[sdesalas]

What about work being done on 4th Gen Nuclear?

If anything is going to make a dent on climate change and provide a way forward for sustainable energy generation it would have to be scaling up the share of nuclear (to 25-50% of overall share) with new and safer reactor designs that move away from outdated cold war technology we are still using.

[tdoering]

Nuclear energy is of course a controversial topic.

The main reason for not appearing on the list is that there are practically no open projects in this field.

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) apparently relies on open source software, but we could not find any open documentation for this project. (https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3316) The Open100 project is similar. (https://www.open-100.com/) We have found only one big project that is really open and active: Paramek (https://github.com/ukaea/paramak).

[hannob]

4th generation nuclear does not exist yet. Building a nuclear reactor just with existing tech can easily take a decade. Building a nuclear reactor that has never been built before with a completely new concept will take at least another decade to develop from a concept to a real working thing.

Even in the case that any of the concepts discussed as 4th generation nuclear will work at all (there's a whole number of previous "new nuclear" concepts that have been tried and never went anywhere), it won't matter in the time most crucial for climate mitigation.

[pydry]

it doesn't really make sense to scale up a form of power that's 2-4x the cost (more if you include research costs for newer designs) just because it can act as baseload. Over producing, demand shaping and storage will be cheaper.

Nuclear is only financially viable because the government subsidizes it - usually to maintain weapons technology.

[RealityVoid]

So what if it's 2-4x the cost if it's clean? I assertthe externalities of pollution are afar more than 2-4x. I also strongly doubt that it _is_ 2-⁴x as expensive.

[pydry]

I meant 2-4x the cost of equally carbon neutral technology.

Solar and wind are almost absurdly cheap. It barely makes economic sense to build anything else.

[hannob]

it's 2-4x the cost compared to other almost carbon free options.