Oliver Stone Releases Trailer for His Pro-Nuclear Energy Movie | Hacker News Reader

Oliver Stone Releases Trailer for His Pro-Nuclear Energy Movie

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I don't really care about Oliver Stone, but as a longtime climate activist (and engineer) I'm glad to see any publicity promoting nuclear. I can't take seriously any proposal for reducing fossil fuel generation that doesn't involve nuclear power. The Messmer Plan in France shows that this can be done in a relatively short time frame. They built huge capacity between the 1980s and 2000s and still get 72% of their electricity from nuclear today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

Meanwhile Germany decided to phase out their nuclear generation over decades due to environmental concerns, and ended up re-commission old coal plants to meet demand. The full story of this is complicated and is also thanks to the current gas crisis in Europe, but the fact remains that the decision to phase out nuclear has lead to more carbon emissions, not less.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/qa-why-germany-phasing-...

I think the US view of nuclear power has been really complicated by the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where nuclear power was (not unreasonably) linked to the military industrial complex. That said, I think the largest obstacle to nuclear power in the US is the federal structure of the government. The US still doesn't have a centralized location for the long-term storage of nuclear waste thanks to Harry Reid killing the Yucca Mountain project in the late 2000s. No state representative has any incentive to allow a facility like that to be constructed in their state, and the federal government is unable or unwilling to force the issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

I'm heartened to see climate activists slowly but surely starting to take nuclear seriously. I want to plug Emergency Reactor as doing to difficult work of trying to turn the tide of public perception and make nuclear central to the climate change discourse. https://www.emergencyreactor.org/

Nuclear takes way too long to come online. If we decide today to build 40 new reactors around the world it will be decades before they are online and operational.

Nuclear is also way too expensive. Building those 40 reactors would cost way, way more than building equivalent production in wind and solar.

Renewables and storage are cheaper, faster and yes, safer. There is absolutely no rational reason to keep building new nuclear reactots.

As a former government bureaucrat, the reason why it takes such a long time to come online is because of bureaucratic red tape. The anti-nuclear side of the debate uses these regulatory hurdles to essentially halt any nuclear progress.

Hence there isn't really much point trying to build anything until the regulations are "fixed".

Since costs are rising in (just about) all countries I suspect regulations are not the sole cause of the problem.

Regulations are the sole cause of the problem, especially in the US.

Study identifies reasons for soaring nuclear plant cost overruns in the U.S.

"The authors also found that while changes in safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages."

"Many of the excess costs were associated with delays caused by the need to make last-minute design changes based on particular conditions at the construction site or other local circumstances, so if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut."

https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

If you want a more local example, the same type of bureaucracy that stops nuclear reactors is the same one that stops multi-dwelling units in California.

Fixing the regulations is nearly impossible. So much of alternative energy projects, nay ALL natural resource projects, are hindered by frivolous "environmental justice" lawsuits, regulatory demands, and outsiders with personal agendas; such as people lobbying to stop a solar farm in a place they don't even live or have any financial stake in, simply because they disagree with solar energy.

Regulatory burden is IMO the single greatest impediment to American environmental, energy, and manufacturing progress. It's simply not worth it anymore for developers given how heavily the system is unfairly tilted against them.

Renewables don’t work at night or when there’s no wind or water. When they don’t work energy has to come from “somewhere else”.

Besides nuclear, the only other option is fossil fuels.

Putting renewables “in opposition to” nuclear (instead of “in addition to”) is just advocating for more fossil fuel.

More blatant untruths by the shills for the carbon based fuel industry, also known as the Greens.

Korea averages less than 5 years and the Japanese have managed one in less than four.

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2016/10/123_215869...

As usual a corrupt Federal bureaucracy captured by the oil and gas industry applies laws which allows the them to make up new rules and conditions as they go along.

In any other industry experience gained from earlier builds would go into improving future builds

IPCC AR6 synthesis report shows otherwise: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/static/2f8a061eaef8dbfc9c.... The graph considers the effect of various actions and technologies in reducing emissions before 2030, and the estimated costs. Nuclear is there, even if building new reactors would have a limited effect before 2030, but we would still need to further reduce emissions afterwards.

> I can't take seriously any proposal for reducing fossil fuel generation that doesn't involve nuclear power.

