> No one has said it’s either-or

Lots of people say either or. When nuclear comes up, someone will claim we should just go all in on solar, wind and batteries. That's unworkable, so we wind up burning gas.

It’s not ideal to have solar/wind and nuclear though. Nuclear doesn’t throttle well (or at least, economically). And Even building gas peak plants to cover still cloudy days is an order of magnitude lower in capital cost and risk than nuclear. The problem is we don’t have a coordinated enough system to properly reward mostly- turned off gas peak plant owners.

I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable" (not intermitent).

Even in this thread someone is saying that the problem with solar is that "if a megavolcano darkens the atmosphere... thus we should go all in to nuclear", as if it was a guaranteed event in the next 100 years.

>I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas.

It is almost always implied. It seems so obvious that nuclear should be replacing fossil fuels it doesn't seem worth mentioning. Unless someone says they're aiming for an energy policy of nuclear plus fossil fuels, it's probably safe to say their goal is nuclear and solar/wind/etc.

Even the volcano comment you mention ends with "For energy we obviously need all the options available."

I can't deduce "implied" when the comments are very, very explicit against solar and wind, not a single word about gas. But somehow I have to read between the lines that they actually meant to criticise fossils.

Do you think everyone pronuclear is a climate change denier? It's so incredibly clear who's the "bad guy" here.

No, never said that and never implied that. That's, in fact, a strawman fallacy, distorting my argument badly to attack me.

It wasn't an attack. The idea that it's hard to pick up on pronuclear folks being anti-fossil fuels when the entire debate is about how meet our energy needs in the face of climate change is absurd.

It sounds like they're talking about the difference between baseload power and intermittent power. Replacing fossil fuel baseload power plants can be done now. Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology.

> Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology

No, it wouldn't. Batteries + renewables is proven and it works. The problem isn't a technological barrier. The problem is we need batteries for a lot of things and production can't ramp up fast enough.

I don't see how this is relevant ?

Technical barriers are always also resource availability barriers, since technics also condition both usage and availability.

> rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable"

People picked tribes and decided it's all or nothing. I agree--that's stupid. There is a historical alignment between renewables backers and anti-nuke activists (see: Germany) that caused nuclear to polarise away from renewables. That doesn't really exist anymore. But you see its artefacts in the debate.

Whatever your plan for a nuclear grid without burning fossil gas is (massive overprovision, syngas production, batteries, demand response, just ignoring the issue) it'll work better and cheaper with renewables.

there are real limits on time on funds: we can't really afford to spend those limited resources on non-solutions.

I meant “no one is saying that on this thread” of course. A lot of people talk about the conflict between Palestine and Israel too but we don’t bring it here because we are talking about something else.