The Nuclear Option

Some of nuclear energy's challenges get a good amount of coverage: politicians unwilling to support it, citizen opposition, and cost overruns and delays at plant currently under construction. Others, less so. And if we discount politics for a moment, the day-to-day economics of new nuclear barely pencil out. Nuclear needs immense capital expenditure vs. other types of generation. Solar gets generous subsidies and doesn't need a lot of opex, wind is similar. And in the US, natural gas is cheap and plentiful, and pairs well with intermittent renewables, and load-following gas turbines are blurring the distinction between baseload generation and peakers.

Despite the wishes of many, pollution externalities are not priced in, and while that is the case and fracking continues to bring up cheap gas, the rule of natgas will continue.

But nuclear's immense capex is a problem nonetheless. While reactor designs purport to be off-the-shelf, the each plant itself is a one-off. There's no institutional memory and hardly any re-use of expertise, there's no economies of scale -- just all the hallmarks of difficult megaprojects. Sound familiar?

This is why research into 'small modular reactors' is promising. Plenty of political barriers remain, but removing some institutional barriers and easing some of the economic ones would improve nuclear energy's prospects.

> France: 44 Billion would be saved by investing in rewables instead of nuclear

>link

I can't read French so I can't comment on this report. I'm not saying it is wrong or your conclusions are wrong. But I would say that there's an unfortunate thing happening and it is that bad information and research is being done. In fact we don't have to go far back in HN history to find this post

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950154

All I'm saying is that you have to be wary of these things (and a lot of people are upset about this, because that's not what science should be. It also gives cannon fodder to global warming deniers...)

But to comment on France specifically, they are basically the only European country making good climate decisions

https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...

Sweden has a great advantage of a lot of natural hydro sources. But something to pay attention to in these countries is how their electricity is generated over the course of a day. You may also want to look at how different countries have fared over time (not including China because you can't make fair comparisons with it).

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?end=2014...

> The last few completed plants in the US (that didn't get canceled) were 20-30 years in the making - and typically over budget and schedule by more than 2x. With some of the cancelled projects over budget by 3-4x.

This is honestly a HUGE problem. And I think everyone pro nuclear agrees with you. There's a lot of reasons why. It isn't just, as others have mentioned, the NRC requiring essentially complete designs. But there are a lot of things that could be fixed by policy changes.

You do also have to consider the cost of human life. Safety is a great concern with energy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

But here's an interesting perspective (I don't think any sane person is arguing for 100% nuclear, or even 50%, but the perspective is interesting).

https://medium.com/@Jorisvandorp/how-much-would-a-100-nuclea...

But I think there is one argument that stands out with nuclear. It is the question of how we transition to "all renewable" or "renewable + fusion". We don't have the technology to handle the storage capacity of solar and wind for periods when there are no solar or wind. I mean we hear a lot about Germany's renewable feats, but look back at that world bank data and you'll notice that between 2009-2014 the trend is flat. So while I think we should sink a lot of R&D money into battery technology (and sequestration), you also need to have a contingency plan. While nuclear is expensive, it is clearly less expensive than what happens if we don't reduce our carbon footprint. The thing is just that we don't have time anymore. We can argue all we want, but with existing technology, the only option is nuclear. And we need to act NOW, not tomorrow. NOW. (now is even too late)

You’d need 0.6% of the continental US land mass for solar panels, and 1 mile by 1 mile of batteries to power the entire US off of solar.

This doesn’t include tens of thousands of EVs sold each month, which is rapidly increasing the aggregate amount of distributed energy storage available to the grid.

And pumping water uphill is a regional solution that requires specific regional geography, to me that does not class as "scalable".

I should be more specific in that to me "scalable" is a solution that can be deployed anywhere without require specific regional properties. Maybe you think this is unneeded and that a lot of region specific solutions can cover the storage requirements.

However another posted did point out that 1 mile by 1 mile of batteries is apparently enough to store US energy requirements.