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I think you may have misunderstood friend. You’re not wrong and I’m not arguing against any of your points.
A wind or solar farm is indeed much faster and cheaper to build than a nuclear power plant. Wind and solar farms take 8-18 months on average. Recent nuclear power plants have been taking 7-10 years.
The nuance isn’t the time required for a single project, it’s the sheer number of renewable projects required that is the issue.
I live in Canada, a single digit number of nuclear power plants here could replace all of the fossil fuel based electricity generation in our grid. That’s something that could be built within 10 years.
We’d need ~1000 new wind and solar farms (not to mention storage) to do the same. We can’t make that happen within 10 years due to supply chain and grid interconnection bottlenecks limiting the number of concurrent projects we can do.
I would ecstatically overjoyed to be proven wrong about this. But we need to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and we can’t do that quickly with renewables alone.
Frankly we’re fucked either way, but we’re less fucked if we build nuclear power in addition to as much renewable power as we possibly can make happen.
Fair point, I get a little snippy on this subject due to the overwhelming amount of bullshit I encounter.
What do you think about this?
"Connecting solar and wind capacity levels needed to reach net-zero grids by 2035 could require as much as $25-50 billion in transmission investments. This includes spending on new interconnection facilities, network upgrades to existing transmission infrastructure, new high voltage lines to connect renewable rich areas and upgrades to inter-regional transmission capacity.'
https://economics.td.com/ca-interconnection-challenges
It sounds like it's mostly down to a lack of investment in the grid which is completely solvable pretty quickly. Given this, I'm still not seeing a case for new nuclear. Do you have any sources to support your argument that it's still needed?