Re:What drives this madness on small modular nuclear reactors?
by vlovich123 on Saturday December 02, 2023 @04:55PM
(#38502437)
Well we did need quite substantial subsidies to get there so that part wasn’t wrong. And heat pumps are orthogonal to this. Like the stuff that’s happening now with heat pumps is exciting and I hope the ideas pan out but that feels orthogonal. I’m sure getting below parity was the primary concern but that was just the first one with storage being an even bigger second hurdle that hasn’t been cleared and we don’t know if we can clear. Like making enough batteries to sustain EV manufacturing & replace all existing vehicles is already a challenge. I’m sure we can muster it but grid-scale storage is an order magnitude larger problem than that. Renewables have all these order of magnitude technical scaling problems that nuclear doesn’t seem to have. The biggest technical scaling problem for nuclear is building a reactor that physically can’t melt down. We’ve been doing research on that with threadbare funding for a long time. If we meaningfully invested in it we could do it. Hell, China is targetting to build a production 370 MW molten salt reactors by 2030. Nuclear is really where we should be investing R&D dollars at government scale because that resolves self-imposed regulatory hurdles. Private investments seem to be generally sufficient for solar and wind.
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