Fission will always be there if the alternatives don’t pan out. Its cost is way too high ATM considering the alternatives, but as those alternatives are exhausted, we still have 90,000 years of nuclear fuel to exploit if we need it. The other possibility is that its cost comes down, then it is competing on a more even field with other renewables.

Storage works really well with nuclear, which by itself is very hard to ramp up or down (worse than coal, in contrast to gas and hydro that can work on demand).

Fukushima is bad press and also Fukushima was designed and constructed in 1960s, that's Gen I design and let alone they cut corners in safety. Like I said, Gen IV is much much safer and produce much less radioactive wastes.

Also nuclear fission might not be relevant if humanity cannot survive after 2040, according to IPCC's climate change report (I am doubtful we will even be able to get nuclear fission power plants commercialized by 2050 TBH.)

Where does the IPCC day the humanity won’t survive beyond 2040?

If fission is dead, then earth is dead. There is no way we'll survive if we continue to burn coal at the rate we do, and renewable don't work at scale yet and storage is not yet solved. Fission is the only thing that can provide us with enough clean energy in the near term (next 50 years).

We have to solve the problem in the next 10-12 years. The median nuclear plant construction is 7.5 years, with the US medians being more in the 18-20 year duration - with the very most recent nuclear projects mostly being shut down mid construction because of cost and schedule overruns.

Even France, with one the most mature and well run nuclear power programs is concluding that the next wave of power investment makes more sense to make in renewables instead of nuclear.

I suspect we will solve our problems with renewables + storage (which are still rapidly declining in cost).

Regarding France, it seems that we have lost the actual knowledge on how to build nuclear power plants. Which should have been expected given that we stopped building those for quite a while, so of course the know-how is gone.

Flamanville, the first EPR in France, was schedule to start running in 2012 for a construction cost of 3.3 billion EUR. It is now expected to start producing electricity in 2020 for a construction cost of 10.9 billion EUR. Emphasis on expected...

If you read past the public/gov't support for Nuclear in the article (the "Declining Options" section, link repeated for convenience), it implies that even China, whose multi-plant build plan should have ensured declining costs and on schedule builds has been experiencing unplanned cost growth and schedule delays.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...

The economic comparisons are ending up that Renewables and even Renewables+Storage is much lower to even costs, at a much lower risk profile. And if you watch energy company investments in renewable and divestment in nuclear projects - the companies studying the matter in detail seem to be choosing the same direction.

It's not just current costs, it's the rate of change in costs. Renewables and storage are declining in cost rapidly, and any plant built to today will be competing in 10 or 20 years with frightening (for them) cheap competitors, if the trends hold up.

Some of the French issue stems from wide-spread anti-nuclear sentiment. Fukushima galvanized a the anti-nuclear movement. Last month, Macron announced the closure of Fessenheim plant after protests and petitions passed over fears of seismic activity and potential flooding.

If you look at the IAEA's Power Reactor Information System, French reactor builds took a long time even in the 1990s:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

The originally proposed construction schedule for Flamanville 3 was 4.5 years. That was a very aggressive schedule. Even reactors completed before Chernobyl, e.g. Cruas 3, took more than 5 years:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

The most modern operating French reactor, Civaux 2 (construction started 1991), took 11 years:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

Generation III reactors like the EPR and AP1000 were supposed to be simultaneously faster to build and safer due to standardization and careful design. The actual experience of building EPR and AP1000 reactors has torpedoed the "faster" part of that justification. The troubled, prolonged builds have also killed the original lower cost projections.

At this point the the original cost and schedule estimates for EPR and AP1000 projects alike look so optimistic that they were basically fraudulent. These projects were troubled even before Fukushima aroused a new wave of anti-nuclear sentiment among the public.

I still believe the empirical evidence that nuclear power is a very safe way to generate electricity. I also believe the empirical evidence that nuclear reactors are expensive and slow to construct. "Generation IV will be safer and faster to build" -- ok, for a while I believed those same claims about Generation III. The next time I'll believe those claims about a new reactor design is after it has already entered commercial service.

If you set aside the public sentiment, the economic non-performance of Nuclear, despite investment, compared to other options is a bigger driver.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po...

This conclusion from the same French agency has been the result since 2015, with prices of Renewable alternatives making that predicted result more and more solid.

There's a difference between the time it takes to solve a problem, and the time it takes to implement the solution.

How long till we solve renewable production/storage problems? How long to refine those solutions to the point where it takes 7.5 years to deploy the solar equivalent of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station?

The time between then and now is the amount of years the world will be burning coal.

Here's an integration problem. Lets compare a project to put 100MW of power coming online from renewable vs nuclear spread over 10 years. In the Renewable case we put 10MW online per year every year and start producing power, in the nuclear case, we finish the plant after 10 years and start producing power. How much carbon do we offset in the two scenarios after 10 years?

For bonus points, even if the cost were exactly the same per unit of power, do a cost analysis of which costs more to implement under the different project timelines, using different financing scenarios?

Seems to me the obvious solution is to build wind/solar as fast as we can, while also building nuclear because by the time wind/solar reaches enough market penetration where variability is a problem, the nuclear will be ready.

We should also spend a lot of money working on storage solutions, but with the planet at stake it doesn't seem smart to put all our eggs in that basket.

Grid scale storage solutions are already commercially viable in may areas power provisioning, and have a crossover market in auto battery development. Companies are already bidding projects with renewable+storage mixes at costs already even to lower than nuclear. There is no reason to wait - structuring for nuclear is just a huge financial drag.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lightsource-sol...

https://www.energy-storage.news/news/jp-morgan-buys-into-10....

Those articles don't have numbers on how much energy they store. So far I haven't seen any that could get through a windless night. Recently I ran the numbers on Tesla's big battery project, and for that much storage it cost significantly more than nuclear.

Costs are going down, but MSRs look a lot cheaper than conventional nuclear too, so if we're going to look to the future let's do it with both.

> There's a difference between the time it takes to solve a problem, and the time it takes to implement the solution.

No, there isn't. A problem isn't solved until a solution has been fully implemented.

There is a difference between that and the time it takes to identify a solution in principle.