Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants?
EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a piece of the plan)
[1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...
Sounds misleading to me. A quick websearch and I found that currently they seem to be 10 x better than oil and coal etc:
> Making solar or photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. It even produces greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Still, the researchers found that if people switched from conventional fossil fuel-burning power plants to solar cells, air pollution would be cut by roughly 90 percent. Although manufacturing solar cells requires heavy metals, the researchers noted that coal and oil also contain heavy metals, which get released during combustion
https://www.livescience.com/2324-solar-power-greenhouse-emis...
> Mining the material to produce them ...
I think everything is off the table then, also your laptop or tablet -- websearch for "minerals laptop environment" for example.
It seems you don't like solar panels?
I never said that. I'm saying that based on AOC's 100% plan, pretty much everything is off the table, meaning that the plan needs to be revised. I plan to have 30kw of solar panels in my next home and a large collection of LifePo4 batteries that also have a dependency on strip mining. I also plan to do some of my own mining (drilling, blasting) for zinc and silver.
LiFePO4 -- that's lithium iron phosphate batteries, then, zinc and silver makes me confused. One can use zinc and silver instead?
30 kw sounds nice -- I think my oven uses about 3 kw, and I guess then that 30 kw is more than enough for your whole house :-) which I suppose is the idea, obviously.
What do your neighbors think about your plans to mine zink and silver?
Or maybe your nearest neighbors are far away? (Or maybe you'll drill & blast far away from where you and any neighbors live?)
And nuclear is much much more expensive than most renewable now (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/)
I'll acknowledge that renewable generation costs have been falling at an impressive rate. However you're understating the problem for storage. Besides cost, there are far more complex regulatory and political hurdles. Just read about the public response to "smart meters" when they were proposed a while back.
We'll likely have price-competitive storage technology by the middle of the next decade, maybe even sooner, but it will take another two or three decades to deploy it thanks to the patchwork of regulatory complexity we're left over with from the 20th century.
Political hurdles... what is easier ? - Saying let's have reltively cheap 100% renewable energy that create a lot of job - Let's have super expensive nuclear energy, there are risk but those risk are small
Coming tech will improve that but we could get to carbon zero far quicker and cheaper with a mix of nuclear and renewables. One problem with nuclear is that safety concerns. However nuclear has caused less death than coal generation. It does require a huge capital investment but it pays for itself over the long run. Waste is an issue but it produces a tiny volume of waste compared to any other form of generation.
We could get rid of all current coal and gas plants and have power when it's required with nuclear. Until we have a better storage option the true can't be said of any renewables (unless you are lucky enough to have abundant geothermal options). With wind and solar you have too much during peak supply and too little during peak demand.
Even the article you linked states whole sale solar and batteries are not yet economically viable.
If there is a viable thermal storage option, I'm wrong but I've not heard about it. I would love to be wrong if that is the case.
What are your credentials if any to have an opinion on this matter, if you think that being a past bartender disqualifies her position?
Why not address the merits or lack thereof of the platform instead of trying to tear her down?
How is anyone of a lower socioeconomic demographic ever meant to make a difference if people like you simply dismiss them based on a job they had to hold to make ends meet? It's elitist
As to why I did not address the merits: it's not a serious proposal, so there's really nothing to address as it presents no details for how to get from point A to point B, how much it will cost, how it will (or will not) help domestic industry, what the electricity will cost when all is said and done, how that will affect the standard of living, etc.
It's a "hope" and, as they say in the military, hope is not a strategy. This is sort of like "addressing" a poem - a completely meaningless endeavor.
Is normal when the hype does not correspond with the reality and the promises of behaving well and to be responsible are replaced by "hide under a rug and find a scapegoat" five seconds after having the green light.
Citizens have the right to ask about how their taxes had been spent, specially when the construction costs increased exponentially, the whole structure is ruinous after 50 years and there are lots of new surprises in tiny characters in an appendix of the social contract that they signed, but never received.
Nuclear plants can only make a limited amount of money in this lifetime but the cost seems almost unlimited.
We have finite resources. If prevention of a disastrous change in climate is your goal does it make sense to replace the older plants?
