<story><title>Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00615-w</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimish</author><text>Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind&amp;#x2F;Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.&lt;p&gt;Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it&amp;#x27;ll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.&lt;p&gt;RIP, only France did nuclear right :(</text></item><item><author>rgbrenner</author><text>People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it&amp;#x27;s complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn&amp;#x27;t make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc.&lt;p&gt;So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it&amp;#x27;s just not going to happen. For the same reason you don&amp;#x27;t shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sir_bearington</author><text>&amp;gt; Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind&amp;#x2F;Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.&lt;p&gt;Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.&lt;p&gt;But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24&amp;#x2F;7.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; RIP, only France did nuclear right :(&lt;p&gt;And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00615-w</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimish</author><text>Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind&amp;#x2F;Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.&lt;p&gt;Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it&amp;#x27;ll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.&lt;p&gt;RIP, only France did nuclear right :(</text></item><item><author>rgbrenner</author><text>People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it&amp;#x27;s complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn&amp;#x27;t make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc.&lt;p&gt;So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it&amp;#x27;s just not going to happen. For the same reason you don&amp;#x27;t shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gameman144</author><text>One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar, and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy production without reverting to the equally land-efficient methods of coal and gas.&lt;p&gt;That said, improvements in the transmission grid &lt;i&gt;might&lt;/i&gt; be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.</text></comment>