As for "nuclear being effectively dead"; the story you yourself posted in this thread says this:
quote: "By contrast, Russia, which now dominates the international market for new reactors, has 53 under construction, planned, or proposed within its own borders and another 50 in 19 countries. China is constructing, planning, or proposing to build 220 new domestic reactors, and 20 of its models are being built or are under consideration in 12 other countries."
And thats not even considering the agreement on tripling nuclear capacity before 2050, adopted by 20 nations at the COP28.
Can we stop with the ultra partisan claims, please?
I will add that with natural gas still facing no CO2 tax in the US the impressive thing is how much renewable energy is still being installed. The environment is oppressive for anything but gas; it's absolutely lethal for nuclear, to the extent nuclear can count it as a victory if existing plants can remain operating.
I reject the argument that being against nuclear energy is "partisan". I suggest instead that new construction nuclear is just bad when examined objectively. Nuclear partisans (and there the epithet is warranted) do not exert quality control on their "arguments".
I'm specifically referring to your extreme rhetoric in this thread. Despite your continued claims, nuclear is experiencing a renaissance these years, and I see that it's purposeless to argue the point further with you, so I'll let you observe the developments yourself in the coming 10 years as they will speak for themselves. End.
Could you please indicate sources?
BTW: you count a lot of "proposed" reactors. Proposing is easy, building is harder.
1) Have we built enough reactors consistently enough over time to say for sure the experience effects don’t build? I know we effectively stopped in the 80s, but I’m curious if there’s evidence from elsewhere to say nuclear’s indeed different here.
2. Hypothetically, if SMRs lead to a 10-100x increase in volume building, would we see experience effects? At what volume would you expect to see genuine experience effects, or again is nuclear fundamentally different for some reason?
I’ll say my biases are: I’m not surprised we’ve seen limited learning over time for various reasons, I think the size of nuclear projects almost precludes repeat learning, and I do expect if we lower the project size and increase the volume we’d see efficiencies of scale, but I could be convinced that either nuclear is sufficiently different or that even with the SMRs we’re not going to see enough scale to actually recognize efficiencies or learning.
Experience effects occur when an individual or a cohesive group gains experience. But with NPPs taking a long time to build, any individual doesn't go through many iterations in their career. Experience also decays, so if the learning rate is low enough decay should cancel it out.
In contrast, the facilities for building renewable technologies iterate much faster, both on production of individual modules, and in design updates. Installation and planning also have similar high rates of activity.
SMRs might provide a solution, but if they're so fast we have to ask why none of the SMR companies have built any yet.