It was the answer. Now solar is so cheap that spamming panels and investing into ways to save the excess energy seems cheaper. By the time nuclear plants are done you’re going to be at least 8 years into the future. Solar panels however are directly implementable. And even cheaper now.

It’s really not even AN answer. It’s so expensive to build them, requires hoards of highly specialised people to build and operate, takes decades to build all the while were relying on fossil fuels still until it can generate power, has a bigger carbon impact than renewables due to massive amounts of concrete used in building decommission and waste storage, is more expensive per mw, and while on average safer than most types of power plant, if something unexpected happens shit goes extremely bad.

It just has way way way too many downsides compared to wind or solar or basically any other renewable to the point its just not really worth pursuing.

A nuclear plant can’t “produce 24/7 regardless of conditions”. Obviously natural disasters affect them. Nuclear plants need water so any flooding or tsunami can affect them. They also need maintenance because they are very complicated water boilers.

They require a lot of educated people to run them, whereas a wind turbine requires a few guys to check on them sometimes. Solar just requires some dudes to brush off the panels occasionally. That can probably be automated too.

Demand isn’t a 24/7 constant value.

Nuclear doesn’t match demand and supply.

Because it doesn’t help. Renewables want to be paired with something that can easily be spun up and down as needed. Nuclear doesn’t fit that model. It tends to make it worse, because cheap energy we could be getting from solar or wind has to give way to the nuclear baseload instead.

It’s something of the opposite problem of the sun not shining at the same time the wind doesn’t blow. At times where you have tons of both, you want to store them up for later. Nuclear forces a situation where you have to do that even more.

Yes diversification is important too. But that still doesn’t mean nuclear is worth it.

Bro do you know how power storage works

Yes, like wind. Which is also much cheaper and cleaner than nuclear.

How long will it take for us to get good enough batteries? If it’s less than 10 years, then it’s less than the time to build a nuclear power plant.

Oh, and the answer may very well be that we already have batteries that are good enough.

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1126523766/water-batteries-could-store-solar-and-wind-power-for-when-its-needed

You can look up the costs of nuclear in a country like France which is easily the most consistent builder of nuclear in the west and its not much better.

The reason we don’t build nuclear power plants anymore (including small modular), is because they’re insanely expensive, produce only a small amount of power compared to you can produce with renewables, and always come with cost overruns. Nuclear power is the techsploitation of of tbe 60’s and 70’s. Most governments look at the economics now and realize they can do solar plus storage for a fraction of the immediate and long term cost.

Even if that’s true, it’s not something we can change without more than a decade of investment. Good batteries will be here before that, if not here already.

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The whole base load situation is largely over hyped, as a diverse and slightly overbuilt network of renewable would compensate for fluctuations with minimal storage needed. Iirc you would just need 118% capacity with a 2 hour storage buffer to achieve stability rates on par with a traditional grid. And nuclears small footprint actually hinders it when filling a base load requirement, as nuclear provides a lot of power at a single location, but if you want to base load a national grid you want a little power at lots of locations. (Which can be argued that SMRs will fill that role, but that’s a whole other argument)

Pay for centuries to keep it safe? We literally just throw it in an old mine shaft and fill it with concrete, it’s really not that monetarily or resource intensive

We have reactor designs that use already spent fuel, we just aren’t building them. We have enough spent fuel for centuries, and afterwards the reprocessed fuel is much less radioactive, and only for a few decades.

None of that is true. That’s not how it works.

I can see that critical thinking isn’t your strong suit, but I’m willing to comment it out with you instead of just down voting.

If the price of solar is already the lowest -and still dropping- then how is the most expensive option that takes about a decade to implement a better option for right now? This apparent point of diminishing returns is only beginning to manifest in even lower prices than this 2019 chart. And this diminishing returns point is only in the cost of the panels dropping; they are still getting better in technology and improving efficiency while maintaining low prices. If your argument is “solar can’t continue on this trend forever” -no one expects anything to consistently drop almost 90% every decade. Of course it will level out. And when it does, it will STILL be the cheapest option.

Yes and no, the progress of solar array technology continues unabated, with multiple areas of research that are beginning to reach commercial applications. Module conversion efficiencies now are in the 20% range, but heterojunction cells, or Gallium Arsenide, or Perovskites, or any number of other possible advancements could easily put efficiencies up into the 30% range.

That being said, the price of the solar modules themselves has already shunk to a small piece of the cost to build a solar array, with the bulk of the costs now being the support structures, wiring, electrical equipment, labor, development, etc. And those costs aren’t going to decline, they’d still be there even if the solar panels themselves were free, so they effectively set a floor to the cost reductions we’re seeing.