You are looking at a very limited sample size only in the western world.
You need scale in nuclear just as with anything else. Whenever people build lots of nuclear plants the cost go down and the build becomes much faster.
You can easily go to South Korea or China and have them build you a massive capacity of nuclear in the next 10 years.
> By the same token we couldn't go entirely nuclear without dramatically over-specifying grid capacity as nuclear doesn't respond well to transient peak demand.
That is a actually not really correct if you build modern plants. Even modern Gen3+ do a OK job, and if you have lots of them, together the can actually do a pretty good job. Furthermore there is a fair amount of innovation in fuels that improve load following capacity.
If you go to GenIV they are great at following load. Not to mention that in a GenIV you already have a hot salt loop that you can use as a heat battery (uses basically the same heat storage as a solar plants do) for peaking if that what the grid needs.
Look at the design of Moltex Energy for example. The see that because of renewable the value of JIT based power delivery is gone go way up they build a GenIV nuclear plant that will be 1GW but the have a huge salt loop and 3GW of turbines in order to peak if there is no sun or wind.
That is of course an extreme case that is rather unneeded if you have an all nuclear grid.
> Centralised production works when it's a multi GW coal plant next to the colliery, or gas near the pipeline etc. As we adopt an increasing amount of renewables the grid becomes necessarily more localised as weather and climate will differ between regions and the grid is served by thousands of generation sources instead of a few dozen. Simple economics are driving that transition not whether they are 'hip' or not.
But that is the whole point. Why should you have more renewables at all? Its a total anti goal, low carbon is the goal not renewable.
If we had picked nuclear then this would be a non issue, its only an issue because of renewables in the first place.
And if you have some ideological 'anti centralisation' thing then GenIV nuclear offers lots of options. In fact one of the main research areas is nuclear for communities cut of from the grid, like military or research outpost. You can get reactors that you can put on a truck and they run for 10-20 years, after that you simply pick it up and drop another one.
However the reality is that most humans live in cities and centralization into large plants makes sense if you have the market.
> As for claiming a low energy house isn't cheap, well that makes no sense considering the size of bill reductions.
Yeah but that requires that the majority of houses in the world have to be rebuilt. And its not really worth it most of the time, at best it is worth it after like 30 years.
Will any of these work in the third world in a way that's geopolitically acceptable? The US frowns at small third world countries having access to nuclear reactors.
Post-industrialization "third world" countries like South Korea and Brazil already have nuclear power. Pre-industrialization third world countries have trivial carbon footprints. By the time they're politically stable enough to build a functioning power grid with enough demand to justify a nuclear plant, it's generally no longer a problem for them to have one.
Also, what does that have anything to do with using them in first world countries?
You need scale in nuclear just as with anything else. Whenever people build lots of nuclear plants the cost go down and the build becomes much faster.
You can easily go to South Korea or China and have them build you a massive capacity of nuclear in the next 10 years.
> By the same token we couldn't go entirely nuclear without dramatically over-specifying grid capacity as nuclear doesn't respond well to transient peak demand.
That is a actually not really correct if you build modern plants. Even modern Gen3+ do a OK job, and if you have lots of them, together the can actually do a pretty good job. Furthermore there is a fair amount of innovation in fuels that improve load following capacity.
If you go to GenIV they are great at following load. Not to mention that in a GenIV you already have a hot salt loop that you can use as a heat battery (uses basically the same heat storage as a solar plants do) for peaking if that what the grid needs.
Look at the design of Moltex Energy for example. The see that because of renewable the value of JIT based power delivery is gone go way up they build a GenIV nuclear plant that will be 1GW but the have a huge salt loop and 3GW of turbines in order to peak if there is no sun or wind.
That is of course an extreme case that is rather unneeded if you have an all nuclear grid.
> Centralised production works when it's a multi GW coal plant next to the colliery, or gas near the pipeline etc. As we adopt an increasing amount of renewables the grid becomes necessarily more localised as weather and climate will differ between regions and the grid is served by thousands of generation sources instead of a few dozen. Simple economics are driving that transition not whether they are 'hip' or not.
But that is the whole point. Why should you have more renewables at all? Its a total anti goal, low carbon is the goal not renewable.
If we had picked nuclear then this would be a non issue, its only an issue because of renewables in the first place.
And if you have some ideological 'anti centralisation' thing then GenIV nuclear offers lots of options. In fact one of the main research areas is nuclear for communities cut of from the grid, like military or research outpost. You can get reactors that you can put on a truck and they run for 10-20 years, after that you simply pick it up and drop another one.
However the reality is that most humans live in cities and centralization into large plants makes sense if you have the market.
> As for claiming a low energy house isn't cheap, well that makes no sense considering the size of bill reductions.
Yeah but that requires that the majority of houses in the world have to be rebuilt. And its not really worth it most of the time, at best it is worth it after like 30 years.