Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would love to see nuclear do this, but the challenges to getting nuclear built are myriad. Regulatory burdens, cost to build reactors, painfully slow learning rate for nuclear reactor design and buildout. Solar, while certainly not ideal, is comparatively trivial to build out. Functionally you buy and lay out cheap panels. Far smaller political challenges. Some friction around land use and interconnect, but compared…
The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation is that you get to sidestep the biggest problem with nuclear - when you build a power plant you want to build it near people (who may object on safety grounds), but you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere. Even better, you could build your nuclear DAC fuel generator in an old natural gas field, where there's ready-made transportation in…
The main point of this operation is to utilize free surplus energy from solar and wind to store fuel for days where solar and wind can't produce enough. Free-as-in-beer surplus, since the energy would otherwise be wasted or sold at negative prices, like what we have been seeing lately in certain markets.
Nuclear can always produce electricity, so converting to fuel has no benefits it's just a loss compared to using the electricity directly. Also, nuclear electricity is never free but always very expensive because you need a large amount of very highly educated people and expensive infrastructure to deal with it.
>you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere.
If things go very badly with a nuclear reactor, there's no such thing as a "middle of nowhere" that's far enough away. The fallout from Chernobyl made certain foods as far away as the arctic circle unsuitable for human consumption.
