Dr James Hansen himself said:

"Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy."

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/08/05/hansen-energy-kool-aid/

This is the way I see it.
Any new generation system capable of being backup will require many
years of development and proving.
We do not have that time.
Therefore we must adopt anything readily available.
With nuclear the only question is can we afford to build say, my guess,
5 large nuclear stations ?
Can we afford not to build them ?

To me that seems to be the only argument worth spending time on.

Can we afford *not* to Bazz? The retail price of coal electricity is only half the total cost of coal to society: the other half is in the health bill. Nuclear doesn't do that. Various prices are quoted for nuclear, and most of them are the one-of-a-kind builds.

What we need is to let GE start building their PRISM reactors ASAP. It's a GenIV nuclear waste-breeding reactor that will eat nuclear waste and convert (most) of it into hundreds of years of clean energy. (We do have to bury the real nuclear waste, fission products, for 300 years, but that's child's play compared to 100,000 years!)
http://gehitachiprism.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(reactor)

Once GE start building their PRISMS on a production line, we'll probably see nuclear come down under $2 billion per GW, maybe even down closer to $1.5bn or even $1bn per GW power station? Nuclear power is like cars. We *could* build expensive Rolls Royces one at a time, or we can put them up on the production line and start pumping out a reactors every quarter. Then all that reliable abundant electricity can replace oil at night as we charge EV's or recycle boron pellets or split water for hydrogen to put on our cars. Then we'll find less smog in our cities, less people in our hospitals, less money flushed down the public health bill and more credibility on the international stage as we finally stop our carbon emissions. Sounds good to me!

Could be Max, but we have to leave oil & coal before they leave us.
The ERoEI of coal has fallen from 80 in 1930 to around 25 now.
Oil is worse as its ERoEI has fallen from 100 to around 10 now.

So we need to get ahead of the decline so we can use them to build the new regime.
Tried to explain this to my MHR but they just do not want to know.

Hi Bazz,
are you the Bazz that used to be on yahoo's ROEOZ? If so, we've chatted before, I'm also Eclipse Now. There's no way peak oil or gas or coal are going to hit us before we can build out enough nukes. Sadly (and catastrophic from a climate point of view) we have centuries of coal we can easily get at a high enough EROEI. We can't even burn all the remaining oil alternatives (like tar sands and shale oil) from a climate point of view. So we've got to do what James Hansen recommends, and start mass producing 115 reactors a year.

Cheers!

Max, that was a long time ago and I only was there a short time.
Well peak crude oil hit us 10 years ago last month and is the cause
of the low GDP everywhere and the fall in demand together with the low price.
Most people are surprised at the low price but it was exactly as predicted by Kenneth Deffeyes and others.
Tar Sands and tight shale oil are in the process of winding down now
but may start up again as the price rises at the start of a third cycle.
A lot will depend on whether the Wall St financiers get sucked in again.
Currently we are in the second volatile price cycle.
We will need a backup of some sort but only nuclear is immediately ready to go.
The problem is that the highest price the economy can afford is
lower than the well head price that the tight shale and tar sands
producers can break even at.
They are still producing but just to pay interest.
The well count has fallen from 1600 to under 600. That tells its own story.