Fordiman

You single out France.

France's nuclear builds took place in all of 15 years, and decarbonized their electrical generation to the tune of 75% in that time.

Honestly, the fact that that hack was not just featured in the first episode of your show - but that you and he spent the time shouting down your supposed balance interviewee - was intensely disappointing. I'd read Jacobson's works and had understood it was contrived nonsense for almost a year at the time. That you hadn't properly vetted it prior to promoting him set the tone that your position on climate change was deeply unserious.

I actually had to stop watching to avoid getting too angry; here's one of my childhood science heroes actively defending what I know to be unscientific.

That you still don't seem to have understood the implications of Clack's paper is worrying.

From what I've read, the reason Dr. Jacobson is suing the National Academy has to do with some details regarding publishing debunking claims in unilateral fashion, to wit, without giving him a chance to defend his figuring.

They, in fact, published Clack's paper and Jacobson's response in the same issue. So, no. That's just not a true.

Mike's got a baked response, I'm sure, but I thought this would be an interesting question to look into the numbers for.

dumping water (either H20 used for cooling or by steam generated in the towers) that has been “irradiated”

Cooling water is physically isolated from, but thermally connected to the core by a secondary loop. That's the entire point of the thing. It prevents the coolant water from being anywhere near where it can acquire radioactive material or become activated by neutron irradiation.

back into the environment above the temperature of the “natural environment”

A 1 GW power plant nominally rejects 2 GW of heat. World nuclear power generation capacity is ~333 GWe, meaning about 666 GWt is released to the environment from nuclear power. World fuel consumption of all types amounts to roughly 17,000 TW. Earth's thermal equilibrium shift (that is, climate change) is, at present, around 300,000 GW. So probably not nuclear's fault. So while "using energy" could be a small contributor to climate change, "using nuclear energy" is not, at present, a significant part of that. Meanwhile, every GW of coal you replace with nuclear has about the same heat profile - but no carbon additions.

Power plants emit Carbon-14

Earth makes about 6.6 kg/year of ¹⁴C annually all on it's own, and the world has about 635 kg of the stuff in the atmosphere, and more in all carbon-bearing material.

All the world's reactors put together, extrapolating this paper should presently emit about 0.71 kg of ¹⁴C annually (in addition to 6.4 kg of stable carbon) in the form of CO₂ and CH₄ and other hydrocarbons - generated in primary coolant, via offgas systems.

So... reactor-generated ¹⁴C is not likely a big contributor - especially compared to, say, the billions of tonnes emitted annually by coal plants, or the recent methane leak in California - those both contain significant C-14, too.

various forms of nuclear waste Wasserman lists.

Spent nuclear fuel's heat profile is, necessarily, lower than the heat profile of a running reactor (otherwise, it'd still be in the reactor, getting cooled and making electricity). So it's less significant than claim 2.

Hold up, that's a little unfair.

There are roles that Libertarians hold as critical uses for government spending; they're just, as a party, rather more strongly limited than the evidence would suggest is optimal.

This could be because that's just what happens when you take a simple principle and turn it into a platform, rather than integrate it with other valuable principles. It could be just that they aren't particularly thorough in fact-finding around macro-econ, and could evolve in that respect.

Whatever the case, I address ideas, not people - because people can change their ideas.

The only guy to ask about energy in the Presidential debate? Man's a damned hero.

Nobody in the energy industry should get subsidies, because that warps true market costs.

I think a macroeconomist would go white at that. The reason: carbon emissions are not just an externality, but a delayed and broad one: no one is harmed by carbon emissions until everyone is harmed by them. Moreover, generation profile and flexibility has a big impact on overall electrical system cost and availability - and the electrical system's cost and availability has a large impact on the nation's public health, inflation, and security.

This is exactly the use case for government distortion of market incentives with taxes and subsidies: public, government and economic impacts without a commensurate change in profitability. Typically, situations like this are unsustainable. So the government intervenes; with regulations; with taxes and subsidies; with caps and legal action; etc. So long as those distortions are direct and evidence-adjustable, everything should work out for the better.

And, it'd be nice if that was how energy subsidies were structured - but they really aren't. Instead of rewarding or punishing a direct thing like emissions profile, we reward an arbitrary technology set deemed "green", and subsidize carboniferous fuels. Instead of rewarding generation flexibility or punishing generation variability, we let variable producers use the grid "as a battery", which costs a small fortune.

How to best rationalize the current set of energy market distortions is a hard macroeconomics problem. Perhaps all distortions do need briefly removed so we can step back, get a good, clear look at things, and figure out what they should look like - but that can't be the final answer; sans incentive, we'll never fully decarbonize.