What's actually happening with renewables? Hype, revolution, or both?: Nuclear advocates
The comparison nobody wants to make
France generates 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Grid emissions: 56 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. Electricity cost: roughly 20 euro cents. Germany closed its nuclear plants, replaced them with renewables backed by coal and Russian gas. Grid emissions: 350 grams. Cost: roughly 40 euro cents. The German experiment is the most expensive decarbonization failure in history, and the environmental movement that demanded it has never accounted for the extra carbon.
We have watched the renewables debate with a specific frustration for decades. The optimists want zero-carbon electricity. So do we. We have it. France built it in the 1970s and 80s. The technology is proven, scalable, and produces electricity 24 hours a day regardless of weather. The grid realists identify intermittency as the core constraint. We agree. Nuclear solves it.
The fear premium
The environmental movement that treats climate change as an emergency spent fifty years opposing the single technology that demonstrably solved the problem it claims to care about most. Three Mile Island released less radiation than a chest X-ray. Chernobyl killed 31 people directly and an estimated 4,000 through long-term exposure — a genuine tragedy operating under a regime that would never pass Western safety review. Fukushima killed zero people from radiation. Coal kills approximately 8.7 million people per year through air pollution. The risk calculus is not close.
New designs — small modular reactors, molten salt, Generation IV — address the cost overrun problem that plagued large-scale builds. NuScale, TerraPower, and X-energy are deploying prototypes. The transition realists are right that energy transitions are slow and additive. We are proposing the addition that actually displaces the incumbent because it provides the same service: reliable, dispatchable, baseload power, 24/7, with near-zero emissions.
Where we concede ground: Construction costs for large reactors have escalated, not declined. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 came in at $35 billion, double the estimate.
What would change our mind: If grid-scale storage reaches 72-hour duration at under $50/kWh, making renewables fully dispatchable without backup.
Read the full synthesis: What’s actually happening with renewables? Hype, revolution, or both?