Doesn't that make renewables the optimal solution? Recyclable, no pollution to speak of when generating electricity and no radiological risks.

Briefly setting aside the term 'renewable' and focusing on wind and solar, the primary disadvantage of wind and solar of course is their intermittency. Due to low capacity factors, you have to build a lot more capacity (in GW) than your peak demand.

For example, CA uses about 25 GW-day of electricity per day. To make that much on a perfectly calm CA winter day, you need to have about 100 GW of solar capacity standing by. Then, you need to also build energy storage/shifting systems that can shift the energy from the noontime peak to the night, where baseload demand never falls below 20 GWe.

Now consider that there are often 15-day wind lulls in huge regional areas, and sometimes these coincide with big cloudy areas.

The oft quoted "low" costs of wind and solar in levelized $/kWh completely ignore and hide the fact that you have to overbuild at this magnitude and include the storage. The overbuild also implies a massive over-taxing of earth's land and mineral resources to build and rebuild the collectors and storage system.

Saying solar is the cheapest form of energy is like saying kids tents in the yard are the cheapest form of housing, and just pretending the indoor plumbing and heating and pantry of the parent's house cost nothing.

Systems costs are what matter. LCOE must stop driving policy.

Building 30 GW of load-following nuclear would be cheaper and have far lower impact on the environment.

The alternate less cooperative answer is no. 'Renewables' as a concept are not the answer. Biofuel is renewable but causes climate change and air pollution while nuclear is low carbon and low pollution but not considered renewable.

Furthermore, nuclear fuel on earth can power 100% of our primary energy for 4 billion years using the known and demonstrated technology of breeder reactors. This is just as long as the nuclear fusion fuel that powers solar, wind, hydro, bio will last, and so nuclear is just as renewable as those.

Spreading out production units (mainly wind turbines) and mixing sources (wind, solar...) considerably lowers the burden of intermittency.

LCOE is pertinent because the very low total cost of electricity generated by renewables spares money, enabling investments needed to compensate intermittency (over-provisionning, storage...).

Not a single industrial breeder reactor works satisfactorily (after many decades of R&D backed by huge investments in nations).

The thing is we don't live in a fairy tale, we're limited in resources and time. We can't ditch both nuclear + fossil right now so we have to prioritize one over the other for the next xx years until we figure out a way of making renewables good enough, right now they're a good addition at best and a gimmick at worst. And it's not like renewables are a silver bullet either. If you ditch nuclear to import panels or wind mills from countries like China I'd like to see a full life cycle pollution/emission report

I'm not as worried about global warming as I used to be after taking a look at world demographics and learning a bunch of stuff about global supply chains and agricultural practices as a result of this conflict breaking out.

World population is likely to steeply decline, and globalization plus high living standards will most probably go away. We just won't consume as much energy or make and trade as much stuff in the future.

So basically you are hoping it all sorts itself out? Maybe it will, but that seems like an incredibility risky position for humanity to make without hedging our bets.

We're long past the point of hedging our bets. Put it this way... when the world runs out of NPK fertilizers (or can't access them) and billions of people start to starve to death, climate change will no longer be seen as the big risk. After going down the rabbit hole that is modern agricultural practices, and more importantly the supply chains that underpin them, the writing is absolutely on the wall for humanity.

> World population is likely to steeply decline, and globalization plus high living standards will most probably go away. We just won't consume as much energy or make and trade as much stuff in the future.

So, rewording that: a bunch of people will die, enough to reduce the global population, the ones who are left are going to be miserable.

And all of that makes you _less_ worried?

Well, I said it makes me less worried _about climate change_. It makes me significantly more worried about the political violence that historically breaks out under such circumstances and the wars that get started by nations to secure scarce and precious resources. The Guano Wars will look tame in comparison to whoever decides to go after the phosphate rock reserves in Morocco.