@charlie2009Interesting. As someone who accepts the climate...

@charlie2009

Interesting. As someone who accepts the climate change science he's looking for the best solution. But he is inconsistent with electricity experts like Amory Lovins and others who calculate wind and solar, with storage, can meet our needs. And can do so cheaply provided storage costs come down further. Or existing storage can complement them - e.g. hydro.
He's not a power systems guy, having a policy/lobbyist/activist background and mostly not in the energy field.

There isn't much detail in his presentation to critique. But his advocacy for nuclear power seems flawed on two grounds.
First, contrary to his view, every article I've read shows nuclear isn't cost competitive. I'll caveat that by saying if you went on a global program to build nuclear plants and refined construction and design, plus financed them at reasonable rates, you could possibly get their costs down to something we could live with. But the Chinese are doing this in scale and haven't got their prices into the "cheap" ballpark yet.
Whereas renewables are already coming in cheap.
Secondly, if you want to address climate change - so are wanting to meet all demand with non-carbon sources - then the problem of responding to variability of demand is a problem for nuclear. That's the same argument he makes when he says that renewables are a problem when paired with inflexible nuclear. So going nuclear requires some other source to handle variability of demand. That's fine if you have decent hydro or other variable sources.
I'm not totally averse to nuclear myself, other than for those two reasons, plus the waste remains something of an issue and nuclear accident risk isn't fun. So while I am not as totally against nuclear as many, and would live with that versus climate change risks, if you've got something better, you go with something better.

Overall seems to me his intentions are good but he hasn't got his facts right.