Noah Smith is too down on nuclear energy
I’ve been feeling like I agree with Noah Smith too often, to the point where he sometimes posts articles saying roughly the same thing as an article I’m working on. So, I’ve been looking for something to fight with him about, and his article last week urging nuclear fission fans to “Let go of the nuclear retrofuture” and focus on solar + batteries was perfectly timed.
Annoyingly, Noah is smart and his article is pretty nuanced, so our actual specific disagreements are also pretty nuanced. In particular, he concedes:
He even takes the step that I rarely see from even the most reasonable of “reasonable” nuclear critics and concedes that “nuclear still has important uses — in particular, where land and sunlight are scarce.” He concedes so much that I’m not always entirely sure what it is we’re disagreeing about.
But a big part of the difference, I think, is probably that Noah lives in California and hangs out with a lot of tech/engineering types for whom all the points about nuclear that he’s conceded are conventional wisdom, and he’s annoyed that a lot of these people have an image of solar (and especially batteries) that’s stuck in the 1980s, rather than seeing these as dynamic, forward-thinking economic sectors. I live in DC, and I hang out with lots of people who work in or adjacent to Democratic Party politics. And among the people I know, the conventional wisdom is toward much too much complacency about the current state of renewables. Many people think that because photovoltaic panels are now cheap, all the problems are solved and the big issue is that you need to say you’re pro-fracking to win Pennsylvania, and they’re looking for linguistics gurus to help them defeat fossil fuel propaganda.
