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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

If you look at how long it takes to build a nuclear plant and compare it to the carbon budget we have left you'll find out that you can't build enough nuclear plants in the remaining time.

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Americans are just slow. The Japanese and South Koreans can build nuclear plants in a jiffy: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...

Maybe that's why Toshiba thought it was a good idea to buy Westinghouse; that they could better manage American mega projects.

83 plants over twenty years means that we first need to scale up production capabilities for things like pressure vessels (they need gigantic forges to make) because we can even think about building hundreds and hundreds of nuclear power plants in the next twenty years. We also need to train engineers to staff them.

Maybe not full-size plants, but SMRs are a possibility.

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/the-new-nuclear-option-...

Good luck suddenly building thousands of 500MW reactors over the next ten to twenty years when currently zero are operational.

That's assuming we won't get better at building them. Also, wind/solar have terrible energy density and are very bursty, so it sounds like we're screwed.

Given the history of the industry, that's a good assumption.

Solar and wind are cheap and are getting cheaper, which will make up for a lot of intermittency. If you want a career in energy, look into ways to exploit intermittent cheap sources. There's free money waiting to be picked up if you can do that.

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