> Storage is extremely expensive

Define "expensive". Over what timescale? Have you seen https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."

This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?

By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.

Are you so sure that storage is so expensive? It’s been coming down the cost curve extremely quickly, such that opinions formed even an year ago are severely outdated, and it’s now solar+storage that’s being favorably compared to replacing nat gas plants, not just solar itself.

> Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage.

For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.

Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.

Solar benefits from storage yes but it's not at all worthless even without it.

If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.

Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.

I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.

> The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!)

So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.

This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.

> Storage is extremely expensive.

No.

> than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.

As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.

No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.

Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.

> It could be dumped in the ocean

FFS no. This is the reason environmentalists don't trust the nuclear industry.

Nuclear proliferation.