[ch4s3]

My thinking boils down to this question. What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? Batteries may reach some practical limits and not end up being feasible for global grid scale storage.

Would we rather live in a world where we grind out building more nuclear capacity, one with rolling blackouts in the OECD, or runaway climate change?

[pfdietz]

> What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out?

The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all.

So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised (for example, in the estimates used to compare renewables and nuclear). This risk historically has been very real.

[ch4s3]

> The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all.

Smart grid tech could easily fail to be able to deal with the complexity of balancing lots of dynamic demand and output. It could simply be too hard to do that with software in real time needing to react to signals over a great distance in real time.

As for batteries, they could be too expensive, clusters large enough for over night power could be dangerously fire prone, or we could have problems with lithium supply/recycling/disposal.

>If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised

Yes, of course it might be. But it may turn out to be much cheaper if we settle on a few well understood designs and stamp them out largely in factories. I'm not advocating for going all in, just getting the ball rolling as a contingency.

If renewables live up to their promise and batteries deliver in the next 10 years then I'll be celebrating along with everyone else. However I think it makes some sense to build some new nuclear plant designs now just in case renewables and batteries take longer to mature than expected.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

[pfdietz]

Nuclear can't even walk and chew gum, though. The recent attempts to build new reactors (or finish old mothballed partially completed ones) in the US have been fiascos. In France, the efforts have gone from bad to worse. Hypothetical potential problems of renewables pale in comparison to actual failures of nuclear.

At this point, nuclear is very sick, and is going to require very large infusions of resources just to stop the industry from decaying away, never mind improve. All this isn't helped by the clear perception of this situation. Why would the best young people go to work in the nuclear industry now?