I think about 10% nuclear is a reasonable prediction midpoint (coincidentally the same as it is now, but the total generation will be higher), but that means I think no nuclear is about as likely as 20% nuclear and I take the "mostly nuclear" prediction from the trailer even less seriously than I would a no nuclear plan.

Countries with nuclear reactors: 32.

Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15.

Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100.

About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world.

Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years.

Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years.

Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.

I don’t want to live next to a coal power plant either.

40% of the electricity globally is generated with coal.

It also produces something like 25% of greenhouse emissions.

It has been like this for half a century?

Waiting for the renewables and batteries really isn’t working out.

We’ve squandered decades, and could have bought ourselves an extra few decades.

Not liking apples is not a pro-orange argument.

It is is you have to eat and your choices are limited.

But if we both want to consume electricity - than we do have to make a choice about that source of electricity. And the data constituently says nuclear is far safer than coal, even though coal is far more common.

So it really is 'apples vs. oranges' when comparing nuclear v. coal.

For what it's worth burning coal emits more radiation than nuclear.

Not when the reactor is melting down or exploding, it doesn't. :) People don't really have much of a problem with properly-functioning nuclear reactors.

No waiting was required. Wind + PHES has been a better option since before fission reactors were invented.

> If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.

If you are not willing to have a pig farm right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a hypocrite and should not really be eating meat.

I would pick a nuclear plant over a dam any day.

Sort of a pointless comparison, isn't it?

number of people who could live next to a dam: "small"

number of people who could live next a nuclear power plant: "much, much larger"

Still, not many.

Don't forget everyone who lives downriver from that dam all the way to the ocean. Living next to it but out of the path of the water, or above it, would be fine.

I used to live in a small city on the coast that was a 20 minute drive from a nuclear plant and also downstream from a hydroelectric dam.

Here is a great thread that might clear up some of your misconceptions about nuclear waste: https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856?lan...

Unfortunately it only addresses the spent fuel rods themselves, not the large amounts of medium and low-level waste from operation and (especially) decommissioning of reactors.

Deaths per terawatt-hour of energy production:

- Biomass 4.63

- Brown coal 32.72

- Coal 24.62

- Gas 2.82

- Hydropower 1.30

- Nuclear 0.03

- Oil 18.43

- Solar 0.02

- Wind 0.04

Source: Markandya & Wilkinson (2007); Sovacool et al. (2016); UNSCEAR (2008; & 2018)

Nuclear energy is one of the safest forms of energy we have.

Statistics like these are largely useless for comparison for several reason. One of these is the small sample size of nuclear accidents while the probability distribution of their impact exhibits an extremely high kurtosis risk, what Nassim Taleb calls a "Black Swan". All it takes is one Chernobyl-level accident in a densely populated area, and these statistics would look significantly worse for nuclear energy.

But even if you could avoid an extremely large number of immediate and long-term deaths from the accident, suddenly having to evacuate and relocate tens of millions of people overnight would take most countries to the brink of collapse.

And none of that even takes into account how completely uncompetitive nuclear energy is in economic terms, how long it would take to build new plans, and that long-term storage of radioactive waste still lacks a proper solution despite decades of work. It's a dead technology, and the time has come to stop wasting resources on trying to make it work when those could be used much more productively to accelerate the move towards renewables.

And yet, in nuclear's first half-century of existence no such accident has happened. And the next half-century has technology to be far, far safer than the first.

First nuclear reactor: 1942. First INES level 6 incident: 1957.

Yes, and with negligible deaths or injuries.

And if you would like to dispute my claim of negligible deaths or injuries, please tell me what percentage of a whole is considered negligible for you? 1%? 0.1%? I'd like to use that information to tailor my reply to your response.

So we're back to pretending Mayak didn't happen now?

Of course not. How many people do you think died or were injured in the Kishtim accident?

You just said there were no such accidents.

Are you suggesting that Mayak was densely populated in 1957? Or that it even is today? Neither of us would have ever heard of the place, or any place within a thousand kilometers ten times its size, if not for the 1957 incident.

You're still trying to distract from your claims that no nuclear incident that could wipe out a city has ever happened. Remoteness of the destruction isn't a counter argument.

>And none of that even takes into account how completely uncompetitive nuclear energy is in economic terms

Nuclear is extremely price competitive if you actually force carbon producing power generation methods to pay to clean up the pollution they emit. Which is something we require of nuclear but for some reason not any other.

