Dude it seems a little naive to me, to believe that the government really is pushing nuclear because they think it is some kind of environmental solution, compared with things like solar.
Again look at Vietnam. Even with lukewarm support of solar, they asked folk to produce solar farms at their own expense, promising to buy power from them via grid connection. They expected 850MW but got 16GW, and their grid could only handle 2GW of solar max.
It took around 18 months to implement that 16GW of solar, by a number of communities self funded by local bank loans, working in parallel, mostly independently of one another.
If the government had funded and co-ordinated the effort, it could have been many times more than that capacity, in an even shorter timescale.
Now they are questioning the need to even have a grid, because it takes three years to upgrade the girid, but an immediate solution enabling all of the farms to distribute and sell their energy is just to fit hydrogen backup in each farm, and ship out the excess hydrogen to wherever needed, effectively replacing fossil fuels. Most vehicles can be easily converted to hydrogen, even EVs, by swapping out the battery in each for a reversible hydrogen fuel cell.
Why even bother upgrading their grid, when they realise that with hydrogen fitted, revenue generated by the sales of hydrogen can easily be channeled back into further expanding the solar capacity, to the level where no grid is required.
With that done, they will have achieved zero emissions energy supply, and zero emissions transport, in one leap.
Even better, in the end it is all for free, since the farms can be maintained indefinitely on their own revenue, replacing the odd solar panels whenever needed, so all all initial outlays become insignificant, compared with the scaled up end-result of the solar enegy coming in, vs the money spent to get to self-sustaning solar
So sfectively, everyone will have free power, and even free money.
By the time the first nuclear plants get to commisioning (7.5 years), the solar farms will already have the field done and dusted,. Tthere will be no point in turning it on, it can't compete with solar energy on financial cost of energy, because nuclear certainly isn't free, nor can it be claimed to even be clean, it isn't clean, it has a pollutive end product of radioactive waste, that someone has to deal with
Does this argument still make me anti-environment? :)
