On a Thursday press conference on nuclear energy, well-known climate scientists Drs. Jim Hansen (formerly NASA, now Columbia University), Ken Caldeira (Stanford University), Kerry Emanuel (MIT), and Tom Wigley (Adelaide University) presented and discussed what they called their stark energy challenge.
The presentations of their proposal were short (as their position had been submitted in a media alert prior to the conference) and overall unconvincing. It is clear that there is an “increasing urgency of fully decarbonizing the world economy.” But they didn’t show persuasively, in my view, that “renewables alone cannot realistically meet the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees C, and that a major expansion of nuclear power is essential to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system this century.”
They failed to demonstrate why huge financial resources and few decades should be devoted to developing the fourth generation (light-water) nuclear reactors, as they are recommending, while we know time is of the essence in solving the climate problem and that funding is essential to bringing to market already available renewable technologies.