Nuclear vs. Renewables: A False Dichotomy

Is it even a discussion worth having? Given the fact that each energy source has its own merits?

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This video is meant as an educational commentary and all borrowed videos, images, and sounds are part of fair-use.

Feel free to use anything from this video. Please let me know if you do! Thanks.

[meltingzero]

Your video is an absolute gem. I've been looking to get my hands on better material on energy sources and their futures in the world. I'm seeing that people are biased against and uneducated about nuclear power, so I was really glad that your pro-con-analysis shone some light on how it measures up against renewable forms of energy.

It was also helpful to see that the future of solar energy is probably in local rooftop designs if not in large-scale electric grid appliance.

[tonychen]

I kinda agree with Kohvazein. I know that having lots of people hate-watching a video is (or used to, hard to be sure with Youtube's change of rules) is a method of getting ad revenue, but it is useless as far as getting people to change their minds, because people who are hate-watching stuff already made up their mind and can't be swayed by you. They maybe swayed if someone close to them made the arguments, but not you nor me. So the point of the video is to reach the fence-sitters. People who may have some vague misconceptions but haven't been brainwashed. And fence-sitters may not be receptive to click-baity titles.

I would have preferred something like Nuclear vs. Renewables: A False Dichotomy.

[kohvazein]

Can you try and avoid putting absolute and overused claims such as "the truth" in the titles? I'd love to share this, and I shall do so, but I feel like many will be put off by such claims. Why not substitute it with things like "an analysis"?

Love the video man keep it up!

[iivin]

I wish someone (other than Isaac Arthur) would talk about the fact that every watt we don't collect from the sun either heats us up, bounces off of us and into the empty void or else shoots straight off into the void never to be seen again.
That and the sun shoots out more of this energy into space every day than could be used by 10 Earths.

[hrthrhs]

I feel I didn't get an explanation as to why nuclear alone can't allow us to reach RCP2.6. Did I miss something?

[tomkelly]

Well yeah, I don't know. I think the single biggest factor in what technology will be rolled out most successfully is the manufacturing cost.

Nuclear is far too powerful and expensive for the world to need very many reactors. So reactors will never get the economies of scale that Solar and wind will.

We just don't have a market for a billion nuclear reactors. Where as we do with solar and to a lesser extent, wind. So the number of iterations and the value of optimizing the process it there for solar but not nearly as much for Nuclear.

Also the red tape with nuclear technology is extreme compared to renewables.

You bring up lots of valid arguments but really I don't see nuclear taking off the way that renewables will.

I am glad that India and China are investing in Nuclear along with renewables. they are very smart and as far as space travel goes, nuclear technology looks to be the very best option, so we do need this technology to continue to be implemented and improved.

[houndofzoltan]

I went in thinking it was balanced up to the first analysis... cons against PV solar included "roofing jobs are dangerous" (construction jobs are dangerous: we just have good health and safety in place ) and "only daytime", when there are so many programs, including home batteries, which means the power gathered can be used 24 hours. I suspect the Nuclear Humanist is honest, but confirmation bias is extremely difficult one to get away from.

[RENIELTUBE]

You seems skip the important one: Why could renewable not do it alone? It seems to me that the market's believes it can and that is where the money is going..