It's crazy to hear the anti-nuclear, or anti-solar people, we obviosuly need a mix of everything, but above all we need to reduce our use
Anti-nuclear folks I've heard about (and argued myself against) in both Spain and Sweden, but anti-solar people? Never heard anyone being against solar, what are the arguments for not having solar granted you have enough sun and besides any temporary economic arguments?
On the face of it it sounds somewhat sensible point by point, but the more you did in, the more it just boils down to finding excuses, any excuse at all, for NIMBYism, often from rich urbanites who moved to the country and want it to be an episode of Downton Abbey, and fret about their house price more then anything else in the world.
This one tries a particularly hamfisted and tendentious "but Ukraine", neglecting that the fucked domestic energy situation is heavily impacted by Ukraine right now.
- the energy they produce is too unreliable
- their production creates more pollution than they save
- the lifespan is too short to be worth it
- they require too much land that should be used differently
Nuclear, otoh, provides constant output (barring maintenance windows) and has the full cost of the plant, from construction to decommissioning, built into it.
We've got nuclear submarines that run just fine- the prototypal tiny reactor. Had we built more and smaller nuclear power plants decades ago, we could have averted a lot of emissions and so on and so forth.
Both wind farms and nuclear power plants end up with a "strike price", which is effectively a collar option around the spot price so that revenue is guaranteed. It can in some cases result in wind farms having to pay money back if the spot price goes up too much.
Separately there is the capacity auction https://www.emrsettlement.co.uk/schemes/capacity-market/ and a fast frequency response market (which batteries are starting to appear in).
> Had we built more and smaller nuclear power plants decades ago
The "learning rate" for reactors appears to be negative: over time, they get harder to build. Possibly as people discover more ways in which things could go wrong. Hinckley Point C is over time and budget.
Small nuclear plants are (maybe) cheaper per "plant" but not cheaper per watt and likely never will be.
Of course, if we're building enough renewable capacity that electricity is basically free when it's sunny or windy, that changes the eceonomics and maybe we should all be making hydrogen in that sort of [bumpily]-abundant future.
However, storing hydrogen is also a pain - the density is crap even as a liquid and very technically challenging, and the density is mind-bogglingly crap as a gas - you'd want to find some vast geological underground reservoir in which to store it economically.
None of these are insurmountable, it's just not an especially attractive option as things stand.
Storing hydrogen is trivially done in salt caverns. We already do it that way today.