If it displaces fossil generation, it's still a big win.

It won't.

The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.

What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.

This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.

This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.

	▲	__MatrixMan__ 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm optimistic about synthetic hydrocarbons for that use case. The infra is already in place for storage, delivery, consumption. You gotta waste some energy to get it, but if sun and wind is cheap most of the time, who cares?

▲

khalic 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

New projects are decades from completion given the size of the any reactor, modular is unproven. We need clean power right now, actually 20 years ago

▲

caymanjim an hour ago | parent | next [-]

A single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant also takes many years to come online. You're not wrong that new nuclear projects take a long time to start producing, longer than any other power solution, but new solar projects of that magnitude don't pop up overnight. There's still bureaucracy, funding, land acquisition (and boy do you need a lot of land for enough solar to offset even one nuclear plant), construction, power grid connections, and sourcing/manufacturing the actual panels.

The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.

This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.

Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.

▲

recursive 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Build nuke and solar then. The more the merrier.

▲

boringg 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nuke, storage, solar and wind. They all work together. You need redundancy, resiliency and dedicate quality power.

No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.

If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?

▲

garbagewoman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> How will we get to fusion?

By researching fusion? Imagine how much research you could do with all the money that you didn't waste on building uneconomical nuclear power plants

	▲	pbkompasz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Or subsidizing oil and gas... It's such a shame that a certain political ideology which strongly believes in the free market (or so they claim) made energy a political issue...

▲

rcxdude 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A bit of a waste if the nuclear is obsolete by the time it comes online and we could have spent the money on renewables instead.

▲

crote 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Money can only be spent once. Similarly, a construction crew can only be at one construction site at a time. Investing in building new nuclear power plants will slow down construction of solar.

	▲	boringg 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What? Construction crews are completely different - different tranches of money. Couldn't be more wrong about this.
	▲	recursive 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Money can only be spent once Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease. The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.