> long-term storage of radioactive waste still lacks a proper solution despite decades of work.

This is both a solved problem and also a non-problem. Advanced nuclear reactor designs have effectively zero waste.

> It's a dead technology, and the time has come to stop wasting resources on trying to make it work when those could be used much more productively to accelerate the move towards renewables

It's not dead?

> Advanced nuclear reactor designs have effectively zero waste.

Really?

> Nuclear is extremely price competitive if you actually force carbon producing power generation methods to pay to clean up the pollution they emit. Which is something we require of nuclear but for some reason not any other.

Price competitive with fossil fuels. Still 10x the cost of renewables. Please do implement a carbon price though.

Also they don't clean up. There are unremediated uranium mines, nuke plants, mills, and plutonium separation facilities all over the world that are just left for the public to deal with while any money set aside is embezzeled or is only a fraction of what is needed for cleanup.

> This is both a solved problem and also a non-problem. Advanced nuclear reactor designs have effectively zero waste.

Closed fuel cycles are not a thing.

It's never happened. It's not on the drawing board. No series program is trying. The one reactor that allegedly could have a breeding ratio over one is used in a plutonium shell game and achieves nothing other than a small boost in fuel economy for some other reactors and to keep some weapons grade plutonium ready.

Reprocessing does nothing other than spew fission products everywhere.

This is only valid reasoning if the danger from those TWh is passed and is a statistically significant sample.

It also intentionally ignores the hundreds of thousands of mining and mill workers and indiginous people living near unremediated mines in India, Uzbekistan, Niger, Usa, Kazakhstan, Mayak, and so on.

That statistics is pretty lying with numbers because it's completely ignoring systemic risk.

Deaths per form of transport: - Car: >0 - Shark: 0.

Therefore sharks are infinitely safer than cars as a form of transport.

It may be mathematically true, but it's still stupid.

Except the previous argument isn’t

Who travels by shark?

400,000 gallons = 12 meter cube of water.

And how concentrated was that?

Do you mind comparing it with the damage done by oil and coal powered stations or even hydro?

Lots of people have been killed by dam failures. 240,000 people just from the failure of the Banqiao and Shimantan Dams in 1975, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

But I don't see anyone calling for an end to hydroelectric power. Fission power certainly has it's issues, but I think a lot of the opposition to it is more emotional than rational.

> But I don't see anyone calling for an end to hydroelectric power.

You must not be looking very hard then, plenty folks object to hydroelectric power.

There's quite a big difference between objecting to specific instances of hydroelectric power and opposition to the entire concept (as exists for nuclear fission)

In the United States at least, new hydro is basically dead.

That's mostly due to the lack of viable rivers left to dam.

There are plenty of people who oppose it as a concept, for environmental reasons.

True, including me!

But, to be fair, you almost never hear about the direct risks to humans, only their affect on the ecosystem.

I think if you asked most people whether the dam upstream from their home could burst and kill them, they'd say "that can't happen anymore", whereas if you asked about the nuclear plant upwind from their house, they'd say "yes, nuclear plants are fundamentally unsafe". That's the opposite of what you'd say if you just looked at the number of historical deaths, which is why I suspect it does not come from a cold-blooded look at those statistics, but from somewhere else.

> Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.

Did anyone even make this point? What's more I don't think any one wants any kind of power plant next to their house. That's why they're zoned.

Quite funny last statement.

There are no more supporters of nuclear than people who live and work in this industry. So if you are trying to say that people who live next to NPP are “against” it, you say a wrong statement.

I would far rather live in a town with a nuclear power plant the either a coal/oil/gas power plant.

> 400,000 gallons of radioactive water

How radioactive? Bananas are "radioactive" and so are you. As far as I can tell the amount didn't actually pose a health risk to anyone.

> If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.

I would live near a nuclear reactor. I wouldn't prefer it, as the cooling towers are unsightly. But I wouldn't be worried about safety. Definitely preferable to living next to a coal plant!

I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a wind/solar farm of the same output. The size difference is enormous. Not even counting that the renewables would also need a spare gas plant on standby.

> Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house

The US is massive. Why would any American who doesn't work at a nuclear plant ever expect to live anywhere near one?

