Its sadder everyday that somehow humanity has failed to become a nuclear society. All our problems could have been solved decades ago but we are still nowhere near a solution.
Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build. Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate chan…
Even PWR don't take 'forever' to build if you actually build a large number. The problem is that, specially in the West, we have gone to a policy where its like 'lets do a tiny bit of nuclear' and that leads to basically 1 plant being in construction supported by a increasingly small nuclear industry getting endlessly delayed because nobody working on it has ever done it before.
Learning effects in nuclear building are massive and well researched. You need to have teams that have done it before and it goes much faster.
Even the most shitty PWR could be built in 4-5 years as we have seen in France, US or South Korea.
Of course, if you were serious today about doing this, you wouldn't use 60s PWRs anyway and if you use modern reactors you don't need to do a massive civil engineering project. Ironically in many way the civil engineering is gigantic part of the cost, not the nuclear itself.
> Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth
Well of course 'all' problems would not be solved, but the fact is we could have had clean energy for 40 years had nuclear continued and new types of reactors had come along.
It's my opinion, and I know most people don't agree that if you have real mass manufacturing of nuclear reactors, it would actually be viable to competitively produce green fuel. Maybe some subsidies or tax on non green version to push it faster.
I would have favored making all cars into FFV (Flex Fuel) and having a 5%-80% methanol requirement (increasing every few years). That methanol could then increasingly be made with nuclear power as your capacity grows.
Today we have lithium batteries for most of transportation so that is no longer as relevant as it would have been if we had done this in the 90s. I still a good idea for aviation and other needs of chemical energy.
> Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others.
Power is still a huge issue for countries, if we had mass produced reactors, exporting them in those countries is a very viable option to get green energy to those people at a cheaper rate then coal they are actually building.
If emerging countries could call the US and say 'we like 50x500MW reactors' deployed over the next 10 years. They would very much want to do it.
> The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest
The same could be said for nuclear as well.
> strong opposition to new transmission lines
Renewables break the traditional local production concept for power and force an ever increasing amount of energy transportation. Because of non uniform wind and weather patterns and lack of economically viable storage you compensate by transporting energy.
I much favor having nuclear reactor, say 500MW units being deployed everywhere where it makes sense as close to consumption as viable. And for places this makes no sense also having a much smaller 100MW reactor type that you can deploy in shipping containers everywhere needed.
Reliable base load close to consumption combined maybe a few heat batteries (or hydro if available) can is the perfect solution. In theory modern reactors could be load following quite well, but its really a question of what is cheaper, lower utilization or energy storage.
This is exactly how Ontario (Canada) and Sweden have a green grid.
> not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
In my opinion part of the political problem is because what is attempted is so difficult and puts so many changes on people. Simply deploying nuclear reactors in the same location current coal plants are leads to basically no change in the overall gird.
Its literally build whatever number of 500MW modular reactors right next to each other in the same building (these building are very small if its a modern reactor) and put them right next to the coal plant and reuse the same transmissions lines. Literally 95% of people would never even know that anything what so ever had changed. No fields of solar panels, no gigantic wind turbine, as little as possible increase in energy transportation (or even a decrees).
Had the world actually made progress on nuclear technology (as I suggest was the problem) it would simply be an economic way for politicians to transition out of coal. Sure some regions where coal is produced have coal lobby, and in some regions you might have local opposition to nuclear being able to stop or delay the building. Overall however most people don't care.
When I say we are not a nuclear society, what I mean is that we are missing everything from a vibrant nuclear industry with startups and big players, a efficient regulatory framework and an agency that is motivate to actually make forward progress (FCC and SpaceX working together), and some public or semi-public organization to manage the fuel cycle and waste.
Literally all of that is missing. Nuclear industry is mostly just producing fuel for PWRs, nuclear startups are 50x hard then even space startups, the regulatory body that took over from the nuclear commission has basically destroyed any and all progress and has made any deployment of advanced nuclear essentially impossible (regulation hard code technology dependency) and no solution for nuclear fuel cycle (politics being deadlocked over the idiocy of Yucca despite billions that have already been paid and is sitting around).
Thankfully Canada regulators have realized this and we see a emerging industry. Canada even seems to think about the fuel cycle in a more imaginative way then 'dig hole dump in'.