I speak with Jigar Shah (head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office) about all things nuclear, including its recent performance, the strategies that could revive and accelerate it, new nuclear technologies and what small modular reactors actually are, and the role that nuclear will play in a decarbonized economy.
Just finished listening and I am again hit with the palpable hype that is the nuclear circle jerk. Your guest shot right over the underlying assumptions that all his models were based on, those assumptions are absolutely critical to how arguments are made. It’s assumes demand, and a stable political environment. What he doesn’t even touch on are nuclear non-proliferation issues and potential terrorism or intentional damage to plants by MAGA Republicans. It also assumes a reasonable intact political structure that looks similar as today. All of that is very much in question right now and nuclear for better or worse has all kinds of problems associated with it.
I also want to invite any nuclear proponent to visit the abandoned mine and mill sites that my part of the country is riddled with. Uranium mining is nasty and has left a legacy of death, disease, and destruction.
So let the nuclear cheerleaders rah rah rah, and let Senator Barrasso push nuclear when he isn’t busy working to undermine our democracy. Nuclear is a bad deal and not worth the costs. Let dinosaurs die.
His "much smarter guys than me are working on it" is 100% delusional. If someone pays me 2x my normal pay check to do some engineering or modelling or PR for the nuclear power boondoggle then I'm considering them as a client or employer from the get go. Doesn't mean they wont burn through Bill Gates equity in a few years then crash and burn the entire business. It's a very dumb version of the "I defer to the experts" fallacy when you aren't even citing the experts evidence for your argument.
Great podcast but he brings a Panglossian view. He glossed over waste and terrible history of costs - in WA alone you may recall "WPPS" and the Trojan plant that closed prematurely at great cost. The "we need everything" view is questionable - we need what makes sense with current technology and economics. You made a great point about lack of intermittency and his response made no sense: if flexible demand (e.g., hydrogen production) can soak it up and deliver it later, the same would work for solar and wind. Finally, I don't believe big tech's (or bitcoin miners) desire for steady power is a public problem: It makes no sense to subsidize generation or take risks for them- they can solve that themselves, with public constraints making sure it's clean.
Nuclear is a huge distraction from the faster and cheaper clean energy solutions that we should be focusing on. Want proof? Georgia’s Plant Vogtle has been under construction for 15 years and is still not done. It’s $11.1 B for 1,024 megawatts- an insane ratepayer ripoff that should be criminalized. Jigar danced around the truth of that, claiming that lessons learned will make the next one(s) faster and cheaper. Nearly everything he said was false. See my LinkedIn page for corrections.
no industry like nuclear has had a 70 year learnings curve that continued to sail north the entire time. that is quite an achievement given the state largesse from at least seven nuclear superpower nations for most of that 70 years. I guess the grift has been so long and so deep that the industry just can't believe it's entitlement has been challenged by these upstart technologies like PV, Wind turbines, chemical batteries, thermal storage, etc etc
I always hear "well, governments can step in and build nuclear plants if the private sector isn't going to do it." My question is WHY? If *investors* say there's no ROI on nuclear power not only because of the decades+ it takes to get any return, but also because of the RAPIDLY evolving renewables market where costs are plummeting year-over-year, why would anyone mandate taxpayers foot the bill for an energy source whose levelized cost is likely to be an order of magnitude more expensive than any other energy generating product when it finally comes online a decade down the road? I thought at one time that the containerized, modular nuclear plants might be the answer, but even those can't come in at an acceptable cost.
I understand nothing provides more power in a more compact footprint, but anyone pushing taxpayer funded nuclear power isn't being honest with themselves or the public. If investors know it's a bad deal, I don't understand why taxpayers should be forced to spend money on it.
What is missing from a high RE energy system is not a nuclear shaped gap and I don't think it can be squeezed into it. Nothing baseload is going to survive on ever fewer hours a day or on a few days or weeks a year. The effective capacity factor - the proportion that is sold at a profit - goes down in response to the periods of abundant wind and solar and the economics, already difficult, will only get worse.
