More important would be cheaper nuclear reactors.
If you factor in all the cost involved nuclear energy doesn't make sense.
Indeed, wind and solar projects can be of much smaller scales. You can iterate on them. Try several places, several designs. And of course, retiring wind turbines or a solar panels, even when you multiply it to get to the same scale of a full blown nuclear reactor, it way easier and cheaper.
In fact, those costs and scales are in such disfavor to nuclear that when officially calculating it, we are not including cheap wiring for the reactor, while we are including expensive underground wiring for wind turbine in my country. It looks better on paper.
The problem is so important, building and retiring reactors is such a pricey thing that we keep postponing it. In France, we are still running reactors that should have been decommissioned long ago.
So I hope we will be able to build some of those awesome new designs. But our society will be more independent, safe and stable if we diversify, and keep investing in wind/solar massively. A mix of energy source is much better right now.
I suspect that a lot of the cost is process and regulatory overhead.
If that can be made more efficient, things are likely to get cheaper.
However, the story only mentions running efficiency, which may not have as much impact.
The small/micro reactors are less expensive from a total investment point of view, but you still are paying at least tens of millions for your core and probably hundreds of millions for your license, regardless of how small you are. The payback on a $100M license for a 1 MWe reactor is infinite.
Furthermore, we've had small/micro reactors in the past, like the one that powered McMurdo Station in Antarctica for 10 years. It was shut down because it was expensive to operate. How do we make sure this doesn't happen with the new gen of SMRs?
We need to be developing reactors that approach full autonomy, somehow design out the need of having 4 shifts of security, somehow design out expensive site-specific licenses, have a clear story for their final waste disposition, are clearly and demonstrably safe, and so on. I'd like to see the advanced nuclear industry focus less on hype and more on practical solutions to these particular problems. Some are working on it, but there's still a lot of seemingly vapid hype in the advanced nuclear circles. I worry that it will lose credibility someday.
Meanwhile if we could figure out how to build Gen III light-water reactors more cheaply, like the Koreans largely have, then we'd have a great low-carbon stopgap that we could deploy significantly, today, with no technology development, and help avoid climate change.
Regardless, we the nuclear industry have to work super hard to get both capital and O&M costs down dramatically if we want to contribute to the energy future.
You are suggesting to fake all the expensive paperwork and playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who would take certain contracts? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
Along with keeping "Only about 10% to 20% of the [post Chernobyl] safety additions" and abandoning an extra wall in the reactor containment building: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corr...
I apologize if this comment may seem sarcastic, but after reading the TR article I would not want to live anywhere near one of those reactors.
> ... eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor components that were supplied with fake documents.
S. Korea learned how to build nukes from the failing American company, Combustion Engineering. They then tweaked the design a bit and totally serialized its production. They have total alignment because there's one big utility doing all the work (no contract wars, suing each other, etc.). They optimized the hell out of the construction management for those projects. Many of the pioneers of Korea's nuclear industry now want to help bring the technology back to the US, they feel it's repaying a debt to the Americans from the early days of their partnership with CE. For example, this long podcast is an incredible and rare view into this stuff. [1]
Tell me more about my bad faith.
Let's assume for a moment that nuclear can never be cost competitive with renewables and natural gas in generation.
Even in that scenario of guaranteed cost non-competitiveness, I would argue that it still makes sense to invest into, build and maintain a nuclear base for energy generation diversity purposes. Nuclear can provide enormous energy from a small number of operating reactors. There is also strong scientific value and potential in continuing to work on and improve nuclear, as who knows what the future holds. The US is one of the three or four leaders in nuclear energy still and it should maintain that capability. If you give it up, it will be extremely difficult to reclaim.
Some things are worth subsidizing on cost because they have other offsetting attributes. It's why, for example, nearly all liberal democracies maintain standing armies today, often at great relative cost (even 2% of GDP is a lot of money coming out of an economy and being put toward a military that is very rarely used).
Stable-without-coolant tech would have meant Fukushima at least wouldn't have melted down.
Just because it's "really safe" now, doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't make it safer.
And as a bonus: you can tell the press "well actually, this reactor can't melt down!" and 95% of their fear-whipping ability goes away.
Though cheaper would be very welcome and should be highly feasible.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/books/review-water-will-c...