Either climate change is an existential threat to life on this planet or it's not, and if it is we should be willing to discard the OTC regulations for it.
Of course climate change is an existential threat. But that doesn't mean drop all environmental considerations, especially when we have cost effective tech that passes environmental regulations.
France has the same problem of aging nuclear reactors that at some point have to be taken down, with problems building new ones in a timely and cost-efficient manner.
Flamanville 3 will probably cost 19 billion alone and won’t start regularly generating electricity by at least 2023 with construction having started in 2007.
In a thread of people arguing about existential threats, 19 billion dollars is not a very interesting figure. 19 billion would be a pretty good argument most of the time, it just happens that in this specific thread it is not a very well placed response.
The argument is "we could have avoided an apparently existential threat at any time with this tech, and there is evidence what we're actually doing won't avoid the thread" and the response is "nuclear isn't free". There is a mighty disconnect here somewhere.
1990 a kWh in Germany produced 800g CO2. That 400g figure would look better if instead of replacing nuclear with renewables we would've replaced more coal with renewables, but the political landscape didn't allow that.
The renewables would have helped, but only if we wouldn't shut down nuclear plants...
Effectively we're replacing nuclear power plants with renewables, which was one of the Green party's original goals (they were born out of the anti-nuclear movement).
It's a threat because it fucks up the environment, so discarding regulations doesn't really seem to help. (Yes, one could argue that it only does so "locally", but we need thousands of new plants.)
