We need to build thousands of these immediately to provide baseload power and decommission all fossil fuels
After that huge push, we have nothing to show for it except for a tiny number of half-finished, over-budget, behind schedule construction projects, and a toooooon of abandoned projects. The UK can't even find somebody to build their projects anymore.
Hope has turned towards these small reactors, after the failure to build big reactors--despite immensely favorable regulatory, finance, and PR settings. I don't know of local opposition to a single reactor! At least not enough to cause a stir.
Thousands of small reactors won't be enough, and we won't be able to build thousands for another 10-20 years. So we are instead stuck with renewables and storage. And just like we were right to throw experimental money at nuclear in the mid-2000s when we didn't really believe the numbers, I think we are far better grounded to throw equal billions of dollars (at least $40B in the US) at storage projects that the industry currently disregards.
We have far better pricing data for storage, it's deployable within a year, and it has massive benefits. And investing now will decrease the cost more quickly.
Throw several billion each at more speculative storage techs like flow chemistries and cryogenic air storage, and then the rest at standard, shipping, off the shelf lithium ion. We will see massive industries come into formation whose economic productivity and value dwarfs the tiny $40B we spent on kickstarting it. This will work, without a doubt. Nuclear may or may not work, it remains to be seen.
We need a technical, regulatory and user regime to support this. For starters, by transmitting power demand/price information to cars so they can decide when to charge, and also allowing cars to deposit electricity back into the network.
If we manage this smartly, we can have battery storage and EVs in one go.
So we will be building massive amounts of storage as we shift our car fleet to electric (though personally I hope that we can massively cut down on car use too, due to the amount of PM2.5 pollution even EVs cause. The biggest source of microplastics in CA is tire road wear, not plastic bags or straws, yet the idea of reducing car travel is faaaaaar outside the Overton window even as we try to ban single use plastics.)
I think there's lots of room for demand response, both in terms of pre-cooling houses or pre-charging batters. But I would love to be able to power my house with the 50amps that my car battery could provide. If you're only taking a couple kWh at peak times, it has nearly an effect on battery longevity and could provide great value to both the grid and user if price signals could be used in an automated fashion.
For a model that won't scale to the general population, OhmConnect in CA will pay residences to reduce usage at certain hours, averaging about 6 hours per month for me. During the recent CA high load days, I made about $50 with minimal action on my part (used all the normal lighting, etc. just didn't run the dishwasher or clothes dryer during that period).
This is the source of fine particulate matter, reported as PM2.5 in air quality, that results in ~50k premature US deaths per year [1] [2].
Tire particulates are the major source of oceanic microplastics off the CA coast [3]. Tire manufacturers produce tires that produce fewer particulates and last longer and are more expensive upfront, but which have a lower total cost of ownership. [4]
Sorry for the big leap, I accumulate all these news bits by trawling deeply in a few narrow topics, and forget that they are not common knowledge and often obscure.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
[2] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/10/22/mit-study-vehicle-emi...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/califor...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyres-plastic-environment...
To be clear: to me it looks like a "nuclear renaissance" is a hypothetical concept. Like a goal that was never attempted due to public image.
The US media is in shambles, and few people care about the grid, so it doesn't get much reporting here. And for the lobbying efforts that it took to convince the utilities to back nuclear were kind of shady: the utilities had to be promised that they would get paid by rate payers for the construction projects even as construction costs ballooned and even if the construction projects failed. This is not the type of screwing of customers that one wants done very publicly. But no US utility is going to take on the immense risk for tiny reward of paying for a nuclear plant without such a ridiculous guarantee. At least not until there are several successes and utilities can start to trust the industry again after all the financial disasters from construction mismanagement in the 1970s. In South Carolina the law was called the Base Load Review Act [1]. Something similar was passed in Georgia but I'm having trouble finding it now.
Here's Lindsay Graham using the term "nuclear renaissance" [2]. Here's a 2017 article talking about how the VC Summer plant in Georgia was to be part of it [3].
In the UK this took the form of an explicit name of "nuclear renaissance" in government communication [4].
I see it commonly used to describe the efforts of many to rebuild nuclear starting in the 2000s, but I don't think that Wikipedia page does much good about actually describing the very real lobbying efforts that went on in the US and UK to make it happen, despite (in retrospect well-founded) qualms by many involved in the energy industry.
[1] "... constitutionality of the 2007 state law that allowed SCE&G to recoup construction costs from ratepayers while construction took place." https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article174561111.h...
[2] https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/sen-lindse...
[3] https://www.axios.com/santee-cooper-sce-g-pause-work-on-14b-...
[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/leading-the-way-the-u...
Luckily nobody besides the Michael Shellenberger Fan Club is falling for this line these days.