I think we'll see a LOT more batteries - which barely existed as an option 7 years ago when the first large Tesla battery got installed in South Australia; whole mega battery factories have been built and batteries from them installed since then. That fast. Investment in new solar factories - the IEA thinks production will reach 1 TW per year within the next two years - is already exceeded by that in new battery factories (and unwise to discount the ability of battery R&D to keep exceeding expectations). And I think investment will turn to pumped hydro storage, not nuclear and it will fit the long/deep storage role that RE will need better. And I don't expect to see Hydrogen as energy storage at all, but confined to industrial uses where production, storage and use are all on-site, avoiding transporting it.
I think the confidence to invest in storage at large scale was always going to wait on wider electricity industry confidence that there will be enough solar and wind at scales to justify it and calls for it to be a prerequisite were more about impeding RE than advancing it.
Except in nations where governments can autocratically decree nuclear - and are prepared to pay for the higher energy costs and complications - nuclear will struggle. Around here the largest bloc of support for nuclear is locked away behind Right politics' Wall of Denial (no climate problem, no need), with their primary use for nuclear being a rhetorical blunt instrument against climate activism and saving fossil fuels from global warming and renewable energy. It is used as a political bar too high intended to force everyone under and to stay with fossil fuels, not over.
But when/if the Wall of Denial does come down... I will expect they will choose RE, out of free market ideology.
exactly. Iv'e modelled grid energy for high penetrations of wind and PV and nuclear cant even compete at the exiting level of 30% RE let alone 90% RE. this is pie in the sky stuff and Shah is talking his book or somebody else's book. pure propaganda from start to finish and I'm surprised David Roberts gave him an easy run with no pushback on Shah's raft of assumptions.
Even where a grid is mostly nuclear the option to cut daytime energy costs by adding privately owned rooftop solar is attractive and will cut into daytime demand. And there will be a whole lot of excess low cost solar that will feed back to the grid and further reduce overall demand (and nuclear's financially effective capacity factor) unless specifically blocked.
Going by household solar it is not just possible to have regular periods where it meets all demand with lots leftover it seems like aggregations will periodically exceed all grid demand with lots leftover. That we have not yet worked out how to take maximum advantage of the lowest cost electricity ever devised (and still not done getting cheaper) doesn't change the fact that it is good news; even the disruptive effect is welcome in my book because the industry, with government support was so resistant to serious change.
Exactly, people always like to blow off the waste problem when they don’t have to live with it. Same goes for mine and mill sites around the western U.S.
They also didn’t talk about the low level waste generated by these plants which is substantially more in volume and different in kind.
Thanks Dave, good podcast. Another problem we need to solve with nuclear is obtaining the fuel. Here in New Mexico we've seen what that's done to uranium miners and their communities and it's pretty terrible. If you have a next in the series, please ask the question.
It seems that the case for nuclear is dependent on longer-duration storage remaining very expensive, as well as the nuclear industry getting its act together.
One problem is focusing on 100% or 24x7 clean. Google, MS, etc., seem to be contributing to this, along with activists. This is distracting us from the path from 30% renewables/clean to 80%+ renewables/clean. Whether it's "transmission-constrained" or not. There have been studies of NM and CO that show very high clean %s are possible w/o any of this baseloadish geo or nuclear. And at very low costs. But it does require some expensive storage at some point, and 5-10%ish rarely-dispatched backup from gas and then maybe switching that to very expensive H2/storage, but only a tiny bit of it, if that last little % matters enough.
IMHO, it's much, much more important to get to 85% clean electric while moving 85% of heat and gas/diesel to that pretty clean electric. Or if this geo heat can be found "everywhere" use it for district heating instead of trying to convert it to electric with very expensive 20% efficient turbines.
But CO and NM are not CT. So in places with lots of cooling water and little land, add nukes. Not in the CO river basin, which includes the Bill Gates thing in south WY. That's just weird politics, as is the apparent inability to site new renewables in WA.
I've modelled 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and 100% RE for the island grid in south west Western Australia known as the SWIS grid. Being an island grid there's no using the state next door or the grid up north as a virtual battery. So it's a tough solution set.
