[api]

MSRs look nice on paper but we don’t have any experience building them. It would take a gigantic up front investment to work out the real world issues and commercialize a technology that has a lot of novel aspects like handling radioactive molten salt.

Meanwhile that same money would buy loads more power in solar/wind and batteries, which are proven technologies that are getting progressively cheaper.

An alternate timeline where we do MSRs in the 1950s and phase out coal by 1990 would have been possible but we didn’t do that and there are better alternatives now.

[jerry1979]

It looks like people recently got permission in the United States to build an MSR: https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/nuclear-reactor-approval-molt...

I have not seen any evidence that solar+wind will provide a proper base load of electricity, and it looks like MSR and its variants will give people the electricity they need.

[api]

Solar and wind require storage. Nuclear needs batteries too because nuclear reactors are very slow to throttle and not good at load following.

Every non fossil source except hydro requires a large build out of grid scale storage.

[evilos]

While nuclear plants do pair well with storage (many pumped hydro storage stations were built to pair with nuclear plants), the idea that they cannot load follow is a myth. It is simply more economical for them to run at full load since fuel cost is a very small portion of nuclear operating expenses.

https://imgur.com/a/tB3x48U