| "more and more" There's lots of talk, and boy would I ever love to see these actually happen! However, there's stuff that a utility can design and install toady, and there's stuff that's decade out. For nuclear, deployment of "understood" designs can take a decade, easily. The other thing about these new nuclear reactors, I don't ever hear anybody talk about them being much cheaper than current reactors. That should be one of the key selling points. They need to be cheap enough that they can run at, say, 50% capacity over the course of a day to follow the demand curve. Right now nuclear runs continuously at near maximum in order to be economical. Wind and solar are getting cheaper. Storage is getting cheaper. These new nuclear technologies don't need to compete with natural gas and coal, they need to compete with the cost in 20 years of renewables with 30%-50% of that energy getting stored. In any case, I'd love to see these technologies enter production so that we have a more diverse energy pool. But I don't think it does them any favors to pretend that they're further along than they actually are. |