Closing perfectly good nuclear power plants decades ahead of schedule is a bad idea if you care about the environment, especially if you care about carbon emissions. That’s because nuclear is the best source of low-carbon energy and actually produces most of our low-carbon electricity, over 800 billion kWhs – twice as much as all renewables combined. And twice as much as hydro.
More importantly, the U.S. nuclear fleet avoided 547 million metric tons of CO2 in 2017, similar to most years. At the same time, hydro only avoided 203 million metric tons, wind 176 million metric tons, solar 37 million metric tons, and everything else less then 15 million.
