I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
The main problem with nuclear power is that it’s the most expensive form of electricity. People who say otherwise are only looking at the cost of running the generator, rather than including all the true costs involved in generating each watt, which is called the “Levelized Cost Of Electricity” (LCOE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
So there’s no reason to build any new nuclear generators now that renewables+storage are the cheapest form of electricity, and are also the easiest and fastest to build.
I know nuclear is expensive, but power generation isn’t the only reason to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plants basically prop up nuclear science. Without nuclear power plants, you’re hampering the chances of discovering a breakthrough that could lead to cheaper nuclear energy. And you’re pushing back the timeline on fusion.
Also, medical isotopes used for cancer treatments are created in nuclear reactors.
fusion is a pipe dream at this point; nuclear physics has been so thoroughly researched through CERN and other organizations that it’s utterly unlikely that any big break-throughs are gonna happen anytime in the next 100 years.
the only optimization that could still happen is in the reactor design, that is, in everything except the nuclear physics part. stuff like how do you build cheaper plumbing through a 1 m thick concrete wall … not really exciting stuff.
This doesn’t seem like a good argument. More research into renewable and storage technology can also lead to interesting discoveries useful in other fields.
I’m curious how SMRs will end up affecting overall cost of nuclear as well. Once we get into a unit that can be mass produced rather than tailor making each site, I could see the line going down at least a bit and would also allow us to keep pushing those boundaries.