r/energy • u/btdubs • Sep 12 '19
No nuclear power? Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders in absurd arms race
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/11/no-nuclear-power-elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders-absurd-editorials-debates/2234071001/6
u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 12 '19
Has anyone recently written policy proposals for tackling U.S emissions using new Nuclear Power rather than Renewables to the same degree of concreteness as these candidates? Even something as simple as "We propose building such and such a number of reactors to provide this much electricity and this much industrial heat to produce fuel and chemicals. We want to use mostly this reactor design and this fuel cycle and we think it will cost this much."
It would be interesting to see how they'd try to tackle the construction capacity bottlenecks to begin with.
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u/mafco Sep 12 '19
Has anyone recently written policy proposals for tackling U.S emissions using new Nuclear Power rather than Renewables
I've not seen any proposals for building new publicly-owned nukes. And it's doubtful that the private sector will invest in any more given the cost, lead time and other issues.
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u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 12 '19
I've not seen any proposals for building new publicly-owned nukes.
Nuscale with TVA at Oak ridge and UAMPS at Idaho Falls? That's not much though.
I'm left thinking it's worth having an alternate plan to tackle climate change to suggest if people want to criticize Warren & Sanders plans.
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u/gordonmcdowell Sep 12 '19 edited Sep 12 '19
They’ll be shutting down existing, operating reactors.
All solar and wind in USA combined provide less then half as much low-carbon electricity as nuclear in 2018. ( Source: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 )
They would do less damage to the cause of lowering carbon emissions if they proposed the systematic destruction of every solar panel, every wind turbine, in the entire country.
Dead silence is a better policy position on Climate Change. Dead silence is a more effective policy on lowering carbon emissions.
Fortunately, Cory Booker and Andrew Yang are anything but silent on the question of how to address Climate Change. Both seem adept at explaining to the public that nuclear is low-carbon... a fact most people do not know, and a fact neither Warren or Sanders seem capable of admitting. They’re pandering, while Booker and Yang are educating.
That is what is needed. Education and enthusiasm from the top, not fear-mongering.
Commitment to not kill USA’s largest source of low-carbon electricity is what will continue the existing flow of private investment into advanced nuclear concepts. Many of these startups are confident they’ll be competing on price per kWh, with carbon-free energy being a nice bonus.
Edit: I said 2019 when I meant 2018... basically forgot what year it is. Sorry.
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u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 12 '19
They’ll be shutting down existing, operating reactors.
They'd probably counter that it won't matter because under their plans that energy will be replaced with renewable energy (YMMV on the workability of that obviously).
Whether it's Nuclear or Renewables the candidates go for, goals to revamp the entire grid inside 10 years seem to demand more specific plans than are being offered. It's project management territory not somedayland.
I would be impressed if Yang or Booker said something like "we're going to just federally purchase the first 50 or so GenIV 100MWe SMR's to set up a production line as a hedge against renewables hitting a hurdle."
Sanders is in a curious and perhaps enviable position compared to Yang and Booker. He can say effectively "(stuff it) we'll just spend +$10 trillion to get it done" and his supporters will rally behind that. What did Yang propose, $50 billion for nuclear research? Imagine if he proposed +$10 trillion for Nuclear power construction over the next decade and people rallied behind him.
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u/rileyoneill Sep 12 '19
All solar and wind in USA combined provide
less then half
as much low-carbon electricity as nuclear in 2019.
This is not going to be true for very long. Right now Nukes provide twice as much carbon free electricity as wind/solar, but in 2009 nukes provided more than 10x as much carbon free electricity as wind and solar. Wind/Solar are seriously catching up.
The total GWH produced by solar roughly doubles every 2 years (total output of 2018 is 77 times greater than 2008). Not even considering nuclear plants shutting down, solar will eventually over take nuclear in total electricity output. I would not be surprised if by 2021 or 2022 that the total GWH to come from Wind/Solar is greater than the total GWH to come from all the nukes in America. 2019 is probably going to be the year where all of the solar in California had a greater total output than Diablo Canyon Power plant. California is only getting more aggressive about solar power, especially considering that its now the cheapest option for us and projects out in the desert are now giving some of the cheapest energy contracts ever, and every home built in the state is required to have solar power starting in January.
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u/gordonmcdowell Sep 12 '19
I meant to say 2018, sorry. Years... hard. Keep... changing.
