Ultra Safe Nuclear

I'm all for the concept, but so far, everything I've seen has been nothing but concept.

I once wondered if it would be possible to have a nuclear power station which operated subcritically with extra neutrons injected from an outside source. The advantage I saw was that turning off the outside source would instantly stop the reaction, no worrying about articulating fuel rods and poison injectors. Unfortunately decay heat is still an issue.

Turns out it's potentially a thing but has some technical challenges.

> (solar, wind, etc) has such a strong tailwind.

Do they? I love renewables but for some reason the masses still just don't think you can get enough energy out of sky farts and hippy sun rays. The fact that ALL energy in our solar system comes from the sun is irrelevant the sun just doesn't feel very powerful. The public knows that nuclear is super powerful.

> how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board?

The same way we convinced people to build them after Hiroshima. The same way we currently convince people to build coal plants when there are better alternatives. People want energy and they don't really care about the environmental / human cost.

So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

>Exposure to radioactive waste may cause health impacts due to ionizing radiation exposure. In humans, a dose of 1 sievert carries a 5.5% risk of developing cancer,[12] and regulatory agencies assume the risk is linearly proportional to dose even for low doses. Ionizing radiation can cause deletions in chromosomes.[13]

First, point out that Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima amount to extremely small numbers of deaths relative to the power these plants generated. For three mile island and Fukushima this figure is zero among the public. Less than two dozen among the plant workers (all of which died due to the hydrogen explosion not radiation). The areas that were evacuated are now safe to return. Chernobyl was worse, but th Soviets didn't even bother with secondary containment. They didn't bother to put a concrete dome over the reactor. Even then, ~200 people died. This is a fairly small death toll for a worst-case failure. Contrast this with hydroelectricity, for example, which has resulted in the deaths of tena of thousands of people and the displacement of millions due to dam collapses [1].

Competition in the form of wind and solar are intermittent, requiring storage on a massive scale to offer a path to decarbonization. With 12 hours of energy storage, the US could reach 80% renewable generation. To get to 100% we need 3 weeks of storage according to estimates [2]. Currently, we have 8 seconds of battery storage compared to our 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. We have 4 minutes of hydroelectric storage, but hydroelectric storage is geographically limited. Increasing this by a factor of 180 is not feasible.

In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar don't actually present real competition.

1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...