But I can tell you even with a bunch of constraints on the modelling like historical demand projections (with some growth factor applied to each one hour power trading interval equality), present day LCOE for each technology, conservative assumptions about EV growth and electrification of build gins and industry and zero by way of flexible demand in industry and sector coupling that 90% RE is very affordable and very doable.
100% isn't that much more expensive using all those constraints but those constraints are artificial in my view. sector coupling will be huge as we move past 60% RE as the cost savings will be compelling behind the meter and for wholesale power purchases. thermal storage is about to explode the dame way battery storage has in the last decade, Storage experts and academics have learned a lot as a profession about the problems associated with molten salts storage. heaps of new mediums are being trailed now with cost projects (only projections at this stage) at a factor of 10 less than lithium ion or Redux Flow Battery solutions. And with potential for applications in industrial settings for process heat the wins for industry and grids are potentially large.
I don't buy the 85% is more important that 100% RE. it's all important and we shouldn't focus in one or the other, we should focus on both,. But I do agree with you that by the time we arrive at 85% RE on most of the worlds grids then way forward to 100% Will be 100x more obvious to pundits and financiers than it is today.
A big part of our problem is political. Nukes, CCS, H2, LNG are posited as ways for the US to "innovate" and hopefully have some exports of this tech to client countries. AKA "The Arsenal of Clean Energy." Since we're falling behind on wind and solar. This is big inside the beltway, also hoping to swing a few union/rural voters. Of course it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if no one is speaking for wind and solar. Then over on the left coast the techie/trekkies have never had their hearts into renewables. I just heard John Kerry mention "fusion" first on a list of clean tech. Time for that guy to "go home and put his feet up." I was a solar thermal guy way back. I'm all for electrical and thermal storage of every kind, efficiently done.
I really enjoy the reneweconomy.com.au/ website and podcasts. The fight seems more focused down under.
I’m not convinced the desire for 24/7 clean power is a distraction. That comes back to additionality, making sure you’re not just bidding up the cost of one unit, you’re actually getting more units built. Those 24/7 commitments, if they’re serious, wind up with PPAs behind them. See Fervo Energy who has PPAs lined up on a bunch of markets.
I think that any data centre claiming they need nuclear to ensure 24/7 or 8760 hours of the year clean energy are talking out of their hat. nuclear is just way too expensive. and it compliments the cheapest power on Earth today, PV and wind really badly bc it cannot ramp and storage makes the most expensive power going around even more expenses when firmed with storage. District heating they say, they're now grasping at straws. Data Centres have a heat dissipation problem not a heat demand problem!
The all-of-the-above approach to decarbonization rarely questions demand. Can we afford to be demand-neutral as long as users can pay? Can we afford to be demand-neutral if it perpetuates unsustainable energy and resource usage?
Data centers can be located near where abundant green energy is available, like the recent announcement of an Amazon data center to be built in Kenya. It really doesn't matter whether a data center is located in Kenya, Iceland, or next door. A lot of people probably would prefer to use a remote data center than having to live near a nuclear power plant.
Thanks for this, David. Please please please convince Jigar to debate Marc Jacobson as an "all of the above vs. no miracles needed" follow-up! I'd buy front row seats.
Yes! And maybe someone from Rocky Mountain Institute on the economics and Union of Concerned Scientists on the safety of nuclear, SMR and full-size. Make a great panel!
Thanks David and Jigar Shah. I know it's Jigar's job to support nuclear (not just renewables). That's a difficult task! I think Jigar makes a good defense for nuclear. Problem is, nuclear isn't very defensible.
For just a second put aside safety and cost (those are two big things to put aside).
If the stated goal is to decarbonize electricity by 2035 I just don't see how new nuclear can contribute much. My understanding is that there are no plants in the permitting process today. If they started today and matched Vogtle's original timeline (which they blew past) the next new reactor will not come online until around 2034. BTW those "trained" engineers and construction workers are not going to just sit around waiting for the next project. They are already on new jobs.
