This attitude is about a decade out of date. It made sense around 2010 when wind and solar weren’t widely deployed and cost more than nuclear per megawatt hour. Now we have more wind and solar deployed than nuclear, and they’re significantly cheaper and faster to construct and make better economic sense than nuclear.
I hear this point all the time, but it’s simply not true. The total power that humanity consumes could perhaps eventually be generated with wind and solar, but they don’t generate on demand, scalable power to provide the actual base load needed.
Don’t get me wrong, I think every new building (and probably the old ones too) should have solar panels, but that doesn’t negate the need to move the base power generation to nuclear from coal and oil.
This is why people now compare cost of nuclear with cost of solar PLUS capacitors/batteries to handle for base load. Surprisingly, with recent achievements in molten sand batteries, solar is still comfortably cheaper than nuclear per kwh. As the base load. Yes, solar as the base load is more expensive than solar on-demand, but if we’re comparing to nuclear, Solar just wins.
And solar’s cost is far less front-loaded, making it more affordable than the “cost per kwh” implies.
The point is, if we are not at the point of moving our base load to renewables today, we would be faster than we would be with nuclear and provisioning all the locations needed for secure, regulated, nuclear plants across the country/world. And the “world” part is a big one. Nuclear power material might not be fully weaponizable, but allowing some countries nuclear power plants could still create risk.
This attitude is about a decade out of date. It made sense around 2010 when wind and solar weren’t widely deployed and cost more than nuclear per megawatt hour. Now we have more wind and solar deployed than nuclear, and they’re significantly cheaper and faster to construct and make better economic sense than nuclear.
I hear this point all the time, but it’s simply not true. The total power that humanity consumes could perhaps eventually be generated with wind and solar, but they don’t generate on demand, scalable power to provide the actual base load needed.
Don’t get me wrong, I think every new building (and probably the old ones too) should have solar panels, but that doesn’t negate the need to move the base power generation to nuclear from coal and oil.
This is why people now compare cost of nuclear with cost of solar PLUS capacitors/batteries to handle for base load. Surprisingly, with recent achievements in molten sand batteries, solar is still comfortably cheaper than nuclear per kwh. As the base load. Yes, solar as the base load is more expensive than solar on-demand, but if we’re comparing to nuclear, Solar just wins.
And solar’s cost is far less front-loaded, making it more affordable than the “cost per kwh” implies.
The point is, if we are not at the point of moving our base load to renewables today, we would be faster than we would be with nuclear and provisioning all the locations needed for secure, regulated, nuclear plants across the country/world. And the “world” part is a big one. Nuclear power material might not be fully weaponizable, but allowing some countries nuclear power plants could still create risk.