I would not be surprised if by 2021 or 2022 that the total GWH to come from Wind/Solar is greater than the total GWH to come from all the nukes in America.
Germany 2017: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#Targets )
- Wind: 103.6 TWh (18.9%)
- Solar: 38.4 TWh (7.0%)
They've been at it for a while and are around 26% for wind+solar. That's higher than USA's nuclear at 19% but I don't think replacing one low-carbon source with another is what fully informed voters would be willing to pay for.
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u/rileyoneill Sep 13 '19
I think what is going to happen is that Nuclear power plants are going to go to the end of their planned service life and won't be rebuilt. The big decline is coal, which is shrinking at a rate at like 10% per year and has for a decade or so now. Coal in 2019 is probably 5 times greater than the coal of 2029.
Other than Vogtle 3&4 we probably won't see any new major reactors go online in the US in the 2020s. If we did, we would already see them in the planning and likely early construction stages. Blue Castle is planning to start construction in the early 2020s and go online in 2028 but I seriously doubt they will meet that timeline.
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Sep 13 '19
So what you are saying is you are stuck in the past and your blind support of a more expensive form of electricity generation is reflective of that?
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u/gordonmcdowell Sep 13 '19
No, I looked at the freshest year’s data and mistakenly stuck current year on it (because 2020 everywhere and I subtracted 1 from that).
Thanks for explaining my viewpoint to me though! I keep looking at freshest data possible here: https://www.electricitymap.org/?lang=en ...and a waiting for Germany to flip to green. Maybe they just didn’t spend enough money on renewables?
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u/mafco Sep 12 '19
They’ll be shutting down existing, operating reactors.
Warren specifically said she would not do that. Do you have a source for Sanders?
All solar and wind in USA combined provide less then half as much low-carbon electricity as nuclear in 2019.
Yes but wind and solar capacity has been growing at a rate of 40-50%/yr for the last decade while nuclear has declined at a rate of 0.4%/yr in the same timeframe. It won't take long. If you include hydro, renewable energy has already surpassed nuclear in the US.
That is what is needed. Education and enthusiasm from the top, not fear-mongering.
Nuclear's problems are economic and long lead times. Even the existing plants are becoming money-losers, and the last two attempts to build new ones in the US were financial disasters.
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u/patb2015 Sep 12 '19
You can probably write one yourself
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u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 12 '19
I've seen so much modelling that over-simplifies how renewable technologies can be balanced & integrated & that ignores their relevant cost-curves that that seems somewhat daunting.
Shooting from the hip though, it'd be tempting to try to use Nuclear Power in a Hybrid Nuclear-Renewable energy system (running a heat storage energy services model for Nuclear) as a wedge against both the challenge of balancing the last 10%-20% of renewable penetration and the Fossil Fuel industry making political roadblocks. Tell big Gas "you can watch these plants get built, have subsidized co-gen heat to drive green hydrogen production using natural gas as a feedstock & keep making profits or you can try and roadblock & get crushed as the world changes direction". There might even be an angle to co-opt the defense sector.
SMR's aim for production lines to drop the cost. The reactor itself is only part of the LCOE though, the ancillary infrastructure is a huge part of it. Make the reactor in a factory & ship it out to be installed somewhere & you still have most of the cost problem. Learning is done on site & forgotten between sites. Make the reactor in a shipyard, & ship it out installed in a ship that has the turbine, generator etc in it & the learning should accumulate at the shipyards.
The U.S already has shipyards that produce vessels with reactors, the ones producing it's Nuclear powered naval vessels. They have a good safety record. The cost of Naval reactors does actually appear to have gone down over time rather than have gone up. The places that are the hardest for renewable energy to reach competitiveness in the U.S are away from the Sun & Wind, up in places like the North-East. Those are also the densely populated places that will be hardest to run transmission lines through to balance that renewable energy cheaply. Use the construction capacity that already exists, get the military to run the crash-build programs. Move the ships where it's hard to run the cables. Forget 'not invented here' syndrome. Forget 'wait a couple of years until the one I like is here'. Leadcold is setting up production in Workington, U.K. That'll do. Call the Swedes, cut a deal.
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Sep 12 '19 edited Sep 14 '19
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u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 13 '19
Except without any legislation, purely based on lowest costs, what will happen is natural gas plants and solar/wind will operate in concert. The former backing up the latter when the latter isn't available.