Yes it would be safer to do so but would the cost be worth it?
a) Help give future generations a reasonably livable and enjoyable planet. b) Help Americans by creating jobs.
I mean you can also say all code written by developers for for-profit companies exists to create revenue.
Both are true yet incomplete statements.
While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them).
"Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions—and in poorer countries nuclear programs actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions."
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables...
EDIT: So yes:
> "The study found that in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions."
https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/we-need-both-nuclear-a...
The NIA blog post doesn't even address the core point of the paper. It looks at a correlation of existing energy by US states, where our nuclear was largely built in the 1970s and 1980s.
In contrast, the academic paper looks at what has happened to countries , globally, that have tried to build nuclear since the 1990s.
And this is a crucial distinction, because the problem with nuclear is that economies have changed since the 1970s and we have new technologies with different costs.
So what if we look at what has happened to US states that, since 1990, have tried to build nuclear versus those that have tried to build renewables?
Nuclear has failed since the 1990s in the US, even with construction project with very strong community support and federal regulatory support from the NRC.
So when you ask the question that the paper asks: "does building new nuclear or renewables decrease carbon more with modern economies?" We see that the US recapitulates the same correlation that researchers found globally.
This huge bias of nuclear proponents, the inability to address the cost issue and very basic construction issues, is far more problematic for nuclear than a corrective analysis of what has happened to grids that have pursued different strategies.
Please don’t ascribe causality without evidence. Even the authors admit upfront that this is a correlational study, with strong confounding variables like GDP.
Wave energy, wind and solar is different though.
> ... Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating ...
It's not the only way -- what about heavier taxes for energy from burning oil and coal.
But I guess people like their cars and getting stuck in the daily 08:00 traffic jams too much. Who wants trains or buses or bikes or running shoes.
And if that's not the case then what do you think will happen to the other programs critical in keeping climate change at bay? Taken to its ultimate conclusion this line of thinking leads to analysis paralysis, i.e. to shut down our government and do nothing. Which may be good thinking; especially for government policy likely full of unintended consequences. I don't think this should stop perfectly good technology from being developed and built out though. Or for the government to effectively kneecap it via regulation so restrictive it's tantamount to a ban, as the US has done with nuclear power.
> Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.
I agree yet have drawn strikingly different conclusions. Nuclear development should be encouraged to proceed. Collectively we need to figure out how to incentivize the actors to behave safely without kneecapping their ability to do something.
If we had them now, nuclear plants would be vastly superior to coal plants for baseload, at least in terms of emissions.
The question is, if a nuclear plant takes 20-30 years from project start to being online, how will it compare with what's available then and over the design lifetime (50ish years). Of course, we can't know for sure, but if storage becomes good enough in the next 30 or so years, the lifetime economics of a nuclear plant get pretty bad.
That said, maybe the economic risk isn't as important as the emissions risk. If renewable + storage doesn't work, and we are still running coal plants in 30 years, that's probably worse than if renewable + storage works and ratepayers paid for an underutilized nuclear plant.
The Vogtle plant reactor 3 and 4 project started in 2006, construction started in 2013, and planned operation is 2021; but these things are often delayed. And that was at an existing site. 20 years may be pessimistic, but not unduly so, based on recent experience.
Unfortunately, people don't believe in climate change enough to acknowledge that nuclear is worth the risk (a risk that would be much reduced by allowing more modern plants to be built).
However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
This is one of the most compelling nuclear plans I've seen. From the sound of it, these would be fine for intermittent power supply
Building a single one wouldn't be cheap, but the modular / standard design can benefit from economy of scale
Er, how does this work? You can't control when wind and solar produce power, so how can you use them to "fill up the demand when necessary"? If anything, using a fluctuating source on top of already fluctuating demand just increases the amount of power storage you need.
A power source that ramps up and down quickly is more convenient than one that ramps up and down slowly, but both are miles more convenient than one which ramps up and down uncontrollably.
For some simulations to help answer when those two options are best:
Hydrogen is cool, but we should also be investing in efficient methane production. AFAICT it's not too hard to make and has immense advantages - existing transport, storage and use infrastructure and market as a heavily traded good. We can use it for most of our energy or carbon needs with today's technology and existing machines with no or easy modifications.
