In the past few weeks, the European Union labeled nuclear and natural gas as "sustainable investments." The New York Times commented "The effort to steer public and private money toward nuclear power stations and gas-fired generators in the European Union was criticized as greenwashing." In this episode, my father explains why he supports the European Union's decision, even though any dependence on a fossil fuel is not ideal and details the science behind his reason.   

Solar and wind are the lowest cost sources of energy in the world and form the new pricing standards for base load generation, but given their high variance, they need augmentation from capacity that can flexibly meet electricity demand. The daily variation in wind and sunlight can be dealt with using batteries, but for longer periods of low sunlight or low wind are not economically or environmentally viable. Longer term supplements must be load following, low-to-no carbon, and scalable. At reasonable scale in 10 years plus those could be small nuclear reactors and geothermal. Until then we need natural gas with carbon capture and storage.  

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Radio Public - https://radiopublic.com/energy-explained-G2QXnn  

Breaker - https://www.breaker.audio/energy-explained  

Utopia By DeadDNA is licensed under a Creative Commons License.