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

Hanul is in Korea. The nuclear "success" there turned out to be due to massive corruption and corner cutting.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...

Taishan in China. China is basically the single remaining bright spot in nuclear, anywhere in the world. But to treat it as such, you have to believe the financial information coming from a communist government. I am not as trusting as you are on that.

> Also, you're incorrect that Votgle is the only nuclear project in the US, Turkey Point is installing two more AP1000 reactors.

https://www.miamitodaynews.com/2018/03/13/economics-shelves-...

"Nuclear units Florida Power & Light was to build at Turkey Point have been delayed indefinitely as it’s too expensive to compete with natural gas, FPL says."

> You continue to miss the point. With renewables and storage, we're talking in terms of hypothetical costs.

Yes, all future costs are uncertain. So any plans involve risk, and all investments are gambles. The market has judged that the risk favors renewables and storage, not nuclear.

> Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale.

They are costs from another time. Unless you have a time machine, those costs are just of historical interest. What matters today is what it costs to build today. And even back then, the costs became unacceptable. There's a reason the first nuclear expansion stopped, and it's not regulation.

> You seem to be particularly determined to avoid the one solution that is actually proven to work.

You have linked to a solar + storage + transmission solution, not needing any nuclear. Are you sure that's what you were wanting to link to? I'm fine with that solution. Note that the "three weeks of storage" there would be better done with hydrogen than with batteries.

Hydrogen is cool, but we should also be investing in efficient methane production. AFAICT it's not too hard to make and has immense advantages - existing transport, storage and use infrastructure and market as a heavily traded good. We can use it for most of our energy or carbon needs with today's technology and existing machines with no or easy modifications.

Hydrogen can be more efficient and probably simpler when appropriate but is more finicky, still needs research and will take a lot of time to ramp up.

If "we" want to spend several times as much money for our power, and only start getting it 10+ years from now, "we" can go all in on nukes. But that "we" looks an awful lot like "them" to me.

My expectation is that if CO2 production has not taken a nosedive by 2030, we are looking at a worldwide collapse after mass migration pushes fascist governments into the driver seat, leading directly to global thermonuclear war. (I would welcome being shown wrong.)

The only problem cited for renewables is energy storage, for which we have numerous alternatives that look like they will all work.

Besides gravity storage, with weights that may be lowered into disused mine shafts, underground compressed air, batteries, and molten salt baths, a surprising synthesis is solar panels floating on dam reservoirs.

They operate more efficiently by staying cool, and are easily cleaned without consuming water. They relieve daytime load, and the existing turbines run at night. There is already a grid tap in place.

But a lot of those materials are renewable, or becoming more renewable. Most/all materials are used in dozens of other things that are essential to modern society, so investing in making mining cleaner and making recycling more efficient and cheaper is not optional. The fact that renewables create more demand for materials, and more waste, can be a good thing, as economies of scale can make investments in efficiency and recycling techniques more viable.

In a solar/wind power plant, all of the materials can in principle be reused quickly, given decent recycling technology.

Hell, now we're even building windmills out of wood again, and turns out they're stronger/better than with concrete/steel.

It's not just the fuel that's waste, when decommissioning the power plant you also have a lot of low-level radioactive material that can't easily be recycled/reused. Not a huge problem, but at a fundamental level it's worse than renewables.