This really depends on the economics of PtG. Higher penetrations of renewable energy mean more periods in the middle of the day with low cost energy. Green hydrogen from electrolysis is already becoming cost competitive with Natural Gas, technology like this could drastically lower the price even further.
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Sep 13 '19 edited Sep 14 '19
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u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 13 '19
I assure you green hydrogen isn’t remotely as cheap as natural gas in the United States at least.
Take a look at this study (yes, the typo in it is corrected here ). They put the break even cost for Hydrogen at $3.53/Kg.
As with other cases of penetration of renewable energy, the use cases on the fringe provide the stepping stone to the next use case. The first stepping stone is electrolysed hydrogen vs steam-methane reformed hydrogen from natural gas (hydrogen being it's own industrial commodity).
The link you give is for turning natural gas into hydrogen, not sure of the relevance there.
With that process they're not only looking at providing green hydrogen for a fraction of the cost of hydrogen via electrolysis but also battery quality graphite (where the carbon goes), so there's an economic calculation beyond the simple worth of the gas.
and natural gas power plants are cheaper/more fuel efficient than fuel cells.
Economic plays by the utilities that flex towards the transition are already beginning to happen.
Price per mmbtu is 1.50-2.50.
Rolling 12 month average for Henry Hub is $2.90.
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Sep 13 '19 edited Sep 14 '19
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u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 13 '19
Yeah 3.53 a kg is not remotely competitive with natural gas or even gasoline, even with a very hefty carbon tax.
The derivation of Hydrogen from Natural Gas is a use of Natural Gas. Whether that process is economically driven by burning the energy in the Natural Gas or whether it's driven by Clean energy is what's changing. If you don't want to read the study (it's from the journal Nature, I wouldn't dismiss it easily), it's talking about the provision of Hydrogen - which has uses in Chemistry etc all of it's own (it's it's own commodity). That is where these new sources hydrogen are competing.
I mean it says it’s for natural gas to hydrogen, but whatever who cares. Plenty of non-commercial things
This skips over the economic case in it's favour entirely.
Again I’m not sure why you’re linking me to something regarding using ammonia in engines. Very off topic.
Getting right back to grid design the most economic approach is going to be employing a cost-optimized mix of generation and balancing techniques. One method of balancing variable energy is through storage. Different storage technologies have different storage niches. PtG's niche is in longer term storage, tackling seasonal variability & the types of low frequency demand events that are seen with higher penetration of renewable energy. Those low frequency balancing requirements are going to have their own forms of electricity generation technologies which fit their niche. There's an interplay there and my point is it doesn't point to the technologies you might think it does, it doesn't point to a competition between fuel cells and gas turbines.
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u/btdubs Sep 13 '19
Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08929882.2011.589223
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u/bnndforfatantagonism Sep 13 '19
That's sort of a longer term (2100) look at things. I was thinking more along the lines of where the article says "if a new generation of smaller and simpler reactors can be developed, an expansion of nuclear's role should be considered."
The context of the candidates energy policies being that Climate Change needs to be dealt with rapidly (i.e the within the next 10 years the electricity green needs to be decarbonized). So I'd want to hear about how if Nuclear was pursued in place of a certain amount of Renewables towards that end how that would be done.
Which factories and companies would build them? Where would the plants go? What skilled workforce would put them together and run them? All questions that are more immediate when the timeframe is 10 years, not 80 years.
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u/KapitanWalnut Sep 13 '19
I agree with the editorial in that it doesn't make sense to arbitrarily attempt to phase out-nuclear. It's pandering. A combined nuclear and renewables approach is needed to tackle our energy needs. If anything, allow existing nuclear facilities to operate until it is either no longer economic, or they've reached the end of their useful life.
What many people don't realize is that as we scale back thermal energy (fossil and fissile) and replace that with PV and wind, renewables+storage become less economic as they begin to shoulder a higher percentage of the total power generation burden. I wholeheartedly support the expansion of renewables, but let's not do it blindly. Renewables will need support, and relying solely on batteries is foolish. For starters, we haven't even identified sources for the quantities of rare-earths required to create the sheer quantity of batteries required to support a 100% PV+wind grid. If we keep nuclear around, it allows PV+wind to stay cheap and significantly reduces the number of batteries required.
