Comment by epistasis

Enhanced geothermal using fracking techniques developed in the past decades is being deployed now, and has very limited restrictions on where it can go.

> storage cannot meaningfully "back" intermittent renewables because it's only good for a few hours load from the grid

That's trivially untrue. If you can build a battery for four hours duration, then of course you can build another to get to 8, or however many you want. Batteries are being added to the grid at a huge rate.

> natural gas peaker plants are very expensive and increase CO2 emissions. There isn't much of an alternative to nuclear.

Gas peakers are about the same cost as nuclear. We will have a ton of gas peakers hanging around in the coming decades, and they will be used less and less as we get more batteries on the grid. Already, batteries eat peakers' lunch economically.

In the most optimistic grid modeling scenarios, nuclear can play a 5% or 10% role in a fully decarbonized grid. If you go full nuclear, then you also need a ton of batteries. And if nuclear was cheap, I would advocate going for a ton of nuclear plus batteries. But nuclear is super expensive, and doesn't scale fast enough to meet our needs.

We are currently at 20% nuclear power in the US and have a rapidly aging fleet. Even if we had investors who wanted to spend the $500B it would take to keep 5% of our grid as nuclear, it's unlikely we'd be able to build those 50 1GW reactors over the course of the next 20 years. Scaling SMRs seems even less likely.

I really hope I'm wrong and the SMRs somehow materialize and are cheap, but none of the startups are acting like the have anything real or the chops to scale. A new reactor getting built by 2032, as suggested here? Pumping out an SMR in 6 years, when design isn't even finalized, the company hasn't shown progress since abandoning an NRC application, does not seem plausible.

> The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.

That is not at all what I have seen, the costs tend to be from absolutely massive infrastructure needed to last a long time in harsh conditions that are difficult to repair.

Those seem more like fundamental engineering requirements.

Across four different regulatory structures: France, Finland, the UK, and the US, modern nuclear has proven to be excessively expensive and require massive amounts of high skilled labor. In the past century, high skilled labor was cheaper, but these days we need to pay welders and other construction workers higher wages because they have high productivity alternative jobs that pay better than in 1970.

Those high interest payments for 10+ years are also because EPC promises to build the design within 5-7 years then takes 2-3x the time. At Vogtle the fuckups both on design meant that many plans were "unconstructable" and then construction proceeded anyway with whatever they could wing together then they had to go back and make sure that whatever the bell was built still met the design.

Construction is actually very expensive and also the plant doesn't "sit idle" for 10+ years before activation.

Construction costs are not "trivial" if each I-beam you're using has a PhD in materials testing.

What, we should have a wild west where everyone can set up their own nuclear power station without any compliance or certification? If not then these are part of the build cost... it's like saying we shouldn't include testing as part of the cost of building software.

> compliance and certification

You can say the same for cars, houses, appliances, medical devices, elevators, stairs, disabled access, etc etc.

So, what exactly is your point? Yes, everything would be "much cheaper" if nobody had to pay as much attention to most details any more. Everything would also be much much more expensive for everybody else and longer term, or not work at all or reliably or safely.

If this were true china wouldnt be winding down its nuclear program in favor of solar and hydro