Hydrogen can be more efficient and probably simpler when appropriate but is more finicky, still needs research and will take a lot of time to ramp up.
Biogas is mostly better than fossil, but we should generate methane from H₂O + CO₂ + energy. It would be useful and quick way to achieve energy storage and decarbonization.
"This paper presents a comprehensive techno-economic evaluation of two pathways: one reliant on wind, solar, and batteries, and another also including firm low-carbon options (nuclear, bioenergy, and natural gas with carbon capture and sequestration). Across all cases, the least-cost strategy to decarbonize electricity includes one or more firm low-carbon resources. Without these resources, electricity costs rise rapidly as CO2 limits approach zero. Batteries and demand flexibility do not substitute for firm resources."
Solar does provide a good way to mitigate carbon emissions in the meantime, even if it's role in a fully decarbonized economy is dubious. It's fast to build and makes a good complement for gas plants. Turn off the gas when the solar cells are collecting, and you can save a good deal of emissions.
Solar also has niche use cases that make sense even with nuclear power. Rooftop solar is a good way to offset air conditioning energy use. In this case, the solar energy collected by the panels are intrinsically connected to the power demand of the air conditioning unit. Plus the energy production and energy demand are co-located.
How much would it cost to build nuclear power generation capacity to meet peak demand, vs. building a grid with renewables, long-term transmission and storage? The levelized cost of solar and wind power is way below that of nuclear power (and that difference will become much larger if you're only fully utilizing nuclear power during the daily peak demand), so the question is how much storage and transmission add for renewables.
It also means you have more turbines on site than the reactor needs on its own, so you can add a furnace burning whatever you like (hydrogen, biofuels, synthetic methane), and that handles the days when renewable output is below average.
The article you point to talks about "firm, low carbon sources". This kind of source for this last bit would be something like hydrogen, not nuclear. A nuclear reactor operating at 10% capacity factor to "fill in" for renewables would be producing power at $1/kWh or more, which is uncompetitive vs. hydrogen by a massive margin.
The inability to generate constant, reliable power is a weakness, not a strength.
However, unless nuclear gets a lot cheaper, it's looking like the nuclear dominated grid is going to be more expensive than the renewable dominated grid, even taking the cost of intermittency into account.
Yes, if you had nuclear, you'd operate it at high capacity factor. That isn't nuclear filling in for renewables, that's using nuclear instead of renewables. It's really mostly one or the other.
France has been running at 75%-80% nuclear for 30 years.
Somewhere in the past year or so a lot of people have started saying “too late”
Maybe you can humor the people who want nuclear while we continue to add solar and wind.
The world needs a lot of electricity.
Humanity always depended on having a leap in either: transport, communication or energy. We are going through a massive change in communication, if we get a cheap and super scalable and sustainable source of energy we might find our next leap...
These [0] SMRs can, for example - there are several other approaches - can be assembled on a standard assembly line, shipped in a couple of C-Containers, and stood up on a concrete pad (well, not exactly, but close enough that I don't feel like complicating the point.
https://losalamosreporter.com/2020/08/22/get-out-of-the-fluo...
"In answer to a question I posed to Nuscale at the town hall we have learned that the plan to save costs by fabricating the modules at a remote factory and shipping them to the Idaho site has been abandoned. The artful response to my question said that Nuscale engaged with approximately 40 … pressure vessel fabricators worldwide and … determined that Nuscale will use existing factories … in lieu of building its own factory.
The major module subcomponents will be manufactured at multiple manufacturer locations and shipped to a single location for assembly prior to installing into the facility.” This signifies the failure of one of the major cost-saving features of the Nuscale project, which was to forestall this exact scenario."
The cost of that project has already escalated 70%, btw, with three towns dropping out and the output only 30% subscribed. I think there's a good chance it will never be built.
However, when we tried to build again back in 2008, it turned to failure. In areas with highly supportive populations that want the nuclear jobs in their community, with an NRC that changed processes to try to make it easier to get approval, we are still 12 years in, way behind schedule, and 2-3x over budget, without a solid feel for when we will star pushing electrons with the new reactors.
