More solar is better if it displaces fossil fuels, loads can be moved to coincide with sunshine, output can be cost effectively stored and/or the climate is co-operative.
Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.
Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.
If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started.
Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve.
If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.
Look at France in their first build out; subsequent reactors of the same design cost more than the first. And France was considered a success by most. The few buildouts that have seen cost decrease have never produced learning like you get in manufactured products.
I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this, sorry I'm making statements without the research to back them up. But those that have looked into which technologies develop learning curves find that the learning curve is found early, and it tends to be tech wheee lots of the same small thing is made, with minimal customization at install.
Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install. Combined cycle gas turbines found some efficiency of scale by being small enough that they could have standardized plant designs that don't require design changes for the site (though it does limit which sites can install the designs). SMRs might change this for nuclear, but what people are calling "SMR" today is still is as big as 300MW, and it's hard to see how that could be standardized and manufactured. Nuclear does not scale down very well, which is why all these places are trying to pass off really big reactors as part of the SMR hype wave.
Here is the most well-known: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
There is nothing "inherently big" about nuclear
1. Scales with square or cube laws.
2. Are essentially fixed.
A 100 MWe reactor requires a very similar amount of security as a 1600 MWe reactor, maintenance intervals are similar and so on.
Thus, it has been evident from the very first days that bigger is better, from an economic perspective because you get both a more efficient reactor and more output to spread the huge fixed costs on.
The problem has been that even the bigger reactors are hideously expensive. Nuclear power never breached the cusp where it would be worth it and today the cost to build new renewables are in the same range as the operations and maintenance cost of existing, paid off, nuclear plants. Let alone trying to build one.
I do agree that the biggest threat to Nuclear at the moment isn't environmentalists or even NIMBY types, it is wind and solar getting so cheap and storage finally being deployed at scale that it will never be able to compete on price.
"THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS"
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
NuScale specific reading:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants...
Out of interest, how do you find the issues to be more frequent for nuclear?
Around these parts we run nuclear for base load and it pretty much runs full tilt 24/7. There is of course scheduled downtime for service, etc.
See the UK and France over the last few years for recent examples.
Solar load factor is 9% and wind 30%.
In the UK you have multiple reactors with 68% Load Factor.
If I ever need to build a Nuclear Reactor I am definitely getting the Finns to run it.
Do you think part of the reason is that dampened demand over the last few decades (due to NIMBY, Chernobyl, etc) deterred the technology from attracting more innovation and growing a bigger ecosystem?
Sure it does. New reactors are not the old designs.