If that is the case the issues that nuclear is intended to address, transmission capacity, etc, have to be addressed anyway. Luckily we just heard a podcast about re-conductoring.
So is this a case of 2035 being unrealistic and the government is saying one thing and preparing for another?
the climate denial industry run their arguments in cycles. when there are democrats in power in the USA or Labor in UK or Australia then it's time to ramp up the nuclear propaganda. Australian opposition is over them moon about nuclear all of a sudden after not even mentioning it for the last 20 year that they were in power for the majority of years. It's all BS and designed to waste the time of everyone from activists to engineers, to financiers and rent seekers to the political classes and NGOs
the "I could sleep on a bed of spent fuel and get more from the environment" - isn't radiation exposure cumulative? If the bed is producing an equal level to background, that means your are experiencing twice background no? If a source is so low as to be indistinguishable *from* background then it's producing far less than background levels.
That was a good podcast. Jigar Shah is always both amusing and informative. I’m not entirely sure what the specific, “not really small and not really modular,” refers to when it comes to NuScale. Is it because the generators themselves require a pretty bit investment and capital and a big capex footprint?
The BWRX-300 I get it, it’s just a scaled down version of an old design. Which is a point in its favor.
Reading the transcript helped instead of trying to listen 6 times in a row while doing something else.
Honestly that part of the conversation is worth revisiting anyway. Jigar Shah managed to explain why it's unlikely we won't get manufacturing learning curves, where you get 90%+ cost reductions, but the industry can use SMR (and just smaller designs like BWRX-300) to get to Nth cost savings, and that's enough to compete with gas. That's actually pretty darned cool.
I've been skeptical that the cost of nuclear could come down fast enough to matter in the energy transition, before it's displaced by something else. It seems a little more likely now, but only barely inside my lifetime.
Maybe I'll have small reactor in my northeast city providing district heating before I die.
Just finished listening and I am again hit with the palpable hype that is the nuclear circle jerk. Your guest shot right over the underlying assumptions that all his models were based on, those assumptions are absolutely critical to how arguments are made. It’s assumes demand, and a stable political environment. What he doesn’t even touch on are nuclear non-proliferation issues and potential terrorism or intentional damage to plants by MAGA Republicans. It also assumes a reasonable intact political structure that looks similar as today. All of that is very much in question right now and nuclear for better or worse has all kinds of problems associated with it.
I also want to invite any nuclear proponent to visit the abandoned mine and mill sites that my part of the country is riddled with. Uranium mining is nasty and has left a legacy of death, disease, and destruction.
So let the nuclear cheerleaders rah rah rah, and let Senator Barrasso push nuclear when he isn’t busy working to undermine our democracy. Nuclear is a bad deal and not worth the costs. Let dinosaurs die.
His "much smarter guys than me are working on it" is 100% delusional. If someone pays me 2x my normal pay check to do some engineering or modelling or PR for the nuclear power boondoggle then I'm considering them as a client or employer from the get go. Doesn't mean they wont burn through Bill Gates equity in a few years then crash and burn the entire business. It's a very dumb version of the "I defer to the experts" fallacy when you aren't even citing the experts evidence for your argument.
Great podcast but he brings a Panglossian view. He glossed over waste and terrible history of costs - in WA alone you may recall "WPPS" and the Trojan plant that closed prematurely at great cost. The "we need everything" view is questionable - we need what makes sense with current technology and economics. You made a great point about lack of intermittency and his response made no sense: if flexible demand (e.g., hydrogen production) can soak it up and deliver it later, the same would work for solar and wind. Finally, I don't believe big tech's (or bitcoin miners) desire for steady power is a public problem: It makes no sense to subsidize generation or take risks for them- they can solve that themselves, with public constraints making sure it's clean.
