[clairity]

right, it's the most optimistic possible scenario, if all of the assumptions (of which there are a lot) are correct and as you point out, all omissions (of which there are a lot, despite the length) are negligible. there are some citations, but the narrative project a certain future way beyond what the meager research suggests.

the article does provide a nice survey of clean tech, but the conclusions should be disregarded.

[tsungxu]

Nuclear is very important. It's just not scaling fast enough.

I don't see a future where next-gen SMR nor fusion gets to cost parity with renewables quickly or easily. They will have to scale up via beachhead markets adjacent to existing electricity demand sources.

Long term, I do think economically viable fusion will supplant renewables, but that's decades away.

[clairity]

nuclear is not scaling fast enough because it's been subject to 40 years of negative mediopolitical narrative reinforced by poor market and technical regulation. nuclear easily gets to cost parity with renewables when you consider the needed storage for baseload usage and the more advanced grid control variable generation requires.

in the US, had we continued to build nuclear at the rate we were between the 70s and 90s, we'd be at over 50% nuclear for electricity generation, which would have knocked coal completely out of the equation, leaving only nuclear (baseload), gas (variable demand), and renewables (opportunistic generation). over 70 years, fission-based nuclear has caused 99+% fewer human deaths than fossil fuels have.

and yes, there's no need to pin any hopes on fusion right now, which is decades away at best.

[pixl97]

If we wanted to build nuclear out like it was the 70's we needed to ensure that 3MI didn't happen in '79. This was the death of the industry in the US. Chernobyl buried it in a lead coffin 6 feet deeper, and Fukushima topped it with concrete. On top of that in the war in Ukraine with fighting around the nuclear power plants has made us that much more aware that the stable political environments that nuclear requires cannot be guaranteed.