[cogman10]

Besides the cost problem, deployment is also a huge issue with nuclear. It takes 10->20 years before a new nuclear plant produces it's first watt hour.

I can get behind the idea of pushing for nuclear in the case of baseload and even in the case of high population density areas where wind/solar are simply not practical. But, if there is anywhere to dump a bunch of money, it is wind and solar. We can have those producing electricity within a year, easily. Even if you want to talk about manufacturing costs, those are payed back within 1->5 years. Still shorter than the timeframe to getting a new nuclear plant online.

I'm not saying this to be anti-nuclear. I think it was a great solution. I just think that solar and wind have become the better solutions (at least for the shorter term).

[DennisP]

I agree nuclear is more of a long-term solution. Solar is the way to go right now, with nuclear coming online as solar gets to such high market penetration that storage is a serious issue. Until then, we can back solar with the remaining fossil on the grid.

The deployment time is a solvable problem though. We've built nuclear faster in the past, and some places still do today. France converted to 80% nuclear in 20 years, South Korea has recently built modern reactors in about five years [1], and some new designs can be mass-produced in factories. Thorcon is working on building molten salt reactors in shipyards, at massive scale [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/21...

[2] http://thorconpower.com/production/

[cogman10]

Guess I don't disagree :)

I do thing there is some peak amount of producible renewables that we aren't really anywhere near. New nuclear would work well to decrease the amount of new renewable build-out required year over year.

Particularly, I think nuclear is a great option for islands (Hawaii, for example) where land is at a premium anyways.