The more relevant question is, how easy would it be to power the whole country with nuclear. The US has a long history of research, still has a huge amount of

The more relevant question is, how easy would it be to power the whole country with nuclear. The US has a long history of research, still has a huge amount of knowlage of nuclear inside the country. And the US has the scale that if they select 1-2 plant designs, the same plant can be built, over and over and over again. A luxury small countries don't have. If the US simple decided to invest money in transition away from coal and gas, you simple plan a nuclear plant next to every existing coal plant and use your currently existing grid. In terms of transitioning to renewables, the US is highly variable, and each regions need to do very complex analysis on what exactly it needs. How much wind and solar it has, what the current grid is and how to adjust it. And then also how much storage you need to keep reliability. If you are going to transport energy over long distances (something traditional grid designs tried to avoid) you need to then interlink all these complex island of renewable+storage. You make your region depended on wind energy from another state. > Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do? Look at how NASA did the COST and CommercialCrew program. Pick 2-6 nuclear plant designs, grantee that each on of the winners gets to build at least 4 plants and and then build a sales pipeline in cooperation with all utilizes to plan form more. Then just build as many as you can, as fast as you can. Likely within a decade you will be finishing many reactors every year and you easily build enough electricity to power the grid, plus transportation, heating and even aviation. If France could mostly do this in 1970s with sub-optimal technology from the 1960s, why would it be harder now.