Are you willing to have a smoking a coal plant right beside your house? You are aware that they release orders of magnitude more radiation than a nuclear power plant, and are orders of magnitude more likely to have a disaster happen to them, right?

Apparently he bashes wind and solar which is not particularly helpful.

Makes his experts look like kooks if they claim "mostly nuclear" is the way forward.

It is the way forward if you want a reliable grid. Solar and wind are intermittent, and the storage technology we would need to make them the primary source of power just doesn't exist yet.

What happens if a nuclear power plant in your area has to be shut down for maintenance?

Ever heard of wires? You can send electricity over them.

These are nuclear wires, right? Because apparantely this does not work for solar and wind as I understand?

Yes.

Most of the time when it's night where you are, it's also night 100 miles away.

There's usually more than one plant, and each plant usually has more than one unit (so they go on a sort of rota), and the maintenance is planned months in advance.

The nuclear have capacity factor of 90%+ meaning that on average they produce power 90% or more of all the hours in year, including maintenance. Just build multiple reactors and stagger the maintenance windows so they do not substantially overlap or match the peak demand periods on yearly scale. And "plant" can consist out of multiple independent reactors.

Nuclear power output is incredibly stable but that can be an issue in itself. Produces energy when we don't need it.

The solution will probably be nuclear for base, renewable for excess and storage to balance the difference.

But talk is cheap, lets actually do it.

What do you know about this topic? How much can nuclear ramp up and down to follow demand?

There are a few ways to control nuclear power plant output. You can send the steam someplace else and the generator turns slower. You can also moderate the nuclear reaction using control rods.

Nuclear can ramp up and down very quickly. The only issue is that fuel costs are negligible, so ramping down does not save money.

> Produces energy when we don't need it.

Channel the excess into carbon removal. What's there to loose?

Or hydrogen and synthetic fuels... It is not like we do not have options where to spend energy if it was reasonably available.

Abundant energy doesn’t really sound like a problem to me

I don't understand why it's an either/or situation with nuclear vs solar and wind. Why can't they both be used?

You could, and in some cases it makes sense. But relying on nuclear alone is simpler and often more cost-effective.

The helpfulness or otherwise of the criticism depends on whether it's valid, correct and/or constructive. It is possible to bash something in a constructive way. Socratic method and all that.

The major question I have about solar and wind is the issue of supply chain governance risks of rare earth elements, cobalt, and lithium. I haven't really heard a good answer yet.

Why do wind generators need those but not other types of generators?

It's a fair question, and the answer is linked to sheer numbers.

Currently it takes a forrest of wind generators, each on a tower, to replace a single (albeit much larger) generator continously and precisely spun as a steam turbine from (say) coal fired heat sources.

Solar takes acres of rare eath films, and solar+wind needs some form of load smoothing via energy storage so there's additional demand if massive battery banks are used (pumped hydro, heat in sodium, other alternatives exist but not always applicable).

I thought solar farms were switching to mirrors concentrating heat on a superheated salt solution.

That's a goal of some that shows promise but so far to date concentrated solar power schemes (of various kinds) have only reach < 10 GW (in total, globally) last I checked [1].

Photovoltaics, by comparison [2]:

    Solar PV generation increased by a record 179 TWh (up 22%) in 2021 to exceed 1 000 TWh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv

All up a hell of a difference (so far) in generation capacity.

In an ideal future we'll see a lot more large CSP plants making better per GW usage of rare earths.

They don't. Most wind turbines use electrically excited induction generators. Wind generators containing permanent magnets account for a minority of the market, used mostly for offshore wind (due to reduced maintenance requirements) and in China (due to discounted rare earth element pricing for domestic users).

https://www.evwind.es/2017/05/31/rare-earths-and-wind-turbin...

I don't listen to Joe Rogan podcast, but one day I stumbled upon an interview to Oliver Stone and was instantly glued to him, a mix of wacky and elocuent.

I do think that Nuclear energy is better than fossil fuels, in almost all aspects.

Nuclear power is not really that clean, and long-term maintenance or dismantling of nuclear power plants is problematic.

Also, while I think we've been under the influence of powerful lobbies linked to oil/coal interests, nuclear power is also an industry with powerful and active lobbies.

We should not discount solar and wind based energy production, they are beating expectations and are turning out to be a serious option.

