Wouldn’t you know it, a small incentive gets them chomping at the bit to build. We could so easily build enough inftastructure to meet demand and all but phase out fossil fuels.
Not easily. There are bottlenecks when everyone wants to do the same thing, and distributed solar and wind require more infrastructure to fully utilize it than something like nuclear. If we built nuclear in addition to renewables, the transition would go faster.
If we built nuclear in addition to renewables, the transition would go faster.
According to all the studies, no it won’t. Nuclear takes far longer to build, in the meantime we’re still using fossil fuels. While we may need to use fossil fuels to back up renewables intermittently in the short term, we would still be using far less than we would waiting for nuclear. Nuclear costs a lot more, and the amount of money the government has to subsidise construction is finite - for every MW of nuclear you could build more MW of renewables, more quickly and for the same cost. Renewables are cheap, proven and available now.
We need nuclear eventually, as part of a complete portfolio of energy production. However we need to get off fossil fuels far more urgently, and nuclear doesn’t care about urgency.
If we’re not already on track to end fossil fuel consumption within the time it takes to build a nuclear reactor, then the nuclear reactor will help get there faster. And the current goals are 2050 or much later in some countries, we can and should move that closer in time by 10 years, and would still be able to use nuclear power to help with that.
And we’ll still need power after getting rid of fossil fuels, too.