Four points:

The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.

1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for “other”.

It’s not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they’re so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the “other” (which is about 10-25GW).

5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.

Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.

That’s about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.

Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it’s fossil fuel propaganda.

It is obviously obviously true that it’s a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.

“Baseload generator” isn’t a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn’t fit into a soundbite like winddon’tblowsundon’tshine.

Here’s an example of a full plan https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/major-publications/integrated-system-plan-isp/2022-integrated-system-plan-isp

Or a simpler analysis on the same grid: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/

For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.

Here’s a broad overview of a slightly simplified model https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z demonstrating similar is possible everywhere.

Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of “other” generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn’t from electricity and has different reliability constraints.

You’d have thought it was obvious, but everyone I’ve ever met IRL thought they’d be cheaper forever.

Smugly attempting to mock people who care about animal welfare doesn’t justify all of the other harms you are doing.

Real meat from animals is good for you

It’s objectively bad for you in the quantities eaten by the west. Cutting out red meat, milk and most of the other animal products from your diet is measurably better for your health.

Stop giving billions to giant multinational cattle farming companies. It’s just as large an emissions source as oil (which you can also stop funding directly by avoiding driving where possible and going solar-powered electric for the rest)

So stop giving money to giant agribusiness corporations to subsidize the most polluting food source. Got it.

If the entire world turned vegan would it make a difference?

…yes. Plainly and obviously. Most land use would be gone overnight. Deforestation would stop immediately as would the second largest source of methane, one of the largest sources of NO2, and billions of tonnes of CO2 per year (about a quarter of all emissions). No other single initiative other than maybe ending urban driving would come close.

If you’re in the global top 50% there is absolutely nothing stopping you from switching to a primarily plant based diet, and if you’re in the bottom 50% you probably don’t eat enough meat to be a major impact.

Someone with a coal or nuclear plant pays to keep transmitting power so they don’t have to turn it off.

Some (not great) subsidy schemes for wind also pay out regardless of market prices, but those are less common.

Only have to get rid of 1% or so to fix it. And it’s not the groups you’re dogwhistling genocide of because they contribute an order of magnitude less than you do.

I can see them now:

“Biden is so weak he won’t even call for the extermination of minorities, vote Trump!”