Hence why we’re talking about bringing existing reactors that have been shutdown back online
And that doesn’t even get into the newer reactor designs being worked on now. Light water modular reactors, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, etc. that all can be built faster than the old designs currently in use.
The designs from the 60s and 70s are monolithic behemoths, but a lot of work has been done in recent decades on technologies that were essentially abandoned outside academia back then simply because they couldn’t be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Modern battery storage still cannot guarantee a base load capability 24/7 without massive battery farms multiple times the size of standard usage. What storage is great at is evening out supply to stabilize the grid. Renewables and battery storage will never be base load capable for any sizeable grid region, you simply need too much to handle the modern power requirements of a city, including necessary expansion in the future.
Some people just don’t want to accept that fact, so we sit here with thousands of gas and coal plants still burning every day instead of taking any steps in the right direction, wasting valuable time that we don’t have.
As it is, a coal plant produces more radioactive material than the waste from a nuclear power plant, but it’s allowed to be exhausted into the atmosphere and ignored. And that doesn’t even get into the greenhouse gasses. If these plants were required to actually clean their emissions, they wouldn’t be nearly as “cheap” to operate.
Continuing to operate nuclear plants that we’ve already paid for and are on the hook for decommissioning costs is perfectly sensible. Building new ones is what isn’t.
There’s lots of newer designs we could use, but they’re still not going to be economically viable. A new nuclear plant isn’t about today, it needs to be viable over its expected lifespan: around 2036 to 2076.
The fancy new designs aren’t up against today’s batteries. They’re up against 2040’s batteries, and they can’t compete. For the price of a new nuclear plant, we’ll be able to buy those massive battery farms and have money left over. Not today maybe, but a new reactor isn’t going to start feeding power into the grid for ten years or so, so it’ll need to compete with 2036’s battery prices on day one and it’s only going to get worse from there.
Hence why we’re talking about bringing existing reactors that have been shutdown back online And that doesn’t even get into the newer reactor designs being worked on now. Light water modular reactors, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, etc. that all can be built faster than the old designs currently in use.
The designs from the 60s and 70s are monolithic behemoths, but a lot of work has been done in recent decades on technologies that were essentially abandoned outside academia back then simply because they couldn’t be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Modern battery storage still cannot guarantee a base load capability 24/7 without massive battery farms multiple times the size of standard usage. What storage is great at is evening out supply to stabilize the grid. Renewables and battery storage will never be base load capable for any sizeable grid region, you simply need too much to handle the modern power requirements of a city, including necessary expansion in the future.
Some people just don’t want to accept that fact, so we sit here with thousands of gas and coal plants still burning every day instead of taking any steps in the right direction, wasting valuable time that we don’t have.
As it is, a coal plant produces more radioactive material than the waste from a nuclear power plant, but it’s allowed to be exhausted into the atmosphere and ignored. And that doesn’t even get into the greenhouse gasses. If these plants were required to actually clean their emissions, they wouldn’t be nearly as “cheap” to operate.
Continuing to operate nuclear plants that we’ve already paid for and are on the hook for decommissioning costs is perfectly sensible. Building new ones is what isn’t.
There’s lots of newer designs we could use, but they’re still not going to be economically viable. A new nuclear plant isn’t about today, it needs to be viable over its expected lifespan: around 2036 to 2076.
The fancy new designs aren’t up against today’s batteries. They’re up against 2040’s batteries, and they can’t compete. For the price of a new nuclear plant, we’ll be able to buy those massive battery farms and have money left over. Not today maybe, but a new reactor isn’t going to start feeding power into the grid for ten years or so, so it’ll need to compete with 2036’s battery prices on day one and it’s only going to get worse from there.