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Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all. Sure, nuclear is CapEx heavy, with low OpEx. But storage and wind and solar have lower CapEx and OpEx. And they also scale much better, and are falling in cost, so when they need to be replaced, they will be replaced at even lower costs than their initial builds. And investing in the technology now only drives down future costs even more. We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites. None of the advocates for nuclear seem to ever run the numbers on what it would take to actually build nuclear. They don't model the needs of the grid, they don't look at where nuclear has failed during construction and do a root cause analysis, they don't try to change specific regulations, they don't try to figure out what could actually make nuclear work in the US. Instead we get vague wishes and hand waving, and we are missing any of the hustle that would be required to actually make positive change in the world. And I have a feeling that the reason for this lack of practical attention to detail, and this lack of this entrepreneurial hustle, if because when you start paying attention to details and the maze of action needed to get nuclear built, nuclear is not compelling compared to the alternatives. |
There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.
Renewable energy has their problem, and the problem is that not all country are like the US, i.e. a lot of space that is unused and can be used to put solar panels, wind turbines, or make dams, without anyone complaining. If you look at the European territory, it's mostly used, there is not a square centimeter of land unused. This is a problem.
Another problem of renewable energy is storage. How do you store all that amount of power to use it when the renewable energy production (that is depended on the weather that you can't control) is not available? It's a big deal. And you will likely always need fossil fuel power station ready to operate in case of necessity.
> We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.
I don't know if you are up to date, but we have also a semiconductor shortage. Guess what solar panel are made of? Semiconductors. How do you even imagine getting the material to produce all that panels in a short time? Not only that, but solar panel alone don't do anything, since they produce DC power: you also need inverters, that are other piece of electronics. Again an enormous quantity of electronic that this day is not available. And do you talk about storage, do you think that getting lithium is much simpler? And in the context of a probable (if not already in progress) commercial war with China, where do you produce them? How many years do you take to open up a plant to make semiconductors in the US or Europe? And where do you even get the raw material?
Yes, a nuclear reactor take a lot of materials to build, but with a few reactors you can make all the energy that you need. That is overall the materials that you need to produce the same amount of power are order of magnitude lower. Also, a nuclear reactor has a greater life expectancy than other renewable sources (except hydroelectric).