White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets
If you want to treat climate change as an existential threat, then you do whatever it takes to keep all existing nuclear running until fossil fuel plants are gone from the entire continent. And you put a little money to subsidize&#x2F;stimulate new nuclear on the off chance some of the advanced nuclear concepts work out (or as a backup in case renewables improve slower than we think).<p>You don’t have to stop or even slow renewables deployment to do this. They are fairly different industries with different workforce’s, so there are resources to do both simultaneously without significant interference. And you’re not going to get “too much” electricity as cheap abundant electricity will help accelerate decarbonization of other things like building heat and transport and industrial processes.<p>Existing nuclear ESPECIALLY must be protected. And existing hydro. Number 1 and number 2 (tied with wind) clean energy sources.<p>Nuclear power produces as much energy in our country as coal. We can phase out coal twice as fast if we at very least keep nuclear around a few years longer.