Last edited Wed May 20, 2026, 10:49 AM - Edit history (1)

...is the second most reliable form of energy, after nuclear. The solar scam cannot operate without fossil fuel back up.

There are of course people around who like to carry on about batteries, and worse, hydrogen, to address the grotesque lack of reliability of so called "renewable energy" but any form of redundancy raises not only cost but environmental impact as well.

It is an atrocious falsehood to claim that so called "renewable energy" is an alternative to coal or any fossil fuel. The common representation to the contrary is only a recent add on for advocates of solar and wind. The main interest of these advocates has been to attack the only more reliable form of primary energy than coal, nuclear energy. If solar energy, at a cost of trillions of dollars, is so great, why are people still building and operating coal plants?

In China, the world's largest producer of solar junk, over 90 coal plants are in various stages of construction. One may note that China also has 39 nuclear plants under construction and operates 61 existing nuclear plants. While the rate at which they are building nuclear plants is slower than the rate of building coal plants there, the fact is that every nuclear plant in China or anywhere else is a coal plant not built.

This is not true of either solar or wind. The antinuke "renewable energy will save us," Germans are hedging their claims that they can phase out coal by 2038. Unless they reverse their antinuke stupidity they won't without access to methane. It's clear from recent experience that there is no assurance they can get methane, the second worst greenhouse gas in our atmosphere.

This recent marketing that so called "renewable energy" has anything to do with addressing fossil fuel use is nonsense. So called "renewable energy" depends on access to fossil fuels. Solar and wind have never kept pace with the growth in the use of fossil fuels, never mind had any effect on representing a pathway to eliminating their use.

If one shuts a coal plant for a few hours because the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, one has to burn coal for a period in which the plant will produce no electricity to bring up steam.

The only nation that was coal dependent and successfully phased coal out is France. They did so half a century ago, but the rest of humanity, still reliant on coal to this day, failed to learn from this unambiguous and clear result.

Have a nice day.

...period while providing the cheapest electricity in the first world. The engineers who did this worked with slide rules and, if they were lucky, computers less powerful than a modern Apple watch.

The new first world power, having emerged from third world status in about 30 years - starting from a position far below the US in the 2nd half of the 20th century - built 60 reactors in the last 25 years and has an additional 39 under construction. The rate at which the Chinese build nuclear reactors is not slowing; it's increasing.

I don't credit soothsaying about what nuclear engineers can and cannot do from critics who obviously know zero about nuclear engineering other than that they hold nuclear engineers' abilities in contempt. Their chants don't mean a thing.

The boy my wife and I raised is working with people who print reactor cores, fuels and components using laser based additive manufacturing tools. Components so manufactured have already been installed in the commercial Watts Bar reactors.

I think my son has a deeper understanding of nuclear engineering than critics poking around the internet with a highlighting tools. I respect his vision and that of his colleagues, and of course the Chinese, Russian, Korean and French nuclear engineers who are serving on the front lines to save what is left to save, and can be saved, than I do people making tiresome claims denigrating their abilities.

Solar and wind junk have never, even with trillions of dollars and mindless worldwide enthusiasm and cheering for them, now carried on with all the enthusiasm of a rapturous religious cult, in any year, produced as much primary energy combined as nuclear reactors produce each year in a climate of vituperation and irrational fear.

The game is up. The results of all the soothsaying now need to compare with the observed results. The results are dire.

The planet is burning. Crops are failing. Desertification is accelerating. The planetary atmosphere is collapsing and the rising seas are dying. Glaciers on which the world fresh water supplies depend are disappearing.

It's a little late, and in my view, excreable, to be spitting on the capabilities of nuclear engineers simply because one is incompetent to know what they do.

Have a nice afternoon.

I’m not your straw man

Again, irrespective of what one claims for himself, herself, or theirself, if a strawman exists I like the one who wanted a brain, the one in the Wizard of Oz.

I am responding, I claim, to a regurgitated assertion by a syndic at the IEA. Now, if someone thinks I need to agree with everything that comes from a regurgitated source or else one holds the source in contempt, it does not fall to me to help them understand what critical thinking is.

I have spent my entire adult life reading technical documents. I have overseen experiments to check the reproducibility of their claims. It's a mixed bag to be honest. What one learns in practice is called "critical thinking."

A publication of the IEA authored by a scientist or writer there is not a religious text. It's an opinion.

Now if one reads the regurgitated text with respect to nuclear energy, the author states that for nuclear energy to reach a certain level - one that no other system of energy may be able to meet - it would require doing what has never been done before. In 1970 no nation had ever eliminated coal dependence by building nuclear reactors. This did not stop the French from doing it. In that same year, no nation had built more than 100 reactors. That did not stop the Americans from doing it.

My political heroine is Eleanor Roosevelt who is represented in my avatar on this website. I live by many of her aphorusms.

A favorite is "You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

I think that nuclear engineers are quite capable of doing what has never been done before. In at least three countries, the US, France and China they have done precisely that, done what's not been done before.

If one wants respect, learning how to understand what a writer actually is saying, strikes me as a reasonable path to earning it. However no one offering an opinion should be treated as oracular. This includes writers at the IEA. The opinions there are not like tablets carried down a mountain by Moses. They're opinions.

Now on a personal level, I don't care if my remarks represent the creation of "straw men." This claim is often directed at me by the class of people I designate as "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes, a designation I attach to my opinion of their level of intellectual honesty, if "intellectual" is the right term to apply.

However, again, to do what I often do, to repeat, if I were creating strawman, I would prefer to create those who wished they had a brain.

That is a straw man argument.

Natural gas will be the energy resource that destroys the world as we know it.

The solar industry presents graphs like this as "good news."

It's obviously not.

In their “Net Zero” Scenario, the International Energy Association calls for "unabated fossil fuels” (i.e. coal & natural gas) to be used as a support for "variable renewables" (e.g. PV, Wind) for a while, however, "increasingly for flexibility and capacity adequacy" (i.e. those "fossil fuel" plants will be run “as needed" not "24/7/365.”)

IEA (2025), World Energy Outlook 2025, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2025, Licence: CC BY 4.0 (report); CC BY NC SA 4.0 (Annex A)

As variable renewables such as solar PV and wind account for a rising share of generation, dispatchable capacity plays a critical role to ensure electricity security. Long lead-times for nuclear limits its role in the near term, but installed nuclear capacity in the NZE Scenario increases 70% by 2035 from the current level, and by 2050 it is two-and-a-half times higher. By the 2030s, the nuclear industry delivers annual additions of around 40 GW per year (Box 7.3). Hydropower capacity also expands strongly, with generation increasing more than 1.5-times by 2050. Unabated fossil fuel plants are operated increasingly for flexibility and capacity adequacy, and consequently their installed capacity falls more slowly than their output across the Outlook period. Fossil fuel plants equipped with CCUS and plants fired with hydrogen or ammonia are also deployed, providing additional low-emissions dispatchable capacity.

SunZia is a wind farm in New Mexico that recently came online. Part of the project was a HVDC line to Arizona (I assume that CA and AZ are already connected). I am looking forward to see what the data looks like in late summer.

Link to tweet

They’re so inconvenient.