Mo' more nukes

The main speakers at the Commonwealth Club’s “Climate One” last Thursday were advocating for either a little or a lot of nuclear to be built on an emergency basis to address climate change, depending on the stage of their argument.  Their foil was a California renewable energy consultant advocating for the standard “solar + storage” model of how we’ll get through the perils of a system mostly made up of intermittent resources.  The main speakers advocated for not closing Diablo as if this were a relatively costless decision, rather than a political process almost certainly doomed, which is I think how PG&E saw it when they announced the plant’s scheduled closing.  They conveniently disregarded the closure under duress of San Onofre a couple of years earlier due to manifest failures in maintenance and materials.  On the other hand, their argument that solar and wind, even augmented by a reasonable amount of battery resource, cannot possibly lead to a fossil-free power system is I think correct.  If the solution to baseload needs, dispatchability during prolonged periods of low intermittent resource generation, and seasonal fluctuations is not nuclear plants, what is it?  There are at least a couple of existing technologies that could meet the need: long=term gravity-based storage, and hydrogen production and later re-use for generation or transportation.  But neither of these technologies is in fact either economic or easily put in place at scale (even if not economic) at this juncture.  Still, building nuclear plants in large numbers is a plan that would take at least a decade to come to fruition even if the right people were somehow placed in power; and the storage and hydrogen technologies are equally likely to come to maturity in that time frame, if fully supported by some government somewhere.