Nuclear is a huge distraction from the faster and cheaper clean energy solutions that we should be focusing on. Want proof? Georgia’s Plant Vogtle has been under construction for 15 years and is still not done. It’s $11.1 B for 1,024 megawatts- an insane ratepayer ripoff that should be criminalized. Jigar danced around the truth of that, claiming that lessons learned will make the next one(s) faster and cheaper. Nearly everything he said was false. See my LinkedIn page for corrections.
no industry like nuclear has had a 70 year learnings curve that continued to sail north the entire time. that is quite an achievement given the state largesse from at least seven nuclear superpower nations for most of that 70 years. I guess the grift has been so long and so deep that the industry just can't believe it's entitlement has been challenged by these upstart technologies like PV, Wind turbines, chemical batteries, thermal storage, etc etc
I always hear "well, governments can step in and build nuclear plants if the private sector isn't going to do it." My question is WHY? If *investors* say there's no ROI on nuclear power not only because of the decades+ it takes to get any return, but also because of the RAPIDLY evolving renewables market where costs are plummeting year-over-year, why would anyone mandate taxpayers foot the bill for an energy source whose levelized cost is likely to be an order of magnitude more expensive than any other energy generating product when it finally comes online a decade down the road? I thought at one time that the containerized, modular nuclear plants might be the answer, but even those can't come in at an acceptable cost.
I understand nothing provides more power in a more compact footprint, but anyone pushing taxpayer funded nuclear power isn't being honest with themselves or the public. If investors know it's a bad deal, I don't understand why taxpayers should be forced to spend money on it.
What is missing from a high RE energy system is not a nuclear shaped gap and I don't think it can be squeezed into it. Nothing baseload is going to survive on ever fewer hours a day or on a few days or weeks a year. The effective capacity factor - the proportion that is sold at a profit - goes down in response to the periods of abundant wind and solar and the economics, already difficult, will only get worse.
I think we'll see a LOT more batteries - which barely existed as an option 7 years ago when the first large Tesla battery got installed in South Australia; whole mega battery factories have been built and batteries from them installed since then. That fast. Investment in new solar factories - the IEA thinks production will reach 1 TW per year within the next two years - is already exceeded by that in new battery factories (and unwise to discount the ability of battery R&D to keep exceeding expectations). And I think investment will turn to pumped hydro storage, not nuclear and it will fit the long/deep storage role that RE will need better. And I don't expect to see Hydrogen as energy storage at all, but confined to industrial uses where production, storage and use are all on-site, avoiding transporting it.
I think the confidence to invest in storage at large scale was always going to wait on wider electricity industry confidence that there will be enough solar and wind at scales to justify it and calls for it to be a prerequisite were more about impeding RE than advancing it.
Except in nations where governments can autocratically decree nuclear - and are prepared to pay for the higher energy costs and complications - nuclear will struggle. Around here the largest bloc of support for nuclear is locked away behind Right politics' Wall of Denial (no climate problem, no need), with their primary use for nuclear being a rhetorical blunt instrument against climate activism and saving fossil fuels from global warming and renewable energy. It is used as a political bar too high intended to force everyone under and to stay with fossil fuels, not over.
But when/if the Wall of Denial does come down... I will expect they will choose RE, out of free market ideology.
exactly. Iv'e modelled grid energy for high penetrations of wind and PV and nuclear cant even compete at the exiting level of 30% RE let alone 90% RE. this is pie in the sky stuff and Shah is talking his book or somebody else's book. pure propaganda from start to finish and I'm surprised David Roberts gave him an easy run with no pushback on Shah's raft of assumptions.
Even where a grid is mostly nuclear the option to cut daytime energy costs by adding privately owned rooftop solar is attractive and will cut into daytime demand. And there will be a whole lot of excess low cost solar that will feed back to the grid and further reduce overall demand (and nuclear's financially effective capacity factor) unless specifically blocked.
Going by household solar it is not just possible to have regular periods where it meets all demand with lots leftover it seems like aggregations will periodically exceed all grid demand with lots leftover. That we have not yet worked out how to take maximum advantage of the lowest cost electricity ever devised (and still not done getting cheaper) doesn't change the fact that it is good news; even the disruptive effect is welcome in my book because the industry, with government support was so resistant to serious change.
agreed.
