We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

And the response to that is that (1) that golden age of nuclear was far less successful than you depict, and (2) attempts to replicate it have gone disastrously wrong.

Cost overruns and failures have been the norm for nuclear. In France, we don't actually know the cost of that initial roll out. In the US, nuclear construction routinely overran budgets, often by large factors. When PURPA subjected US power markets to more market discipline nuclear construction evaporated. This should tell you that it was never a low cost source.

Today, even the construction that occurred then is not possible. The nuclear supply chain is atrophied, especially without nuclear weapons programs to provide support. Attempts to repeat the past glories have gone even more disastrously wrong than they did then.

The best people know not to go into nuclear now, so the expectation of its failure is self-reinforcing. Nuclear programs at universities are closing for lack of interest. Hell, even steam turbines (!) risk becoming a marginalized (and perhaps, eventually, forgotten) technology.

> What will be the cost of scaling this up to the hours or days required to make intermittent sources viable?

It will almost certainly be much cheaper than building nuclear reactors, and by a very large margin. But if it's not, no big deal. We could build reactors later if by some miracle it turns out they're needed. I think the best you can expect now is a dribble of seed money to keep the nuclear industry from disappearing entirely, just to keep some level of expertise around as an insurance policy. But if and when renewables prove themselves to a point even you cannot deny, even that could dry up.

There are a bunch of startups developing new reactor designs that should be cheaper and safer than existing plants. Some are ready or close to building demonstration plants.

I'd rather we fund the most promising dozen or so of those funding to build demos over the next decade than start building conventional plants now and locking ourselves in to those for decades.

There was an interesting Nova episode a few years ago that looked at a bunch of these new designs.

I remember one that used a liquid fuel in a spherical vessel, with an opening in the bottom to drain into a wider, long, shallow rectangular vessel. The fuel would react in the spherical vessel, but if you drained it into the rectangular vessel it would not react.

This is because in the spherical vessel if a given atom reacts and produces a neutron there are many directions it can go which have to pass through enough fuel that it has a good chance of causing another reaction. It's enough to achieve a self-sustaining reaction.

In the rectangular vessel, there are much fewer directions for a neutron that pass through enough fuel to react. You can't get a self-sustaining reaction.

The best part was how they plugged the drain when the reactor was operating. They plugged it by having some frozen fuel in the pipe. The heat from the reaction in the spherical vessel would quickly melt the plug unless it was heavily and continuously cooled.

Note that unlike other plants where if something goes wrong with cooling you have to take explicit action to stop the reactor before meltdown, in this one if something goes wrong with the cooling the reactor stops itself.

Another good one is the traveling wave reactor. There was a joint venture between TerraPower (a company founded by Bill Gates) and China National Nuclear Corporation to build a 600 MWe demo reactor from 2018-2025 followed by commercial 1150 MWe plants later that decade, but TerraPower was made to stop in early 2019 by the US government.

Besides having a much lower chance of doing something that can harm people in the surrounding area than current designs, many of these new designs allow for much smaller reactors so that even if something does happen the area affected will be small.

With energy from wind farms 1000 km away, hydro and biofuels closer by, and nearby storage. At the beginning, you'll probably also have a small amount of "dirty" generation as backup, but which sits idle most of the time.

Intermittency of renewables is less of a problem if one rids oneself of the medieval seeming idea of energy self-sufficiency. Energy does not have to be produced where it is needed. We can transfer it already. The grid would need upgrades but we can definitely transfer large amounts of energy over long distances.

Example from China: 12GW over 3300km at 1100kV DC, for others look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity... .

Europe is also building HVDC (high-voltage direct current) links connecting windparks and consumers with e.g. norwegian pumped hydro power plants for storing excess energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current )

Doing one doesn't preclude doing the other, that's a false dichotomy.