Your strawman of Jacobson’s position isn’t compelling. First, on carbon capture and sequestration, I’ve published multiple assessments of most approaches to carbon capture and sequestration, and none of the industrial processes scale or provide anything more than a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. As Jacobson points out, it’s much better, cheaper and with few negative externalities to avoid emitting CO2e in the first place than to try to capture it. If you choose not to read his referenced studies that show exactly that, perhaps this will be more to your taste.
As for nuclear, he’s excluding new nuclear from his solution set because it’s unnecessary and unnecessarily slow and expensive, not shutting down the civilian nuclear industry. That there’s nothing for nuclear to do in his model doesn’t mean he’s calling for turning off existing nuclear reactors today.
He makes many very conservative and expensive choices with his model, choices which are clearly showing that an all renewables grid is viable with only the technology we have today at the renewable price points we have today and often with only the approvals in place. For example, on storage, his team leans into very expensive lithium ion, ignores cheaper redox flow technologies and has a very small amount of much cheaper pumped hydro. As he said when I asked him, he’s not modeling every option, but choosing a very defensible subset of options.
Once again, if you aren’t interested in reading his study and finding this out for yourself, then perhaps this might be more to your speed.
There is no requirement for Jacobson and team to include technologies which empirical evidence of the past decade have shown to be expensive and too slow to build. If the nuclear-oriented academics wanted to do their own study with a full and transparent cost case and defend it, that’s their option. There’s no problem with Jacobson excluding nuclear and CCS, anymore than there’s a problem with him excluding vehicle to grid storage or massive lifestyle change assumptions for humans. It’s a set of choices, and his are very conservative and defensible, especially when the urgency of change is pressing and a rapidly deployable technology stack is required.
That nuclear advocates refuse to accept the global empirical reality of the past decade of nuclear around the world isn’t Jacobson’s fault, he’s just a target for their misplaced wrath.
