Existing plants are barely competitive with the worst wind/solar from the LCOE graphs I've seen.
There's NO WAY a new LWR will ever beat LCOE of solar + wind + battery. And that is current day prices that doesn't count forthcoming sodium ion storage, LFP, and solar/wind cost improvements.
And it won't come online for a decade at best, with inevitable massive cost overruns.
LWR/PWR is all the crap with waste, fuel rod reprocessing, only using select isotopes of uranium, and while I'm not an expert at nuclear plant economics and accounting, have tons of unpriced externalities.
I wouldn't support any LWR/PWR unless it had LFTR or other reactors built with it that could "online process" the waste. And if we had those, why bother with the huge shield domes?
I'll read your blog posts though carefully, maybe I'll change my mind. But a cursory look seems like it is caged too much in the baggage of the last century of nuclear, which IMO are just dead ends that won't practically advance nuclear for the next century.
As in, we need a couple decades of wind/solar to wipe clean the current slate of nuclear, from politics to actual installations.
Edit: The old designs are interesting, but they are huge and expensive.
What I look forward to in next gen nuclear is basically all of these:
- breeds (so you can use thorium and reprocess old spent waste to usable stuff)
- meltdown proof (LFTR has the melt plug and cooling tank that will decriticalize the liquid)
- scalable to a bunch of shipping containers or smaller (LFTR allegedly fit in a closet for the demo)
- 99% fuel use (per the docs, no idea if this is true or not)
LFTR promises those, if it can deliver due to containment degradation issues, who knows.
When I look at the gee-whiz LFTR presentations, what sticks out to me is the closed fuel cycle/complete usage, promise of breeding old waste to non-waste or new fuel, and so many other things that fix the errors of nuclear history.
The other thing that is missing is computer simulation. We should be able to develop far more usable designs with modern simulation software. We know the military has a lot of fission simulation software. Materials degradation and so many other things can be calculated far better than was available in the 1960s.
The final thing holding back nuclear is that despite a lot of their idiocy, the fact of the matter is that the "greenies" were correct about nuclear energy. It was poorly designed from a long term perspective, played fast and loose with waste, and many other considerations which probably derived from its military inception. The military only cares about the end result, and giving a 100,000 people cancer from spillage/meltdowns, dealing with the full cycle of waste, or actually maintaining safe operation.
Tepco, a japanese company with all the supposed strict adherence to process, was operating the reactor incompetently. Fukushima wasn't an outlier, it was an indictment of the large reactor design over the long haul.
LFTR design addresses SO MUCH of that. Far better meltdown protection, and full fuel use so there's practically no waste (not by the old solid fuel rod standards).
So if the nuclear industry doesn't reformulate around things that LFTR can do, then it will just fail in the long run again.