Renewables will be far cheaper than trying to have a second construction miracle.

There are no miracles in engineering.

Well that's certainly the green-washing that's going on in the US right now, and everyone's eating it right up.

Not a climate solution though. Gas's 490 gCO₂-eq/kWh is incompatible with stopping climate change.

The leading nuclear attack dog, whose name I will not mention here, spends much time attacking renewables, especially wind and solar, as "the enemy" and "destroying the planet". He gets lots of dark funding, and it constantly picked up by the gullible press for amplification.

In this case, it's probably a response to the review paper that was recently published [1].

[1] Tao, Major challenges and opportunities in silicon solar module recycling (July 2020) https://doi.org/10.1002/pip.3316