Last I heard, NuScale is hoping to hit a cost of $55/MWh. That's about the current cost of wind/solar and the storage to make it dispatchable. Meaning that by the time they finally ship, it will be a more expensive option for firm low-carbon energy than the current options we have.
So not only is NuScale aiming at a not-so-desirable target, by the time it can deliver its first 10GW, it's quite likely that the renewables will be curtailed for much of the year, meaning that we have extra generation capacity that goes unused, which is likely to spur a huge round of economic innovation for that energy.
I would hate to get stuck with the path dependence of nuclear. Renewables are so cheap that they open up a ton more doors for society.
Various African countries can be helped to pick/prefer carbon-free energy options.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
There is no science behind it.
Spot on. People often ignore the political problems of nuclear power:
- Centralization of control encourages corruption and the hiding of incidents
- Power stations make excellent targets in case of war. The bigger they are, the bigger the impact
- Nuclear power stations also cause social panic if hit, even if the damage is minimal
- The last two points apply to war but also to terrorism
If we want political stability (aka no wars) we need reasonably decentralized access to food, water, energy and information.
You are stopping the butcher to use big knives for fear he may go insane in the future and kill some customers with them, when millions of weapons are highly available.
Not at all, this is a logical fallacy.
A small fraction of countries have nuclear weapons and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust.
On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM.
I dont think you understand what a logical fallacy is. The number of nuclear weapons in the world is in the 5 figures order, that is fact. Nuclear weapons are a fact.
> and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust.
Most experts assessed the chance of a nuclear war during the Cuban missiles crisis at 1/3. Maybe that is a number you feel comfortable with, I dont. In +70 years of nuclear plants the 3 "big" accidents (3 Miles Island,Chernobyl, Fukushima) are nothing compared with that.
> On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM.
And never managed to sabotage a nuclear installation and cause an accident so your point is moot.
The wiki article claims that CATO also supports this, but that claim does not appear to be supported in the cited material.
The FAQ AOC released after the document explicitly ruled out nuclear energy, iirc.
Conversely, if the nuclear power plant is running anyway and has enough capacity to cover a windless night, you may as well get rid of the solar and wind.
This equation will change if we ever get storage to be cheap enough so we can store intermittent power, but there is nothing on the horizon that will do that.
But we often don’t talk about the energy wasted in bad location of industries. E.g. growing water demanding crops in the Mid-West or South East instead of California where water is scarce, or energy intensive industries in Alaska (where energy is plentiful) instead of Texas where it is scarce.
Another thing not mentioned is wasted energy because of lacking infrastructure. This also applies to the rest of the world. A good example is not building high speed rail connection between high travel areas, so people use polluting air travel instead, another is lack of waste management facilities so garbage is left to rot instead of reused or recycled lowering demand for making the same thing again in a far away facility.
You look on a map and you notice places where the days of sun shine aren't very conductive to solar are usually within 1500 miles of places where solar works great. Seattle to the Mojave desert is 1200 miles for instance.
Potentially extremely dangerous.
If we find a way to connect the world on a common electricity grid, we might be able to skip nuclear and go full green (ofc this ignores the cost of producing/disposing those green energy generators)
Not if the Green New Deal sucks up all the resources for "renewables" that will never provide anything close to the base load power we need.
Example from China: 12GW over 3300km at 1100kV DC, for others look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity... .
Europe is also building HVDC (high-voltage direct current) links connecting windparks and consumers with e.g. norwegian pumped hydro power plants for storing excess energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current )
I’m not an expert, and I’m sure there’s some way in principle where it could be architected so this isn’t so, but it just seems empirically that the more interconnected the more we see unexpected and enormous outages.
Map of the European grid: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
Synchronous grid of Continental Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
The most recent large blackout we had was IIRC specifically due to mismanaging the interconnected grid, which is part of where my concern comes from.
I'm in Saskatchewan. For a good chunk of the year, everything is frozen. We currently heat our homes with natural gas but require electricity to run the furnaces. Power outages are a very big deal, and in the winter are generally correlated with terrible weather (big snowstorms and deep cold tend to have a negative effect on our infrastructure).
