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The people who don’t have any money can’t vote for anybody who is good about this because that’s how it’s designed. It’s not our fucking fault.
I mean it is; that we haven’t taken power directly.
It’s not 10-20 years of construction AND 10-20 years at a loss, it’s 10-20 years of construction at a loss. Not great, but up to 40 years as you suggest sounds a lot worse because it’s a misrepresentation.
And you would be running 10-20 years of gas and coal power plants in addition to the renewables if you’re not in a suitable area for hydro because suitable grid scale energy storage solutions literally don’t exist. Maybe they will in 10-20 years, but would you bet on a maybe or go with nuclear which we know will work as a baseload?
Nuclear (with the exception of France because they’re special) is limited to being a base load as you alluded, but power demand varies throughout the day. Nuclear can’t vary on a 24 hour scale to follow the load so we need renewables and energy storage or hydroelectric to make up the difference. That’s what “nuclear OR renewables” misses
You cannot run the entire grid on entirely renewable. We physically don’t have enough lithium in the world to make the batteries for it, and even if you don’t use lithium there would be untold ecological destruction to extract the rare earths.
Renewable and hydroelectric is a solution but not viable everywhere and hydro also causes massive ecological destruction
Nuclear plants are immensely profitable, just not on time scales politicians are interested in. You’re deep in the red for 10-20 years and then after that it prints money
The US needs to legalize it first