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> Nuclear energy is the real future At present in the US there's no reactor that anyone will build. No one will build any more big AP1000s after the unmitigat

> Nuclear energy is the real future At present in the US there's no reactor that anyone will build. No one will build any more big AP1000s after the unmitigated financial disasters that were its 2 initial projects. Everyone has put their faith in small reactors (SMRs) but the only one with an approved design (NuScale) had its initial project fail after a Utah utility coalition fell apart. The NuScale project that failed was supposed to come online around 2030. Their other project was some sort of Bitcoin mining fiction, its not clear they will have a future. There are a bunch of SMR startups that are at various stages of development, however, none has an approved design. So, we're looking at after 2030 if we're lucky with speculative designs that may or may not work out. Not a very certain bet.

gotoeleven 3y ago
If your environmental regulations prevent you from saving the environment by making it too expensive to save the environment, maybe you have too many environmental regulations? The medium term future of energy in the US at least is california, ie ridiculously expensive and unreliable. Hopefully costs will eventually come down as we get enough batteries and grid infrastructure in place so everyone can have their indian solar power energy--but a sane policy that would have been to have excess nuclear capacity in place and slowly transition to solar panels as the reliability improves.
- thinkcontext 3y ago
  There's site in FL that has all approvals in place, no environmental issues are barriers. It was to be the next project after the first 2 AP1000 and was cancelled after their experience. The economics of such a project have improved substantially since then due to the IRA's nuclear production tax credit (thanks Biden). Yet no one has picked up this project. Why? Because the construction risk is too great, not because of environmental regulations.
- tfourb 3y ago
  China has no environmental regulations to worry about when building out nuclear and has great incentives to do so, but their goal for 2035 is a meagre 7.7% of electricity generation from nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China So China, surely the best case scenario for nuclear power expansion anywhere in the world, will go from 5% nuclear power generation today to 7.7% by 2035. That is about all that you need to know about the potential contribution of current and near future nuclear power technology to solving the climate crisis. As we need to be basically net 0 CO2 emissions by 2050 at the latest, there is simply no scenario in which nuclear can play more than a minor part in solving this. Meanwhile renewables are cost effective investments today, you simply need to improve the regulatory and infrastructure context (transmission lines). Yes, solving storage is required as well, but that seems vastly more feasible than somehow beating 80 years of real world experience telling you that putting it all on nuclear is not a politically or financially viable path forward.

gotoeleven 3y ago

If your environmental regulations prevent you from saving the environment by making it too expensive to save the environment, maybe you have too many environmental regulations? The medium term future of energy in the US at least is california, ie ridiculously expensive and unreliable. Hopefully costs will eventually come down as we get enough batteries and grid infrastructure in place so everyone can have their indian solar power energy--but a sane policy that would have been to have excess nuclear capacity in place and slowly transition to solar panels as the reliability improves.

thinkcontext 3y ago
There's site in FL that has all approvals in place, no environmental issues are barriers. It was to be the next project after the first 2 AP1000 and was cancelled after their experience. The economics of such a project have improved substantially since then due to the IRA's nuclear production tax credit (thanks Biden). Yet no one has picked up this project. Why? Because the construction risk is too great, not because of environmental regulations.
tfourb 3y ago
China has no environmental regulations to worry about when building out nuclear and has great incentives to do so, but their goal for 2035 is a meagre 7.7% of electricity generation from nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China So China, surely the best case scenario for nuclear power expansion anywhere in the world, will go from 5% nuclear power generation today to 7.7% by 2035. That is about all that you need to know about the potential contribution of current and near future nuclear power technology to solving the climate crisis. As we need to be basically net 0 CO2 emissions by 2050 at the latest, there is simply no scenario in which nuclear can play more than a minor part in solving this. Meanwhile renewables are cost effective investments today, you simply need to improve the regulatory and infrastructure context (transmission lines). Yes, solving storage is required as well, but that seems vastly more feasible than somehow beating 80 years of real world experience telling you that putting it all on nuclear is not a politically or financially viable path forward.