Impossible to predict, Joe, to what extreme irrational anti-nuclear activists will take their crusade in Texas, or anywhere else. I know you have full confidence they'll be able to shut down nuclear energy in Texas, but you're wrong.

If you want to comment on what the author of the article writes it might add to the discussion. But you don't - you want to post homemade graphs totally unrelated to any of the points he makes. Standard anti-nuclear fare: when backed into a corner by facts, shower the discussion in irrelevant propaganda. Distract.

How about if you show us the same graph, but hour by hour, for the last week? Include gas generation. Show us how nuclear is steady as a rock, how wind and solar are all over the map, and how they're 100% dependent on gas to fill in the holes in their production - you know, the stuff that actually matters to people who live in Texas. Though it's impossible to predict with certainty what energy choices they will make in coming years, my money says reliability will win out over unreliability; that opposition to the immense land footprint of wind, solar and the thousands of miles of transmission necessary to connect them all together will continue to grow; that as the memory of Fukushima fades into the past and the impacts of climate change worsen, nuclear will continue to gain traction as Texans realize wind and solar aren't getting the job done.

But I don't know, and neither do you.

Yes, one reactor at South Texas shut down due to a frozen cooling pipe outside the plant. All pipes were insulated, and the reactor was online 30 hours later.

Have all of Texas's 10,700 wind turbines had heaters installed to prevent them from freezing again in February? If so, how much did it cost?

I've heard engineers at South Texas were able to score some insulation at Home Depot. That and duct tape probably cost < $200.

Richard, in my cycling club I used to ride with the former captain of a nuclear sub. That the public was afraid of fission reactors burning fuel that's half as reactive as that used on submarines, where crews work, eat, and sleep within a few meters of the reactor core for months at a time, was incomprehensible to him.

There will be nuclear accidents in the future - of that, I have no doubt. But like commercial aviation, safety has dramatically improved, and will continue to improve. That a technology with so much energy in so little space had the possibility of disastrous consequences was anticipated by U.S. engineers, but not in other countries. For the USSR and Japan, Chernobyl and Fukushima were lessons that had to be learned the hard way.