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But if we're not heading to space, then we must be stuck with pre-industrial tech, right? Notwithstanding individual civilizations rising and falling, we'd be stuck at pre-industrial technology forever, in his model.
France? Their grid primarily runs off nuclear power. French electricity is quite cheap by European standards and remember that they export a fair bit, so their prices are pushed up: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
The financial disasters were manufactured by the US government that sabotaged nuclear industry, deliberately raising costs. After 1978, the US had plants redesigned while they were being constructed, introduced all kinds of regulatory nonsense, having workers strip out parts and replace them... South Korea has been producing cheap nuclear plants in the last decade. China is doing it. India is doing it. It's not hard, it's just that an increasing number of countries are allergic to doing these things correctly. Nuclear energy is like high speed rail. It is completely possible and perfectly practical if you do it right (France, Japan, China). It is very expensive if you do it wrong (UK, California). It's not 'a few years today' it's being done, it has been done 40 years ago by the French.
Take the Washington Power Company. Did it fail in the 1960s? The early 1970s? No, it failed in the early 1980s just after the US decided to start wrecking the nuclear industry. Greer doesn't explain why the cost of US nuclear power plants suddenly spikes after 1978, why construction times ballooned 5-10 years then specifically (and why this EROEI issue apparently doesn't apply to South Korea, China or India). The laws of physics apply across the entire universe. The woes of nuclear energy are based in human stupidity, not physics.
Yes, nuclear energy needs subsidies. But not for the reasons Greer would have us believe but because it's a big long-term investment that pays off slowly, over decades. Once the plant is built, it can run for fifty years or more at very low fuel costs and very high capacity factor. There's an obvious role for government in subsidizing long-term investments like education, sanitation and so on. Nuclear power is similar. Markets don't like investments that governments might regulate into oblivion or suddenly cancel midway through construction, either.
The reason I don't like Greer is because he doesn't provide a single shred of evidence to back up his arguments and prove causal links. I've spent 10 minutes looking for a more detailed analysis from him about nuclear power than a few unreferenced paragraphs. It isn't there. I've linked papers and statistics that actually discuss in a quantitative and rigorous way what the costs of nuclear energy actually are. Since we know they differ from plant to plant, country to country, we can discuss why this might be based upon reason and logic. Greer just tells a story that has no relation to reality. Compare Greer with this book review: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop. There are numbers! Figures! Graphs! Actual analysis based upon data, as opposed to dogma. Greer is a good writer and is good at telling a story but that story is not true! He combines ignorance with arrogance in a very unattractive way.
No, this is not what his model suggests at all. He wrote an entire book about this and you can just read the blurb to see what he thinks on this topic - https://www.amazon.com.au/Ecotechnic-Future-Envisioning-Post-Peak-World/dp/0865716390
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/06/frances-edf-to-be-fully-nationalised-borne-.html
France's electrical power system is currently about to be nationalised because it has taken on so much debt, and they were forced to import power from other nations during periods of high demand. To argue against the claim that nuclear power generation is unprofitable without government subsidies you have produced a system which is unprofitable, fails to provide adequate power during times of peak demand and is about to receive even more government subsidies in the form of nationalisation. This is evidence FOR Greer's position!
The most concise summation of Greer's position on nuclear I can find is the following paragraph, from the article "Too little, too late."
Again, the answer here is real easy: just provide the commercially successful nuclear plant which pays for itself with power generation (nuclear power plants are worth having around anyway due to their ability to generate useful isotopes for medical/research purposes). Take EROEI into account and demonstrate that the nuclear power plant can produce enough energy to be economically viable - and remember to take the various invisible subsidies petroleum supplies into account as well. So far this hasn't happened, and while again, I'd love to be proved wrong, I just don't see why this hasn't happened. A successful nuclear power plant of the type you're claiming would be so significant that it would have a major impact on global geopolitics, and yet this just hasn't happened (why has regulation managed to stop nuclear power from achieving viability in every single place on earth?).
You've claimed that his arguments are wrong when you do not have even the slightest clue what his position actually is and routinely make absurdly incorrect assertions about his views because you do not have enough familiarity with his work to debate it coherently. If you are going to speak with confidence about someone, you should have more knowledge and understanding of their position than you've demonstrated here. You're accusing him of combining ignorance and arrogance while you look at a vanishingly small section of his work and assume that you know better than he does on the basis of that tiny slice without even being able to accurately identify which wing of politics he belongs to.
You're splitting hairs. There are three possible outcomes. Technological development and energy use keep going up and we become an interstellar civilization. They stagnate and we get stuck somewhere below where we are now. Or we are wiped out. He clearly dismisses 1 and 3. Therefore he agrees with 2. It's as simple as that.