The province itself is quite flat as well. Ignoring the part where reservoirs freeze over for at least 5 months of the year, pumped hydro (which seems to be our best current energy storage approach) isn't going to work very well with no significant hills to pump the water over. We absolutely require continuously reliable electricity to, at a minimum, keep the water pipes in our homes from freezing. A 24h outage in the middle of winter is going to, at a minimum, cause significant widespread property damage; past around the 72h mark, there's probably going to be significant death as well.
On top of all of the other reasons why I like nuclear, that is the reason why locally-generated nuclear is at the top of my list of "ways we should produce electricity around here".
And even then, one doesn't preclude the other. Retrofitting power distribution to have less energy loss, buildings with better insulation, more efficient logistics networks for food delivery, these are green new deal issues. None of that is anti-nuclear - they simply aren't related.
By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. That is simply not how reality works.
Nonsense. Please apply some intelligence and common sense. We're not talking about shutting down all other activities and only doing Green New Deal stuff. We're talking about the limited amount of resources that can be redirected by various choices of government policy. Given the magnitude of the resources that would be required for the grandiose plans for renewables touted in the Green New Deal, there wouldn't be anything left over for nuclear.
Also, historically, they've each been multi-year ventures.
These are likely different humans and different companies than people doing urban gardening projects and rooftop solar.
I honestly don't see the conflict here. I don't know too much about nuclear construction and maintenance but I'd imagine it takes years of specialized training and experience to be competent. If that's true, I can't imagine someone sliding from say, retrofitting insulation to older apartment buildings to nuclear in any reasonable time. I think we have to conclude they're as different as any other sophisticated skills; you're still starting at zero if you want to switch.
The GNDs problem has been the same since Jill Stein was talking about it in 2012 - it's too grandiose for a society and time that has rejected grand visions.
We would need to fix our systemic cultural inability to be able to subscribe to a collective imaginary before a GND is broadly entertained.
However, you crack and divide GND as separate goals, such as increasing the usefulness and efficiency of mass urban transit, most people are on board. And each of these concrete goals doesn't preclude Exelon and GE from building nuclear power plants.
Once you reframe the GND as simply a basketcase of low hanging fruit of city and neighborhood level projects, then we get into nuclear's real issue in this conversation - It is the biggest project of the bunch.
Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them. They think "big = broken disaster". Some american may even feel obligated to respond to this, "But it's true" and then my point will be made.
The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this.
Humans can decide to enter different fields; more can choose to enter one field and fewer can choose to enter another. New companies can be started and old ones can go out of business. Resources are fungible; there isn't a fixed pool of resources that are suitable for nuclear but not for renewables, or the reverse.
What determines where those resources get allocated are economic incentives. If the government puts its thumb on the scale and gives lots of incentives for renewables and lots of disincentives for nuclear--which is exactly what the US government has been doing for decades, and what the Green New Deal would mean doing even more of--then resources will be available for renewables but not for nuclear.
This is a valid point as far as the type of nuclear projects that have been done in the past is concerned. However, nuclear has progressed, and many of the designs being worked on now are not megaprojects and would not require the same huge up front investment that traditional designs have.
However, until then, we have to go off of the existing historical reality. We can't run the numbers with any kind of integrity based on what is currently vaporware.
Designs that are actually operating and producing power are not vaporware. The reasons those designs aren't already doing that in the US are political, not technical.
Anti-nuclear politics in the US has made people believe that every nuclear reactor is a Chernobyl waiting to happen. That was a pernicious lie even in the 1980s, and it is much, much more of a pernicious lie now. In terms of the fairest measurement, which is harm done per unit of energy generated, nuclear power, even with reactors of traditional designs, is orders of magnitude better than any other energy source, including renewables, which in turn are significantly better than oil and coal (coal is by far the worst). And with newer designs, not vaporware but actually operating today, that risk per unit of energy generated is even lower.
A sane US government policy would have had nuclear displacing oil and coal starting in the 1970s, as France and Japan did, and reprocessing the waste instead of beating ourselves over the head with a baseball bat by saying the only option was to store it for 100,000 years, which of course is not practically possible. Then we could have a meaningful conversation about how much of that nuclear base load capacity it makes sense to transition to renewables. Plus, if you really think CO2 emissions are a planetary emergency (I personally don't, but GND advocates do), there would be decades worth of CO2 emissions that the US would not have made at all. Not to mention decades worth of coal still in the ground where it belongs, and oil that could have been used for things much more productive than burning it for energy.