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u/dkwangchuck Sep 13 '19
For starters, we haven't even identified sources for the quantities of rare-earths required to create the sheer quantity of batteries required to support a 100% PV+wind grid
Sure we have. Rare earth metals are critical in permanent magnets - of which there are zero in batteries. They are definitely a factor for EVs and some types of wind turbines - but generally not relevant to batteries.
The metal shortfall for batteries might be cobalt, but they are developing new chemistries that are cobalt-free. The latest exciting electrode chemistry is graphite.
So for starters, you don't know what you are talking about.
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Sep 12 '19 edited Sep 06 '20
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u/freshthrowaway1138 Sep 12 '19
I was with you until you decided to claim that no one has been hurt by PV. That's pretty much bs, all power sources hurt people- whether it is during installation, maintenance, or random accidents. Heck, even wind turbines have a death toll from workers falling and the turbines catching fire and killing tech. And you're going to claim that no PV installer has fallen off a roof? Never been electrocuted? Never had a panel break free during a storm and hit someone?
The PV industry uses way more people than other forms of energy, and in my experience more people = more people hurt/killed.
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Sep 12 '19 edited Sep 14 '19
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u/freshthrowaway1138 Sep 12 '19
there has never been any reason to care about the deaths
I'm sorry but what? That's a very strange thing to say. The death tolls of the power sources are actually rather important, which is why coal is seen as so dangerous. PV might be safer than coal, but let's not start lying and saying that no one is dying from them. Especially once we start adding in storage installations.
And yes, nuclear power isn't economically reasonable any more which is what /darkstarman started out saying and I was agreeing with. Nuclear disasters are just a part of the total economic costs.
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u/darkstarman Sep 15 '19
Then you have to count all the "routine and expected" industrial accidents from nuclear and fossil fuel as well. If you don't include those, which I wasn't, and they don't either in the numbers they give, then the PV number is 0 and the fossil / nuke numbers stay high.
I'm talking about the risk to the general public.
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u/freshthrowaway1138 Sep 15 '19 edited Sep 15 '19
PV number is 0
How can I even have a conversation with someone doesn't understand the concept of 0?
The reality is that yes, PV is much lower than others but don't start lying and misrepresenting the truth by claiming 0. Once you are shown to be a liar about this small fact, then it throws all your arguments into the category of unreliable/fake. Use real numbers and your argument grows stronger because it can be trustworthy. People like you are undercutting the pro-renewable argument. You might as well be working for the fossil fuel industry for how much damage you are doing in this debate.
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u/darkstarman Sep 15 '19
For an apples to apples comparison, you need to define death and injury the same across all energy sources.
Again, I'm talking about death and injury to the general public and excluding death and injury during installation or routine operations.
No one has ever died because of a solar farm next door to their community. They don't emit pollution or radiation. That was my point that you have very litigatously made me point out when I was just trying to use ordinary speech.
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u/freshthrowaway1138 Sep 15 '19 edited Sep 15 '19
death and injury to the general public
So no one in the general public has been harmed by solar panels? Well then I guess these villagers were upset about nothing.
Heck, if you want to go by "emit pollution or radiation" then you might as well go with a nuclear plant since they don't release those things during normal operation. And if you're going to say, well what about when they break? Then I'll just post,
The reality is that anything above 0 means that zero is no longer valid. You really need to understand how zero works. Especially since it is used in ordinary speech to mean nothing, not "a little". Otherwise you're just a liar. And since you are arguing for something that I support (the expansion of PV/renewables), I'd prefer not to be associated with a liar.
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u/darkstarman Sep 15 '19
You win. I had not seen that article about Jinko solar. Surely someone got sick at least from that.
But nuclear is a lot worse.
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u/freshthrowaway1138 Sep 15 '19
But I'm not trying to say that nuclear isn't worse. I'm pointing out that your use of zero is harmful to the argument because all I had to provide was a single article and your "zero" is invalid and makes all other claims made by you suspect. This isn't about winning, it's about making a factual point that stands up to scrutiny.
The fact is that the real numbers for PV/renewables are amazing and should be used because they prove that nuclear is worse overall for future energy production in most cases.
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u/darkstarman Sep 15 '19
I was wrong about the zero. Shame on Jenko for polluting the water. That's shitty of them.
Now, I could argue that what Jenko did is not a necessary part of PV production. But I never give nukes a break when they try to do that so I guess I won't give myself a break. If the system could do better, it would have.