So what? Companies take on excessive debt and are restructured from time to time. French electricity prices are low, France exports electricity every year on net. They undertook various manipulations of prices, forcing EDF to sell at artificially low prices to competitors or other countries, forcing them to buy at higher market prices, imposing price caps in 2022 to protect consumers...
EDF was profitable literally every year but 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/279640/consolidated-net-income-of-edf/
And yes, there was corrosion and power outages at reactors because they are old and need replacing (which France simply hasn't done because they too have been drinking the renewables cool aid). You crow at one year of unprofitability but sneer at 15 years of profits?
Right, we're agreed here, this is what he thinks. He does not provide even a single citation or anything at all to back up his point. This guy thinks he knows more about nuclear energy than the actual scientists who write papers about it (with statistics and everything) and doesn't deign to provide any evidence! He's clearly read none of the literature about the reverse learning by doing that plagues US nuclear energy. He doesn't understand the importance of interest rates, regulation, political risks in prices. Even then it's still profitable: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-14/why-nuclear-power-once-cash-cow-now-has-tin-cup-quicktake-q-a#xj4y7vzkg
This article alone torpedoes Greer's entire ideology, it explains how cheap gas has been outcompeting otherwise profitable nuclear energy, even in one of the most hostile environments for nuclear energy, the US. It also helps shed light on the complexities he doesn't understand, how there's a role for subsidizing long-term energy sources that temporarily aren't profitable for when gas prices rise.
Just step back and think about what Greer is saying. Nuclear power plants (all of them, in every country) are commercially unprofitable, not just at some times based on volatile oil prices, macroeconomic conditions or political interference but always and forever! Do you realize how insane this sounds? All these investors just line up to get zero returns? Of course nuclear power is, has and will be profitable, despite the best efforts of a very well organized sabotage campaign.
This is a meaningless and impossible demand. How am I supposed to know what the 'invisible subsidy' of petroleum is? Even Greer admitted that it just comes down to prices at the end of the day. The price of nuclear energy is low. That's why people spend billions building these plants and operating them. I have already linked papers that show that nuclear is as cheap as fossil fuels if the plants are built correctly at $2000, as in Korea.
He's a crank that projects his own ignorance on nuclear 'fanboys', making snide remarks about them and refuses to provide any factual substantiation at all for his claims. There's no need to look at his 'work', which is free from any basis in fact or scholarly convention.
Wrong. He has said, over and over, that it isn't stagnation that awaits, and the future that he's describing lies outside the limited options you have presented. The future that he describes falls very much outside those options.
This is from an article that I have already linked! Why do you continue to speak so authoritatively about the content of his work if you aren't going to read it? You do not even have an accurate picture of the most basic and central elements to his worldview and positions yet feel comfortable dismissing his work wholesale on the basis that the tiny sliver of it you read does not contain the type of analysis you're looking for.
You have set up a standard which no scientific journal article ever published would pass - you read some of the excerpts and writing, don't see any of the numbers or calculations that were done elsewhere, and then assume that they do not exist and the paper is thus worthless and not worth reading. Yes, he hasn't included the calculations done on EROEI on nuclear plants in his most recent essays, and that is because he has been participating in this discussion for longer than I have been alive, and he doesn't feel the need to re-establish the foundations of his work in every single paragraph of his output afterwards (and given that you haven't even read the articles I linked, I doubt you went back and read his earlier work).
Again, I'm not asking you to go read his entire output if you don't find it engaging - but at the very least you should stop making authoritative claims about work that you have not actually read. If you're going to say that his work is entirely free of fact and scholarly convention then you can totally do that and make a case for it - but only after actually reading and engaging with it! You continue to make basic misunderstandings and mistakes of his position that he was tired of repeatedly resolving a decade ago, and I am not going to continue to reply to this conversation unless you actually read his work before dismissing it: pointing out errors that only exist because you just do not bother to read the articles linked is not a worthwhile use of my time.
Yes and it backs up my point. 'technologies well suited to function within the long-term energy budget of our planet will doubtless blossom in turn' = non-industrial lifestyle, no space travel, no exploitation of the enormous resources of space. What is so hard to understand about this? He is describing stagnation in a preindustrial world with some trinkets.
Because he hasn't done them, because they show that nuclear power is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, as is obvious from reading the papers I linked (which actually provide figures to back up their claims and some analysis of what's actually going on).
Scientific journals demand citations and references from credible sources. Undergraduate level essays demand references. Greer's work would not pass muster at a third-rate university.
Tu quoque.
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