It’s difficult to be calm about waste storage when you’re downstream from Hanford, which remains an insanely expensive shitshow.
Exactly, people always like to blow off the waste problem when they don’t have to live with it. Same goes for mine and mill sites around the western U.S.
They also didn’t talk about the low level waste generated by these plants which is substantially more in volume and different in kind.
Thanks Dave, good podcast. Another problem we need to solve with nuclear is obtaining the fuel. Here in New Mexico we've seen what that's done to uranium miners and their communities and it's pretty terrible. If you have a next in the series, please ask the question.
https://www.propublica.org/article/new-mexico-uranium-homestake-pollution
It seems that the case for nuclear is dependent on longer-duration storage remaining very expensive, as well as the nuclear industry getting its act together.
and yet Shah points to H₂ electrolysis and storage as the big hope for nuclear. this guy is confused.
One problem is focusing on 100% or 24x7 clean. Google, MS, etc., seem to be contributing to this, along with activists. This is distracting us from the path from 30% renewables/clean to 80%+ renewables/clean. Whether it's "transmission-constrained" or not. There have been studies of NM and CO that show very high clean %s are possible w/o any of this baseloadish geo or nuclear. And at very low costs. But it does require some expensive storage at some point, and 5-10%ish rarely-dispatched backup from gas and then maybe switching that to very expensive H2/storage, but only a tiny bit of it, if that last little % matters enough.
IMHO, it's much, much more important to get to 85% clean electric while moving 85% of heat and gas/diesel to that pretty clean electric. Or if this geo heat can be found "everywhere" use it for district heating instead of trying to convert it to electric with very expensive 20% efficient turbines.
But CO and NM are not CT. So in places with lots of cooling water and little land, add nukes. Not in the CO river basin, which includes the Bill Gates thing in south WY. That's just weird politics, as is the apparent inability to site new renewables in WA.
I've modelled 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and 100% RE for the island grid in south west Western Australia known as the SWIS grid. Being an island grid there's no using the state next door or the grid up north as a virtual battery. So it's a tough solution set.
But I can tell you even with a bunch of constraints on the modelling like historical demand projections (with some growth factor applied to each one hour power trading interval equality), present day LCOE for each technology, conservative assumptions about EV growth and electrification of build gins and industry and zero by way of flexible demand in industry and sector coupling that 90% RE is very affordable and very doable.
100% isn't that much more expensive using all those constraints but those constraints are artificial in my view. sector coupling will be huge as we move past 60% RE as the cost savings will be compelling behind the meter and for wholesale power purchases. thermal storage is about to explode the dame way battery storage has in the last decade, Storage experts and academics have learned a lot as a profession about the problems associated with molten salts storage. heaps of new mediums are being trailed now with cost projects (only projections at this stage) at a factor of 10 less than lithium ion or Redux Flow Battery solutions. And with potential for applications in industrial settings for process heat the wins for industry and grids are potentially large.
I don't buy the 85% is more important that 100% RE. it's all important and we shouldn't focus in one or the other, we should focus on both,. But I do agree with you that by the time we arrive at 85% RE on most of the worlds grids then way forward to 100% Will be 100x more obvious to pundits and financiers than it is today.
Thanks, mate! Can't argue with much you've said.
A big part of our problem is political. Nukes, CCS, H2, LNG are posited as ways for the US to "innovate" and hopefully have some exports of this tech to client countries. AKA "The Arsenal of Clean Energy." Since we're falling behind on wind and solar. This is big inside the beltway, also hoping to swing a few union/rural voters. Of course it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if no one is speaking for wind and solar. Then over on the left coast the techie/trekkies have never had their hearts into renewables. I just heard John Kerry mention "fusion" first on a list of clean tech. Time for that guy to "go home and put his feet up." I was a solar thermal guy way back. I'm all for electrical and thermal storage of every kind, efficiently done.
I really enjoy the reneweconomy.com.au/ website and podcasts. The fight seems more focused down under.