I wonder what he things about Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and how this could happen in other places during war.

Having watched "JFK" I'm not really interested in anything Oliver Stone has to say.

regardless of whether you agree with the message it was a great movie

Why not? I thought the movie was excellent, even if I'm not persuaded by it. I don't want to assume you're saying "I don' want to listen to people I disagree with", but that was my first reaction.

People who have a history of deeply irrational thinking can be safely presumed will continue being irrational, until proven otherwise. If someone derails a serious work project and is combative and doubles down when the boss tells them what they did wrong, they don't get to lead the next one.

I think JFK is a great movie with a few flaws.

Things that are covered well and faithful to the evidence:

* Basically all the parts of the movie which are set in Dealey Plaza (reconstructed like no other film has done before or since)

* Oswald's background and enigmatic lifestyle

* The activities at the Carousel Club

* Dean Andrews

* Sylvia Odio and the Mexico City incident

* Guy Banister, Jack Martin, and the 544 Camp Street leaflets

* Vernon Bundy

* The voter registration witnesses

* The apparent Oswald impersonations

* George de Mohrenschildt

* The autopsy

Things that aren't covered so well:

* Claw Shaw (some of the evidence against him is just fabricated in the film, which is very frustrating)

* David Ferrie (some parts good, others not)

* Jim Garrison's personal life (eg incorrectly depicting the Shaw interview as happening on Easter Sunday to win personal favor - nauseating)

* "Janet and Bill Williams", obviously the Paines

* "Mr. X", while an accurate portrayal of Fletcher Prouty, it gives an inaccurate impression of the timeline of the case

Many people object to the composite character ("Willie O'Keefe") played by Kevin Bacon, but this doesn't bother me. I think it's about as good as you can do with those characters without making the film another hour longer to tell each of their backgrounds.

Overall, I think that JFK does a good job of presenting the most important evidence that Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy (something I assert is very likely), and does so in a way which is likely to prompt viewers to do additional research.

It's not as hard on every fact as I wish it were, but it's still way above the mean for a historical film.

Stone has also published a 600 page book in response to the hullaballo surrounding the film, inviting and platforming his strongest critics (and responses to them), along with a painstaking bibliography of essentially every fact asserted in the film. [0] I think that deserves commendation; commitment to this degree of dialogue is very rare for a Hollywood film.

0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/430224.JFK

The book it is based on is important. It carefully reviews the evidence, from the viewpoint of a prosecutor.

Can you elaborate?

Oliver Stone would probably do more good for nuclear energy by making a movie against it

That same Oliver Stone that praised Putin until the 24-Feb-2022 and even a bit after?

and also the same Oliver Stone that helped making conspiracy theories mainstream!

It's sad that nuclear energy has been so ostracized that only Hollywood's compulsive contrarian support it.

Most of people's understanding of nuclear energy seems to have come from The Simpsons. Big glowing leaky drums and 3 eyed fish.

You can support nuclear and not be a Hollywood contrarian like, apparently, Oliver Stone.

My thoughts exactly. I enjoyed his 80s films. He lost it sometime after that.

Is Oliver Stone the only person to have praised Putin?

Nope, but he went to great lenths, not only supporting publicly, but visiting Putin and making a pro-Putin documentary.

I'm pretty sure that the real drive behind the pro-nuclear push is and has always been about centralizing electricity "generation" (i.e. conversion); ultimately for reasons of creating authority and/or centralizing power.

Are you sure it’s not because it’s many times more efficient than any other source of electricity “generation”?

not anymore

there are too many government-sized subsidies all over the allegedly (but not really, not at all) free energy market. the energy market is too important to allow 'the market' to fully control it; so it's intervened with subsidies, tax-breaks, and other such kinds of influences (soft controls).

so many, and I know/understand so little about this, that I don't think it's necessarily more efficient. the centralized aspect of it (the historical norm for electrical grids) creates POWER besides the electrical.

There are several centralized control points already in use. There are only 4 railroads that control most of the coal deliveries in the US.

Refineries for petroleum are centralized choke points, as are the distribution networks. The same tends to be true for natural gas.

The energy return on investment for oil has been falling, from 100:1 for the early wells, to as little as 2:1 in fracking.

We need to give up fossil fuels.

I say we need to give up fuels of all kinds.

nuclear is still based on fuel.

