...to keep fighting against all of the non-CO2 emitting energy technologies.

Soon.

It's far from ideal from an environmental perspective - but it works from an economic perspective.

The new administration wants them to "drill baby drill" and sell the stuff overseas. Less demand at home (shifted to nuclear) means more for export.

...so any reduction in emissions anywhere on the planet is good.

And yes, nuclear does have environmental drawbacks (at least until we figure out what to do with spent nuclear fuel), every ebergy production technology does have drawbacks, but those drawbacks are nowhere near as immediately and severely damaging as continued CO2 emissions.

How fast can you build this nuclear-powered paradise? Because we need dramatic change now.

We’ve got all sorts of exciting new plants in the design stage (they’ve been in the design phase for decades.) We had a go at small modular reactors (like monolithic reactors, it went way over budget, and way behind schedule, although this time it was eventually cancelled.)

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-agree-terminate-nuclear-project-2023-11-08/

Replacing ALL fossil fuel power plants with nuclear power plants ought to be our immediate goal.

The most environmentally destructive and potentially dangerous hydroelectricity plants need to be taken down too.

It isn't just the herculean task of constructing hundreds of reactors when our recent experience has been years of delay... it's ramping up the education and training necessary to have the competent workforce to operate them.

I wouldn't be opposed to a plan that said we would continue at the 10-15 GW/year pace for a decade or two after that as well... but I think it would be near miraculous to hit that stride in the next decade

Threatened by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany we were able to transform the U.S.A. economy rapidly at the beginning of World War II. The threat of global warming is as dire or more so.

I hate to imagine what the U.S.A.'s "Pearl Harbor" of global warming will be, especially if it occurs under the Trump administration.

No one has figured out what to do with the toxic nuclear waste. My engineer father with bachelors and masters degrees in engineering and more than 40 years of aviation and automotive engineering work experience taught me this.

Not much aviation/automotive engineering involved in the debate.

Nothing is entirely green. This is the greenest non-malthusian path forward.

If we could build nuclear plants that fast (I’m afraid we cannot) that will not release us from our “malthusian path.”

If we could eliminate all carbon emissions today, there is already far too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere (“warming in the pipeline” to borrow a phrase.)

https://www.climate.gov/media/14599

This graph shows the heating influence caused by the major human-produced greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (gray), methane (dark purple), nitrous oxide (medium purple), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, lavender), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs, blue), and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs, light blue). Relative to conditions in 1750, today's atmosphere absorbs more than 3 extra watts of energy per square meter of Earth's surface. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from NOAA Global Monitoring Lab. For the complete list of chemicals in the CFC, HFC, and HCFC groups, see Figure 3 in the Full AGGI Report.Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from NOAA ESRL.

It's the aviation and automotive engineers who will build the cars and airplanes that will run on hydrogen. It was part of my engineer father's job to know how every aviation and automotive fuel is formulated and refined from crude oil. My engineer father well understood that the world had to stop burning fossil fuels. My engineer father's original inspiration for realizing that green hydrogen is the solution was the space shuttle which ran on liquid hydrogen and oxygen?

Not saying your father wasn’t in a useful career - just not one that adds to a nuclear power debate.

Oh… and the space shuttle’s hydrogen came from fossil fuels and was “grey” at best. But you can get “green” hydrogen and oxygen from nuclear power if that’s what you want.

Hydrogen produced by nuclear power is typically not considered “green hydrogen" since nuclear power is not renewable. That being said, nuclear power has long been considered a good way to produce hydrogen.

Here in NY, hydrogen is already being produced at a nuclear power plant at a demonstration scale.