If we could just build 500MW smaller Molten Salt cooled reactors we could literally build them like gas plants.
> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
Sure, a nuclear cycle without the use of a steam turbine may have a future. Similarly to how gas plants undercut coal, and nuclear. Simply due to the cost of the steam plant. I haven't seen any proposals though which is more concrete than a pie-in-sky powerpoint design though.
The other issue is that for wind you only need an axle and a generator, for sun it is solid state. It is hard to compete with the economics of solid state power generation.
Germany has been doing a Green New Deal style thing with Renwables for 2 decades now, in my opinion they could have easily been heading to 100% CO2 free by now if they had just started to build nuclear plants.
The French certainty made mistakes and unfortunately technology innovation and improvement and continued expatiation of the products on a global scale didn't happen.
Of course I don't want to relay on learning effects from these large complex projects, but its better then just extrapolating from individual first time builds.
We defiantly want to move to smaller AND more efficient nuclear plants, but for that we also need nuclear industry, nuclear education a competent nuclear regulator and a government that actually puts its resources in that place.
> The other issue is that for wind you only need an axle and a generator, for sun it is solid state. It is hard to compete with the economics of solid state power generation.
That is one consideration. The real question is all in, 100% making sure all citizens have as much power as they need at every moment no matter what happens. If you approach it like that, going a all nuclear route with some localized batteries for peak shaving would be the overall cheapest solution for a largish industrial economy. You just replace current coal plants with nuclear plants and use the same infrastructure.
Doing a fully renewable massive industrial economy is totally unsolved problem requiring storage, smart grids and so on. And even then, when you consider the loses of solar in the case of a vulcano for example, you probably need some kind of gas backup.
Had the world at Kyoto just said, lets everybody build 1 nuclear plant per 1 million people, we would have de-carbonized by now.
I think it would far cheaper to just build like 2x the wind/solar you need and use the surpluses to make methane [2] which is easily stored and already used for 40% of the US electrical grid [3].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
[1]: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