You say we have to go off of the "existing historical reality", and while it's true that we didn't do all those sane things in the past when we should have, that still is no argument for not doing them now. We have an obvious alternative source of base load power that would free us from oil and coal staring us in the face, and instead we're noodling about renewables that can't possibly meet the same demand requirements. That doesn't make sense to me.
You have to account for greenpeace and all the organized opposition. You have to account for the politics
That's why you need to go off of concrete material historical reality - if you're free to apply counterfactuals as you please than practically any conclusion is permissible because we can tweak and modify whatever we need.
Just like the "business as usual" advocates are hypothesizing a globally deployable massive carbon sucking technology to somehow exist in the future without a shred of evidence that it's at all plausible. It's extremely dubious gambling with the future of society.
Reality overrides counterfactual hypotheticals every time. When ambitious next-generation nuclear is ready to go, then there's a possible opening but right now it's simply not there.
The GND proponents aren't even talking about specifically how individual GND projects would be executed; they aren't talking about whether it would be a collection of small bite-sized projects or a few large ones.
What they're talking about is the government putting its thumb on the scale even more in favor of renewables. And that means even more incentive to do those projects, and less incentive to do others. That's where the conflict is.
Instead, many advocate for oil, gas, and nuclear to no longer get tax subsidies, government insured loans, preferential treatment with land use, or be able to freely externalize on to the community the damage and debris their products leave behind.
These companies also shouldn't have a Right to profit guaranteed by international trade treaties or be able to sue countries in tribunals when the countries decide against their wishes.
Instead, oil gas and nuclear need to stand on their own two feet, take full fiscal responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their products and fund it not from government handouts but from the prices paid for their product. They should also get no preferential treatment and legal rights to their business interests.
Communities should have a right to say no without being sued in international courts.
It's the exact opposite. Take the thumb off the scale, include All the costs, remove all the special privileges and then let the market decide.
I'm find with that, as long as it also includes no more government subsidies, etc. to renewables. Which have been given out for decades to renewables projects that, unlike oil and gas, do not even produce any actual energy, but are just "research" that promises to produce something Real Soon Now and has been for decades.
> let the market decide
I'm fine with that too, as long as it really is a free market. I do not think an actual free market is what the GND is proposing.
Then it just becomes the DSA agenda under a cape labeled "renewable energy" and it's a political non-starter. There's no way.
The advocates show that each of the issues separately have broad support so they think that by putting it all together you'll get the union as a coalition.
I think they'll more likely get somewhere from the intersection to practically nobody.
It'd be as if Republicans were trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, end obamacare, and ban gay marriage as a single package. Good luck!
I'd almost cynically claim it's only political theater to be leveraged in their reelection campaign. The DSA has a pretty solid ground game but you need to toss them red meat to get them to come out for you.
People like say, hamburgers and ice cream, but not on the same plate. I don't think the AOC GND is good politics. And as we've seen, the support seems to be leveling out.
That's why I side on the mostly-libertarian GND camp which was closer to what Jill Stein was advocating for 8 years ago. Remove all protections, remove all subsidies, open up a market, give consumers choice.
Then they can fight for a living wage if they please, but separately, not together.
I think it's far more politically feasible and achievable.
As we build more renewables, we’re also building better grid connections to serve demand response. You build until most places are overproducing.
Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.
Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also promise to pay billions in upkeep, and then pay billions for decomissioning. If you aren't willing to do that upkeep or clean up after yourself then you can cause a radiological disaster.
What happens if we have a majority government that refuses to believe in the long term effects of radiation damage even as scientists explain to them over and over again what will happen? They just don't see why we should be spending that amount of money on reactor decomissioning or on upkeep and don't want to be seen as the one spending taxpayer money on something so costly. What if they decide to cut nuclear safety programs in a political stunt? I wish I could say that I know that won't happen, but on the hundred years in the future scale I'm just not sure.
Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.