[audunw]

That future will never come. Nuclear power has several fundamental barriers to scaling, and given that the world population is still growing and the demand for energy per person in the developing is growing, those barriers will become an issue.

The biggest barrier in the end is that if we scale up nuclear by an order of magnitude or two, the heat output will cause global warming effects that approach that of CO2 emissions.

There are panels that can radiate the heat directly to space. But then you have the same area usage problems as solar power.

While some nuclear can be good I think the path to abundant energy is solar, geothermal and energy storage. There is more than enough solar and geothermal energy all around us to cover all our needs, and more. Solar will eventually mostly be in forms that also provide useful shading or act as roofs. Agrovoltaics is a field that’s growing very rapidly.

Going back to nuclear, one path to potential extremely abundant and cheap nuclear power is Helions fusion reactor. It should require a lot less cooling for a given output of useful electric power.