So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know.
But we keep burning gas, oil and coal while arguing how dangerous nuclear is. Meanwhile Climate Change is here and it's real. We could've been 100% nuclear by now. It was fear mongering from greens and environmentalists (heavily financed and brainwashed by oil producers like Russia) that f-d up our climate like it did.
TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece.
But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over.
In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China.
The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.
It's like when inventing the airplane we would've stopped because the high number of crashes and never reached today's safety and convenience.
Just as much as I trust any giant megacorp to do the right thing?! Which is to say slightly more than my government and slightly less than my neighbors.
Everything around me that I use and enjoy (my phone, my car, my laptop, my clothes, my food, movies, music, internet etc) is created&delivered by a megacorp or other. I hope someday we will each produce our own energy but so far solar mostly works on sunny days and home nuclear is probably illegal - regulated to death.
If not for that, some Exxon exec will one day get the bright idea on how to cut a lot of corners to boost quarterly profits, and a windmill toppling over has different externalities than a meltdown, or even just inadvertent radioactive gas/particle release.
I'm not saying the likes of Shell, BP and Exxon can't handle it (they certainly can) but it needs to happen in an environment that prioritizes safety above all else, because in the case of fission the fallout is quite severe if they/we mess up (compared to other energy sources).
This mentality is exactly how we sleep-walked into the current Climate Change predicament. "We" did not make this particular bed. Nuclear fear mongering (well financed by oil producing enemy states) and anti-capitalist mentality stopped the switch to nuclear power that would've prevented our carbon problem from happening in the first place. And now we are facing a Civilization Ending Event.
We can't get out of this hole with the same way of thinking that got us in. No thanks. I vote progress. Deregulate. Risk. Try. Test. Build.