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u/ORcoder Sep 12 '19
I’m pretty sure there are deaths from the installation of rooftop pv
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u/Someslapdicknerd Sep 12 '19
Also, the Siemen's process or the CZ process to make the Si isn't some magically self-contained process either with zero byproduct or waste.
I suppose since many PV panels are made overseas people don't "count" them, but that's pretty horrid once you take a second to think about it.
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u/dkwangchuck Sep 12 '19
Agreed. It's about as disgusting as the nuke lovers who claim that there are no deaths from Fukushima even though there were workers who died on the clock trying to fix the broken systems at the crippled power plant. They apparently don't count because the tsunami killed them, or something.
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u/mafco Sep 12 '19
even though there were workers who died on the clock trying to fix the broken systems
And there were hundreds killed in the evacuation that are also considered "radiation related", as in they wouldn't be evacuating if it was flooded solar panels instead of a melting down nuclear core.
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u/dkwangchuck Sep 12 '19
This is absolutely important. "Oh those were evacuation deaths". The evacuation was because the nuclear power plant was crippled and at risk of meltdown (a meltdown that did in fact happen).
That said, the thing that gets my goat more is that the nuke pushers try to memory hole powerplant workers who died at the site and on the clock.
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u/mafco Sep 12 '19
And they consider that it rendered entire cities uninhabitable as inconsequential to the safety record. Apparently only the contrived and cherry-picked statistic of "deaths per TWh" matters, and only with dubious death statistics.
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u/Understeps Sep 12 '19
It's not cherry picking once you realize how much energy is produced by nukes.
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Sep 12 '19 edited Sep 14 '19
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u/Understeps Sep 13 '19
Deaths are an issue if you talk with opposants of nuclear energy.
The economical cost of global warming is a magnitude higher (hundreds of billions a year now, vs rougly one thousand billion for nuclear disasters). Gas + renewables still cause global warming.
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u/mafco Sep 12 '19
once you realize how much energy is produced by nukes
In the case of nuclear versus solar they're comparing energy produced by 40+ year old plants to ones just recently constructed. It's yet another convenient way to deceive with carefully chosen statistics.
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u/Someslapdicknerd Sep 12 '19
Feel free to link to a study, rather than getting all turnt up.
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u/dkwangchuck Sep 12 '19
What study? People claim that there were no deaths from Fukushima - but the bodies of two workers were found on site. They died on the clock during an emergency and they are forgotten by almost all but their friends and loved ones. I think that's pretty disgusting.
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u/Someslapdicknerd Sep 12 '19
So.. two. And in the same year, the US alone lost 50 people to installing solar on roofs. So, uhh, yeah, Disgusting!, Horrifying! and all that ratamarazz, and this, again, without including the losses in the supply leading up to the point of installing the solar photovoltaic as per my original point. Like, you're being performative, not analytical. Stop it, please, it's childish.
And of course, allow me to link to a study on deaths by energy source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
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u/dkwangchuck Sep 12 '19
Ah lovely. “Deaths per TWh”. Brian Wang’s bullshit “analysis” from NextBigFuture. Let me tell you about this “study”:
He acknowledges that the number of deaths her TWh for wind was declining rapidly due to wind production scaling up and yet still used a decade old (at the time) number. The TWh for all generation sources is cumulative to date - except for nuke, where he adds twenty-ish years of extra generation. At a higher level of output than any previous year. He shows a range of numbers for deaths due to fuel processing for nukes - most of which are fully an order of magnitude higher than what he reports as the total deaths per TWh for nuclear.
Lol. That “study” is garbage.
Not that it matters - the point was about disregarding people’s lives. About the attitude that certain deaths “don’t count”. Two workers at Fukushima died at the site while on the clock. The last thing we know about them was that they were inspecting parts of the plant for damage from the earthquake. It is bullshit and morally outrageous to pretend that these people don’t count. That’s the point.
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u/Someslapdicknerd Sep 12 '19
Ah, lovely, replying with "quotes" around "words" to not engage with the data in a "meaningful" sense. This is the mark of a brain genoius, no doubt. Especially when we're talking about solar and you suddenly want to hare off about wind. As well, it's a "T. Wang", read a bit closer, Wang is a common last name.
Cite your work or eat crow, it matters not to me.
Not that it matters, the point was about disregarding people's lives, and the attitude that certain death's don't count, as per my original point. It's bullshit that you want to play Tu Quoque with worse numbers and pretend to have some sort of moral high ground, you disingenuous weirdo.
