> or being overly dependent on local weather.

It was interesting to see (thanks, Europe) how nuclear power plants are still somewhat susceptible to global climate change, since they require vast amounts of water below a certain temperature to run.

Those are administrative limits set before climate change to help protect fish. You can solve the problem by keeping fish farther away from the outlets.

Nuclear plants can also be cooled with nearly zero water usage, using dry cooling (dump heat straight to air basically with air radiators). This is more expensive, but may make sense as climate change kicks in. It's perfectly doable and safe.

So you're with more words saying - lets take the by far most expensive energy source and make it more expensive?

Today creating hydrogen from solar and burning it in a turbine is competitive with new built nuclear. Not that anyone suggests it for anything else than emergencies, since the round trip efficiency cost would be ludicrous.

Markets are currently broken. People are looking at low LCOE for gas, wind, and solar without it having any capability to consider factors like greenhouse gas emissions (for gas), cost of capacity overbuilds and storage needed for intermittency at scale (for wind/solar), increased transmission lines (for dispersed sources, again wind/solar).

Yet everyone just says "ok nuclear is the most expensive and always will be no matter what"

Add in a carbon fee and a low-carbon capacity market and all of a sudden nuclear would be the cheapest.

Markets are human constructs that are currently woefully messed up and leading us in dangerous directions.

Capacity over build is already factored into LCOE for renewables, right there in the definition.

Transmission lines are not but comparing how many HVDC lines you can get for the difference between renewables and a single nuclear reactor is laughable. This is not even mentioning the cost that has gone into building the current grid in a hub and spoke model around big centralized producers.

Not that we need to throw it away, but it is worth mentioning when talking nuclear. Especially new builds.

Power 2 X makes storage solved at costs lower or in line to nuclear. Not that anyone would accept those costs.

The real interesting research which is currently happening is around grid forming inverts. Being able create a country wide grid without any synchronous producers or coupling.

> Capacity over build is already factored into LCOE for renewables, right there in the definition.

The way people argue about it, no it absolutely not. CAISO generates about 25,000 MWd in a day. If you just use LCOE you would say, ok let's take the LCOE in $/MWh, convert to $/MWd and multiply them for each energy source. Wow look how cheap 100% wind and solar are!

But oops they totally missed the fact that oops in Winter they have to build at least 4x capacity to fill up the shockingly large amount of chemical batteries (hundreds of skyscrapers full) and wires during the windy/sunny periods, and then rebuild all of this stuff every 25 years. Now it looks very expensive and crazy.

The 92% capacity factor nuclear plant running for 80 years is looking good.

Wind and solar alone are the cheapest forms of energy as tents are the cheapest form of housing.

Many studies suggest that a good mixture of hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar are the ideal. Let's not rule out nuclear due to current market quirks.

We see in France how good that works.

And we don't fear russia bombing Ukraine's WECs

Climate change and the 8 million people who die per year from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion products (WHO numbers) are far more concerning. Nuclear solves wayyy more problems than it causes.

Oh and nuclear fission used in breeder reactors is just as renewable as the fusion fuel in the sun that powers wind/solar/hydro/bio. We can make 100% of the world's primary energy for 4 billion years with nuclear before running out of fuel.