The alternative is not burning things, it is renewables. Stop creating a strawman to argue against.
Fossil and biofuel make 80% of our energy. This is not a straw man argument.
Primary energy. That will shift dramatically as industries get electrified. No point cooling 70% of the produced energy in a nuclear or coal plant anymore.
Similarly, the question of interest is what to build. Fossil, or nuclear plants barely exist on that list globally.
It is simply too expensive. 5x the CO2 emissions get displaced by building renewables compared to nuclear, with a much shorter time to value.
Investing in nuclear today prolongs the climate crisis.
This kind of willfully blind thinking continues our reliance on fossil fuels. There is a need for reliable energy that cannot yet be met by renewable energy. For this specific reason, Russia funded German opposition to nuclear power.
The research finds it easily solvable today, but a holistic approach is necessary.
But that aside, just looking at the sheer magnitude of capacity mentioned in his papers, one can see that it's not even remotely easy or trivial. See eye-watering Table 2 in [2]
[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/11/stanford-prof-ordered...
[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USSt...
Do you bet against this?
I'm pro anything low carbon. I love wind and solar and hydro and nuclear. These no-nuclear people are trying to get us to tie a hand behind our backs for no reason in the midst of a climate crisis. Energy generation choices are not a zero sum game.
Lots of antinuclear people mistakenly believe that pro-nuclear people are also anti-wind or anti-solar when in fact we are usually just anti-fossil and biofuel.
So you are telling me that a peaking nuclear plant will solve the last 10% when it comes online at earliest 2040? What problem are we even solving then rather than brute forcing nuclear into the solution?
Then try put that nuclear power plant on a marginal price market. What do you expect to happen?
Simply put, humans failed and caused a catastrophe. If you have c), a) and b) don't matter. And we will always have c).
Humans are currently failing by waging a war around nuclear power plants. How safe those plants are under normal operation doesn't really matter. Humans fail by performing terrorist attacks too. They fail by building nuclear plants that can't handle a tsunami in a tsunami-prone area.
Nuclear power provides centuries of opportunity for humans to fail in ways that have immense damage potential. This is clearly a very real risk, and makes nuclear power unsafe.
One can still argue for nuclear power, but not by saying it's safe. It simply isn't.
a) an unstable reactor
b) without a containment structure
c) that was put through a dangerous experiment overriding safety systems
means to me that it's very likely to be the worst commercial nuclear power scenario we'll see.
Compare with Fukushima where a whole area was inundated by a tsunami and a triple meltdown, leading to very few, if any, people receiving more than the minimum dose known to cause measurable harm.
And again keep in mind that we're comparing against fossil and biofuel, which power over 80% of the planet and cause 7 million premature deaths from particulate emissions every single year just operating normally.
I guess the term 'worst case scenario' isn't really useful since there's always someone who can come up with something else, regardless of how unlikely it is. Fair point on that.