30 GW of capacity would be c. 24 3rd generation units. There's no way they can build that inside of 20 years, starting from scratch.

Sure they could; They wont, but its technically and financially quite feasable.

But every reactor displaces a coal plant, and thats a good thing.

You say nuclear power is the lowest cost solution. My point is entirely that: nuclear power historically has been anything but 'low cost'. There is a built-in optimism to that industry that you have to discount.

Compare it to anything besides fossil, which we can either expect to get more expensive or be assigned externality costs, or hydro, which has a limited number of sites. Historically, with all the R&D that needed to be done as well as custom built plants, the cost has still been low.

The French did not go from 0 to 70% of their entire power from nuclear in a decade (I'd have to check on the phasing, but they spent a lot of time building those reactors). They spent 3 decades building up that infrastructure.

They started the rapid expansion program in 1974. By 1984, over two thirds of french electricity was nuclear. In 1973, most of their electric power was derived from coal, and today france is one of the lowest emitters per head of industrialized countries.

'ignore the waste with the magic of discounting' -- hmmm.. would you suggest the chemical industry do that? Why don't we just discount the damage of CO2 at such a high rate that we don't care about next year?

The chemical industry can do that sure, if its sitting in casks in some parking lot. Its not doing anyone any harm there, and we can revisit the issue again in fifty years to make sure the casks are getting on fine.

Analagously we could simply discount everything at such a high rate, spend all our money and die right now. Set the discount rate high enough, and that's what we would (rationally) do.

Sure, whats your point? The discount rate isn't ten thousand percent.

proliferation is a threat if you build more nukes. It's not orthogonal to anything.

Power reactor fuel is unsuitable for weapons development. If a nation-state wants nuclear weapons, they'll pursue them seperately.

blowing up a skyscraper does more damage than blowing up a nuclear reactor? Doesn't that entirely depend on your assumptions about radioactive release?

Chernobyl killed maybe 100 people, and gave a few kids thyroid cancer, most of whom recovered and wouldnt have gotten sick anyways if it werent for iodine deficiencies in the area. A couple of planes in WTC killed 3000.

If you don't think we can do anything about global warming, then why go for nuclear? Coal is far cheaper.

Are you just trying to be argumentitive. I think nukes should be pursued either way because coal is a limited resource and has the potential to be far more expensive when its gobbled up for CTL projects as the oil starts to dry up, and evidence shows that nuclear done well is the same cost or even cheaper than coal. You should go for nukes because you seem to think emissions are bad on their own.

So many problems.

1) Coal is NOT far cheaper. It kills 300,000 people a year in the US alone, for free. Add any cost to that (even just medical bills) and coal is the most expensive thing around. You talk about nuclear research grants when comparing it to an industry that is subsidized by allowing it to kill people for free. Seriously, think a little bit here.

2) Proliferation is orthogonal. The US already has nukes, and australia could have them if they wanted them. If we went to build reactors in the congo, then you might have a point, but we aren't doing that. You know what really spreads proliferation? Rich countries using up all the fossil fuels so the poor ones are left with no option but nuclear, that would do some serious proliferation.

3) If the 911 hijackers had crashed into indian point instead of the WTC, thousands of people would still be alive right now.

4) Nuclear is the cheapest. You can look up the numbers, currently it makes power for something like $0.03-$0.04/KWh, which is as cheap as it comes.

5) Nuclear waste, what a straw man. Waste itself has a half life of a few dozen years, and would be safe within 300. It's not the waste that's a problem, it's the unburned fuel, which has an extremely long halflife. Reprocessing would fix this problem, but the environmentalists fight it tooth and claw because it would take away their signature "waste is lethal for [insert whatever preposterous number here] years" argument that they love so much, and the nuclear power industry really doesn't want it because Uranium is cheap, and likely always will be.

6) Coal power produces something like half the world's CO2 emissions, if you want to have a good solution to global warming, this would be a terriffic way to start. Hell, the oil will run out in a few decades anyway, so I'm not sure oil is such an issue, it'll solve itself.

7) Look it up, the french really did it in about 10 years. And they did this starting from basically nothing. I love this line of thought, making 30 reactors will take decades, yeah, if they're built one at a time by the same construction crew. You think Australia is large enough to have a few different crews competent to pour cement? I do.

So much misinformation, so little time.

He doesnt really say anything that supports his view that renewables are capable of competitive baseload power.

Wind couples well with hydropower for load balancing provided your resevoir is large enough, but its just not as scalable as nuclear. Sure, wind should be pursued where it makes sense, but the notion that wind alone is capable of baseload competitive with nuclear just isn't so.