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.