Why California May Go Nuclear

That's... not really true. Cost to build out nuclear power capacity remains much (seriously, MUCH) higher than for solar or wind.

It's true that nuclear is carbon free, really quite safe, and very useful. You certainly don't want to be deliberately decomissioning reactors in a world where we're still trying to get legacy coal plants off the grid. But if you're going to spend $100M on new capacity, I want to see numbers that say this is actually better than buying a bunch of windmill blades.

It's a similar situation to hydro power. Dams are clean in a carbon sense but "bad" in lots of other ecological ways. No one is pushing for new dams, even if we all tolerate the ones that are already there.

(Personally, I find the arguments about how hard waste is to dispose of deeply unconvincing. It's treated as a stick to beat people with, rather than an engineering problem to be solved, and one that is, frankly, almost entirely solved already in a number of ways.)

There are a wide variety of ways to use nuclear power for propulsion, such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket NASA has recently been renewing investigations into this, as nuclear rockets have a much better story for getting into the rest of the solar system in some reasonably period of time.

You can ride on explosions, but, I mean, it's kinda brute force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... That said, if there was a "asteroid impact in three years that will wipe out humanity", this would be our best chance of lofting enough $STUFF into space to maybe survive as a species.

1) A good size chunk of California is seismically active, which is generally a bad idea for nuclear power plant placement.

2) Nuclear power plants require large water sources nearby for cooling. Large chunks of California where power is actually needed are essentially deserts without lakes or reservoirs that can be easily used for this without environmental concerns. You could place them on the coast, but this brings its own set of environmental problems and potential dangers.

3) Nuclear power plants are not quick to build. We're talking 5+ years to get one up and running, even in the ridiculously optimistic estimates from industry proponents. So you need to make the case that in 5 years when one is running it will be better than if we had built more solar + wind + battery over the same period of time (a solar farm can be constructed in a few months, battery storage can be installed in weeks).

4) Nuclear waste is not a solved problem, no matter what proponents tell you. The solution right now is to just kind of keep it hanging around mostly secured locations and hope for the best. Long-term storage proposals have still not gone anywhere, so you're basically just hoping that nothing terrible happens until there's political and financial will to do something about it.

5) Power requirements per capita have been mostly flat or dropping for years in the US, and this is expected to accelerate as homeowners continue to install their own supplemental power systems. Building more gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants is a huge investment with a questionable ROI given this fact.

To me, nuclear power is a solution whose time has likely already passed. It just doesn't make much sense to install more baseload power via nuclear these days when we have non-coal alternatives available and dropping power requirements overall. Continued pushes for efficiency improvements, green buildings, residential solar+battery installs, and grid-scale renewable installs are cheaper, faster, and have less risks.