Nuclear is inherently an extremely complex technology that requires construction techniques that are advanced and expensive. The steam turbines and cooling towers are the only parts that are easy and standard construction with well-contained costs.
It is, at best, an energy storage mechanism, not a source.
Electrolysers are dirt cheap (and prospects of technologies with battery-like efficiency commercialising are pretty good). You still only get back 50% of your energy by burning, but if the energy from the lower capacity times is enough to fully fund your panels, then electrolysing the energy from 10-3 during spring till autumn allows the use of a resource you'd otherwise dump as heat.
Storage is hard, energy to power electrolysers is only cheap with solar or surplus wind, and the second stage of a ccgt is big and expensive.
This would solve one of those problems.
The other two are already cheaper than drilling a bunch of 20km deep holes or building a nuclear reactor.
Unless another has come online since the last time I looked, there is only one (1) grid-scale solar installation in the entire world, and it was built with massive government funding.
What a bizarre line to draw. The technology that benefits from being distributed rather than needing massive centralisation to be viable isn't concentrated to the point it causes the grid to be over-centralised?
Whatever metric you need to satisfy those mental gymnastics you can watch it come true realtime over the next year or two by adding 'unsubsidized solar park GW' to your news topic feed.
You're not going to run an industrial civilization from a few hobby solar panels on someone's roof, any more than Mao was able to run an industrial civilization from crude cast iron smelted in people's back yards.
> you can watch it come true realtime over the next year or two
Yeah. Not happening. Not in a year or two, nor even in a decade or two.
What powers heavy industry in your decentralized utopia? Some kind of reverse grid?
Only about 34% of electricity is used for residential purposes in the United States, and I would be surprised if the proportion were much different in other countries.
Yes, it's what allows solar modules to see 10-20% yoy reductions in price per watt and 15MW wind turbines to be more cost effective than 1MW ones. You achieve this by doing the same thing enough times that you get good at it. This is something the nuclear industry has never achieved.
> You're not going to run an industrial civilization from a few hobby solar panels on someone's roof, any more than Mao was able to run an industrial civilization from crude cast iron smelted in people's back yards.
Good thing there are thousands of 10-100MW scale solar parks finished every year and several GW scale plants being finished each year. Almost all new development is completely unsubsidized and auctioned of for $15-40/MWh before completion.
> What powers heavy industry in your decentralized utopia? Some kind of reverse grid?
The 15MW wind turbines, 5GW solar plants, 1GW battery facilities and the existing gas plants running on green fuels. Putting more than a few hundred MW in the same place creates bottlenecks in your grid and reduces its resilience.
Rooftop solar can happily produce enough to cover commercial, personal transport/transit and residential with plenty to spare because you can cover worldwide average primary energy with about 50m^2 of sunlight per person. It's largely irrelevant at the moment though hecause costs are dominated by installation and coordination.
> Only about 34% of electricity is used for residential purposes in the United States, and I would be surprised if the proportion were much different in other countries.
This is entirely irrelevant
It is entirely relevant. How is that power getting from someone's rooftop to an aluminum smelter? Magic?
> Yes, it's what allows solar modules to see 10-20% yoy reductions in price per watt and 15MW wind turbines to be more cost effective than 1MW ones.
If it were really "cost effective" it wouldn't need the constant cheerleading and handwaving. Nor would it need the massive government subsidies.
And no, the entire power grid isn't going to be rebuilt within the next two years. Or the next two decades.
You are a fundamentally unserious person.
The total subsidies ever spent in solar are about the same order as the subsidy on a single nuclear reactor. That age is now over and most new utility scale projects (the majority of installations) are fully unsubsidized.
It won't even be economically preferable to keep existing gas running soon, let alone run a nuclear plant. Any money spent on nuclear now is just a handout to the builder and a handout to the gigawatts of fossil fuels that money could make obsolete.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/us-installs-record-s...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-09/gas-plant...
https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/07/22/solar-at-17-30-mw-in-...
https://www.science-climat-energie.be/2021/07/16/the-present...
Here's a simple model using very pessimistic costs of last generation technology with 100% uptime for lower LCOE than new nuclear https://model.energy/?results=ee966ba4279eec9f32fcdadb8dd4dc...
Much more importantly you're buying capacity that can come on as soon as each part is done with that money rather than capacity that comes online between 2032 and 2045 and won't see full return until 2100.
As you said the planet is dying now and I'd much rather have 3W for the capital in 3 years (with a vast surplus for variable loads) than 1W in 10-20.
All we have to do is stop helping the fossil fuel industry block new wind and solar projects, delay them and drive costs up. The variability will fund storage and drive fossil fuels out of business on its own. Pouring those billions of public funds into gigawatts of nationally owned electrolysers to kickstart the industry would be a vastly better use of money than spending it on nuclear projects that will never open or be a drain on public coffers for decades via tarriff guarantees 10x the projected cost of electricity.