I’m not convinced the desire for 24/7 clean power is a distraction. That comes back to additionality, making sure you’re not just bidding up the cost of one unit, you’re actually getting more units built. Those 24/7 commitments, if they’re serious, wind up with PPAs behind them. See Fervo Energy who has PPAs lined up on a bunch of markets.
I think that any data centre claiming they need nuclear to ensure 24/7 or 8760 hours of the year clean energy are talking out of their hat. nuclear is just way too expensive. and it compliments the cheapest power on Earth today, PV and wind really badly bc it cannot ramp and storage makes the most expensive power going around even more expenses when firmed with storage. District heating they say, they're now grasping at straws. Data Centres have a heat dissipation problem not a heat demand problem!
The all-of-the-above approach to decarbonization rarely questions demand. Can we afford to be demand-neutral as long as users can pay? Can we afford to be demand-neutral if it perpetuates unsustainable energy and resource usage?
All-of-the-above is a political answer not a truthful answer.
Data centers can be located near where abundant green energy is available, like the recent announcement of an Amazon data center to be built in Kenya. It really doesn't matter whether a data center is located in Kenya, Iceland, or next door. A lot of people probably would prefer to use a remote data center than having to live near a nuclear power plant.
Thanks for this, David. Please please please convince Jigar to debate Marc Jacobson as an "all of the above vs. no miracles needed" follow-up! I'd buy front row seats.
Yes! And maybe someone from Rocky Mountain Institute on the economics and Union of Concerned Scientists on the safety of nuclear, SMR and full-size. Make a great panel!
Thanks David and Jigar Shah. I know it's Jigar's job to support nuclear (not just renewables). That's a difficult task! I think Jigar makes a good defense for nuclear. Problem is, nuclear isn't very defensible.
For just a second put aside safety and cost (those are two big things to put aside).
If the stated goal is to decarbonize electricity by 2035 I just don't see how new nuclear can contribute much. My understanding is that there are no plants in the permitting process today. If they started today and matched Vogtle's original timeline (which they blew past) the next new reactor will not come online until around 2034. BTW those "trained" engineers and construction workers are not going to just sit around waiting for the next project. They are already on new jobs.
If that is the case the issues that nuclear is intended to address, transmission capacity, etc, have to be addressed anyway. Luckily we just heard a podcast about re-conductoring.
So is this a case of 2035 being unrealistic and the government is saying one thing and preparing for another?
the climate denial industry run their arguments in cycles. when there are democrats in power in the USA or Labor in UK or Australia then it's time to ramp up the nuclear propaganda. Australian opposition is over them moon about nuclear all of a sudden after not even mentioning it for the last 20 year that they were in power for the majority of years. It's all BS and designed to waste the time of everyone from activists to engineers, to financiers and rent seekers to the political classes and NGOs
the "I could sleep on a bed of spent fuel and get more from the environment" - isn't radiation exposure cumulative? If the bed is producing an equal level to background, that means your are experiencing twice background no? If a source is so low as to be indistinguishable *from* background then it's producing far less than background levels.
Thanks. So basically doable, but not the utopia some people have been making out. Very interesting article.
That was a good podcast. Jigar Shah is always both amusing and informative. I’m not entirely sure what the specific, “not really small and not really modular,” refers to when it comes to NuScale. Is it because the generators themselves require a pretty bit investment and capital and a big capex footprint?
The BWRX-300 I get it, it’s just a scaled down version of an old design. Which is a point in its favor.
Reading the transcript helped instead of trying to listen 6 times in a row while doing something else.
Honestly that part of the conversation is worth revisiting anyway. Jigar Shah managed to explain why it's unlikely we won't get manufacturing learning curves, where you get 90%+ cost reductions, but the industry can use SMR (and just smaller designs like BWRX-300) to get to Nth cost savings, and that's enough to compete with gas. That's actually pretty darned cool.
I've been skeptical that the cost of nuclear could come down fast enough to matter in the energy transition, before it's displaced by something else. It seems a little more likely now, but only barely inside my lifetime.
Maybe I'll have small reactor in my northeast city providing district heating before I die.