Very cheap oil is very recent and it's an artificial situation created by pumping by OPEC countries. Fracking was only worth it because of how expensive oil was before, now it's not worth it anymore while oil stays this cheap. I think current fission nuclear tech is competitive with fossil fuels in the "fracking era". It's not competitive with current oil but that wouldn't kill it, just at most put it on hold until inevitably oil goes up again. Not to mention environmental issues, which massively favor nuclear over fossil fuels.
IMHO it is competitive renewables that is a death sentence for current reactor tech. Nuclear needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with more efficient and realistic designs.
There are no competitive renewables. Photovoltaics can't survive at scale without massive government subsidies or screwing the environment like in China (choose one), wind power doesn't scale, and don't even get me started about biodiesel.
PV are pretty much competitive now without subsidies in current studies and getting better all the time. The "renewables are not competitive" is a thing of the past.
Like I said -- only if you disregard the environmental impact and account for reusing the scraps from microelectronics industry (which is a good thing, sure -- but can't be expanded much). Crystalline silicon production is messy.
Well, fossil fuels are not an option anyway, but going full nuclear with closed cycle is much cheaper and environmentally safe. The only problem are proliferation concerns...
Some studies beg to differ. Also improvements in batteries will make this problem much less important. And even then, they don't have to cover 100% of the energy generation, if they cover a significant % with the rest provided by more traditional sources, it might be enough.
Good luck with storing GWh of electricity in batteries for more than 15 minutes. They have terrible energy density even before mentioning costs. In fact they're not even cost efficient for home scale battery backed solar/wind projects. You need to replace the batteries every 8 years. How do I know that? We've been installing PV for 10 years. The only uses for battery backed PV/wind were remote areas with no grid access.
The only commercially viable electricity storage available today is pumped hydro. Flywheels and molten salts are also working technical solutions and could be used for wind and solar thermal.
IMHO it is competitive renewables that is a death sentence for current reactor tech. Nuclear needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with more efficient and realistic designs.