I think I still mostly stand behind the claims in the post, i.e. nuclear is undervalued in most parts of society but it’s not as much of a silver bullet as many people in the rationalist / new liberal bubble would make it seem. It’s quite expensive and even with a lot of research and de-regulation, you may not get it cheaper than alternative forms of energy, e.g. renewables.
One thing that bothered me after the post is that Johannes Ackva (who’s arguably a world-leading expert in this field) and Samuel + me just didn’t seem to be able to communicate where we disagree. He expressed that he thought some of our arguments were wrong but we never got to the crux of the disagreement.
After listening to his appearance on 80k: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/johannes-ackva-unfashionable-climate-interventions/ I feel like I understand the core of the disagreement much better (though I never confirmed with Johannes). He mostly looks at energy through a lens of scale, neglectedness, and traceability, i.e. he’s looking to investigate and push interventions that are most efficient on the margin. On the margin, nuclear seems underinvested and lots of reasonable options are underexplored (e.g. large-scale production of smaller reactors), both Samuel and I would agree with that. However, the claim we were trying to make in the post was that nuclear is already more expensive than renewables and this gap will likely just increase in the future. Thus, it makes sense to, in total, invest more in renewables than nuclear. Also, there were lots of smaller things where I felt like I understood his position much better after listening to the podcast.
I think I still mostly stand behind the claims in the post, i.e. nuclear is undervalued in most parts of society but it’s not as much of a silver bullet as many people in the rationalist / new liberal bubble would make it seem. It’s quite expensive and even with a lot of research and de-regulation, you may not get it cheaper than alternative forms of energy, e.g. renewables.
One thing that bothered me after the post is that Johannes Ackva (who’s arguably a world-leading expert in this field) and Samuel + me just didn’t seem to be able to communicate where we disagree. He expressed that he thought some of our arguments were wrong but we never got to the crux of the disagreement.
After listening to his appearance on 80k: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/johannes-ackva-unfashionable-climate-interventions/ I feel like I understand the core of the disagreement much better (though I never confirmed with Johannes). He mostly looks at energy through a lens of scale, neglectedness, and traceability, i.e. he’s looking to investigate and push interventions that are most efficient on the margin. On the margin, nuclear seems underinvested and lots of reasonable options are underexplored (e.g. large-scale production of smaller reactors), both Samuel and I would agree with that. However, the claim we were trying to make in the post was that nuclear is already more expensive than renewables and this gap will likely just increase in the future. Thus, it makes sense to, in total, invest more in renewables than nuclear. Also, there were lots of smaller things where I felt like I understood his position much better after listening to the podcast.