First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever technology they think will fit the role best, such as green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exist no hydrogen-burning turbines that burn green hydrogen, but someone could become the first and do that.

Producers of green hydrogen are currently more interested in delivering green steel, which pays much better than hydrogen-burning turbines. The general idea is that this will in the future reduce prices down to energy grid levels, and a researcher here in Sweden working on such project estimated prices to drop to those levels around ~2060-2080.

This could happen much earlier if prices continue to increase as they do, but who knows. It would make for a good A/B testing to produce both and see which one was the cheaper option, and if the green hydrogen power plant fail they can always just produce more hydrogen for steel production.

My 2c:

Why nuclear power is a dumb idea.

Countries with nuclear reactors: 32.

Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15.

Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100.

About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world with the bestest regulation of such things.

Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years. So all you can do with the waste, at best, is leave it for someone else to handle later.

Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years. You can not trust governments or nuclear power companies about this stuff.

The entire ecosystem is getting poisoned by all that waste water Japan is dumping. Almost 50% of countries with nuclear reactors have had significant leaks and meltdowns, and it only takes one significant event to screw up the entire natural environment.

Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.

Hydro is only source of renewable power that generates >50% of any country's electricity grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...

Wind caps out at 42% with Denmark, solar at 15% in Australia. Many countries have nearly 100% of their electricity coming from hydroelectricity. Besides nuclear power, hydroelectricity is one of the few non-intermittent sources of renewable energy - sure, rainfall does technically make hydro intermittent in a sense, but it's not going to change output on a dime when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing.

Well, you also have geothermal power, but that's even more geographically constrained than hydro.

The problem with pumped-hydro is - and all storage based solutions is - how low can you let the storage get before it's an emergency?

Electricity is a vital service: completely vital. Without it, modern civilization halts. It might be annoying being unable to make a cup of coffee, but municipal water and sewage need electricity to work. You go without power for a week, and the entire wastewater infrastructure will start shutting down. Refrigeration and food storage fails. Even backup fuel storage becomes a liability because you need electricity to pump it around.

So the question is, how low can you let the reservoir get? Because it's not about how long you could run going from 100% to 0% - it's how much of it can you use. And we have a model for this, in the form of another service: city townwater supplies.

In Australia, water restrictions go into effect when we hit slow - we lose storage capacity over the course of months, not days.

And this is a resource which is dependent on electricity to supply (we also have a desalination plant, so we have some guaranteed capacity).

So within that context then - i.e. imagine you're planning a nation-state electricity supply, what are your risks? - how good does pumped hydro - or any storage-based solution - look, when your requirement is "the power cannot go off - ever". Put on your systems engineering hat, treat it like a software deployment - what level of redundancy and overbuild would you want when you're told "this is a mission critical, safety-critical system consuming an intermittently available resource". How much capacity and overbuild would you believe is necessary to have confidence, or even decision-making capability, when pressured?

Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don't forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people!

If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.