I have seen this guy speak before and he raises some interesting points.
What I would really like to see is him debate this backed up by some more data.
E.g. He is comparing the 70 year old French nuclear industry to the infant renewable industry which I don't think is fair. I'm not disputing his data about nuclear necessarily but I would like to compare apples with apples.
He used the example of how much money Germany had spent on renewables and how much nuclear they could have got for that.
What he didn't say is that they would still be building half of that stuff now as nuclear power stations take an awful long time to build. That's a long time to wait for new power. He is using renewables costings that might go back 10 or 20 years. It would be interesting to see the costings on today's prices or the future trend prices of renewables.
He also used the examples of solar farms vs domestic solar. One of his arguments against solar farms is the land they displace. There is an awful lot of marginal useless land that could be used in places like California and Australia . Domestic solar is getting cheaper and cheaper and the sheer area of roof space in the built environment is available instead of agricultural land. He is using retrofitted pricing when we could be looking at new installation pricing or even intergrated panels which will become much cheaper.
I reckon there's much more in this discussion that could be explored.
I wonder whether anyone has asked him whether he'd be happy to live in a neighbourhood with a nuclear power station ?