Eventually solar and wind will be so inexpensive that most homes will generate and store all it needs and not require the grid. There are already roof mountable wind turbines that can be used in urban areas with no visible moving parts such as the Halcium PowerPod: https://youtu.be/vg7wW2nnrPU

Very sad to see that such important topic and message are going to be delivered by such freak. Now people who are against nuclear power will have even more emotional arguments against it.

P.S. Specially for people who “if you don’t live nearby: shut up”, I have lived near NPP my entire childhood and both of my parents worked 30+ years in this industry.

I agree that this is not a beneficial contribution to improving the public debate about nuclear.

However the public debate around nuclear is pretty much meaningless until there's a revolution in nuclear technology:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35159449

Research on nuclear tech is continuing apace, without being influenced by public debate. There are plenty of sites that would love to have new nuclear if such a tech revolution happens, especially at existing NPP.

Vogtle is an outlier in most regards. A tech revolution isn’t really needed, the tech works fine. Simplifications of existing tech like the BWRX-300 seem to be gaining a lot of traction (in theory should be more expensive per watt, but can be contracted in more palatable sizes). TVE is pushing ahead with plans to build BWRX-300s. Canada is returning to building nuclear again. As is France. Poland. So on. Sadly it seems the US may lag but that’s the way with a lot of things in this country. It will still be good if other countries can make the advancements.

[1] https://twitter.com/_hannahritchie/status/163712120205237452...

That tweet is a hopelessly optimistic reshaping of the data. The Nordhaus paper linked to in a reply is a far better assessment.

France's attempts inside France, Finland, and the UK all look like Vogtle. There's all Summer in the US, which fared even worse than Vogtle.

For US construction, Vogtle is a best case scenario, matching the disasters of the very last US disasters as well as European construction costs.

There is no financial backer that will continue to throw away money like what was done at Vogtle. The next US reactor definitely needs to be something massively different.

The SMR might be the next tech, and the BWRX-300 is somehow dubiously cast as an SMR, but "pushing forward" is just some press releases without much chance of success.

And that's the fundamental problem with nuclear, it's all hopes and dreams and press releases, along with missing deadlines and budgets if a sufficiently large fool can be found to front the money.

I’m of two minds about that. I agree this is a guy with a history of peddling conspiracies and dictators. Not someone I want in a debate that should be driven by facts and reason. But I realized, in my experience there is a large overlap between people with anti-nuclear attitudes and fans of his. (Boomers, greens, far leftists, et al.) So if they see someone they (sadly) respect put out the message that “we’ve been wrong about nuclear”, the maybe they’ll be open to hearing it?

Oliver Stone? As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. That nuclear energy is a practical way forward may be true. That solar and wind will never meet the world’s energy requirements is also true. But when a wacko like Stone comes out in favor, it raises the question of why.

> That nuclear energy is a practical way forward may be true.

It's not.

> That solar and wind will never meet the world’s energy requirements is also true.

It isn't.

And your evidence of that?

We will figure out better ways to store solar and wind energy for when it is night and there is no wind. There are already technologies to do it but I haven't seen any that seem practical to scale globally yet. Ultimately, we will build enough solar and wind capacity to provide more energy than we need for when the days aren't windy or sunny enough.

>I haven't seen any that seem practical to scale globally yet

See Tesla Master Plan Part 3.[0]

LiFePO4 batteries can easily scale to the required level, and require no scarce minerals (namely cobalt and nickel). Lithium itself is abundant even outside of China.

[0] https://youtu.be/BoGNEZF2XFQ

And the land area required to produce even the current power levels, which is unequivocally insufficient to eliminate gasoline powered cars and stoves?

A tiny fraction of the land that is currently used for energy crops.

Also a tiny fraction of the land used for fossil fuel infrastructure.

And able to colocate with other uses.

Plenty for a PhD and then more. And no, you don't just make a wild claim and then expect people to provide tons of evidence to the contrary. Go learn.

Nuclear has the smallest land area per megawatt of any energy source. Those numbers are easily available to anyone that looks. IEEE has published information on the grid’s inability to meet the demand of EVs. Your proposal exacerbates the situation. As with most proposals to combat “climate change”, they are based on political agendas and wishful thinking.

Include the upstream land use required to expand it massively and try again.

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