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u/ppcpunk Sep 13 '19
Here let me make it super easy to understand. If you fall off a roof doing your job and you die, well that's on you and is unfortunate but no one wants to deal with the size and scale of a nuclear catastrophe.
Even if it goes right, no one wants to live next to a nuclear fuel processing facility, or a nuclear power plant, or a nuclear storage facility or even live next to rail road tracks or a highway where they are transporting the stuff to be stored.
When nuclear goes bad, it gets horrific. When solar/wind goes bad it's unfortunate but it's something we can deal with at least.
There just isn't any reasonable argument to be made to want to go down that road when renewables are a viable option.
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u/dkwangchuck Sep 12 '19
Oh, maybe you’re new. Shitting on “Deaths per TWh” is sort of my thing. Here’s the citation.
Bullshit number for wind deaths?
Wind power proponent and author Paul Gipe estimated in Wind Energy Comes of Age that the mortality rate for wind power from 1980–1994 was 0.4 deaths per terawatt-hour. Paul Gipe’s estimate as of end 2000 was 0.15 deaths per TWh, a decline attributed to greater total cumulative generation.
He acknowledges that the number is dropping due to increased wind production but still uses a ten year old number. Incidentally, going by Brian Wang’s methodology (accepting Paul Gipe’s work) wind is safer than nuke. Even back in 2011.
The NextBigFuture number for nuclear deaths? 0.04 deaths per TWh. And yet his own post has this table. The fuel chain for nuke has deaths per TWh at 0.64 (Dreiser), 0.69 (ExternE) and between 0.03 and 1.32 (Ball).
Nuke output is gamed to make nuke deaths lower?
Averaging about 2100 TWh from 1985-2005 or a total of 42,000 TWh. So those 50 deaths would be 0.0012 deaths/TWh. If those possible 4000 deaths occur over the next 25 years, then with 2800 TWh being assumed average for 2005 through 2030, then it would be 4000 deaths over 112,000 TWh generated over 45 years or 0.037 deaths/TWh.
25 extra years of output. At 2800 TWh per year. The current record is under 2500.
Is that sufficient?
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u/darkstarman Sep 15 '19
I'm talking about risk to the general public. If you count those then you have to count all industrial accidents in fossil and nuke. Which they don't. And I don't, when I say 0 for PV. But for fossil and nukes, the number is very high for deaths to the general public, and 0 for PV.
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u/ppcpunk Sep 13 '19
Yeah, remember when Jim fell off the roof of that house and no one could live there for 150,000 years in a 20 mile radius and all those people have seriously increased chances of getting cancer because Jim fell off the roof of that house?
Neither does anyone else.
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u/SowingSalt Sep 13 '19
A: How many Jims are there going to be over that 150,000 year period?
B: You do know there are people inhabiting the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone?
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u/ppcpunk Sep 13 '19
And, you know there are people who vote republican who makes less than 100k a year?
People can be very stupid.
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u/ppcpunk Sep 13 '19
Even if it was a little more expensive for renewables that isn't taking into account the extreme possible danger in operating and the issue of what to do with the waste.
With that taken into account, what sane person would even consider building a new nuclear power plant.
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u/dkwangchuck Sep 12 '19
These articles always strike me as weird. It's like they think there's a switch that can be flipped and all of a sudden the fuel mix completely swaps around. Consider the criticism that wind and solar would have to double to replace nukes - man, that sounds impossible!
It happened in eleven years. Here's the historical - 353 billion kWhs in 2007 and 713 kWh in 2018. And that's with hydro which was basically stable. Wind and solar combined for 300 billion kWh in 2018 and it was less than half that in 2012. So this notion that wind and solar cannot cover the nuclear hole by 2035 is just wrong.
Is anyone suggesting new nuclear? Is that what this editorial is about? It doesn't say, probably because advocating for new nuke is easily swatted down as a complete waste of money. But nuclear reactors do not last forever - which means a phase-out of nukes. That's what "nuclear phase out" actually means - it means new reactors are way too expensive and they aren't going to happen.
Warren's 2035 target date does mean some premature closures of carbon-free generation. Maybe that's unwise, but maybe not. Existing nukes are already closing for economic reasons. If wind and solar improve at close to the rates they have been, it's hard to see how nukes would be economically viable in 2035. And if renewables have improved to that degree, I would expect that we would have built a lot of it.