In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.
Or overbuild renewables reducing the seasonal variations. In cost terms when compared to nuclear power those would be insignificant.
With fossil based energy systems we didn’t match production capacity to consumption 100% with peakers having low capacity factors.
But somehow we can’t overbuild a kWh and need massive seasonal storage when it comes to renewables.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
Also please give a source as to why the US grid would need 5 TWh of battery storage. So we know it is not simply a number you invented out of thin air to say ”impossible!!!!”
Also, 4 hours is the target Jigar Shah talks about for getting solar to a load factor roughly equal to most thermal plants.
Also, I believe that’s 4 hours on the nameplate of the variable generation, not 4 hours on the entire grid load. People generally aren’t advocating for going fully variable generation.
Define "expensive". Over what timescale? Have you seen https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."
This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?
By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.
Storage could get there, but I don’t think it’s credible that manufacturing scale alone will solve the problem. We probably need some new, qualitatively different chemistries to become viable for solar to be viable for the whole grid. From a technical perspective the nuclear plants we could build in the 1960s could do it, whether we can still build them (no matter if the barrier is regulatory or practical) is another question.
How will you get me with rooftop solar and a home battery to buy your extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when I have my own imperfect solution almost the entire year?
Scale this up to a society adding onshore and offshore wind and you quickly realize that the nuclear plant will have a capacity factor at 10% or so.
Vogtle with a 20% capacity factor costs somewhere like 85 cents per kWh, or $850 per MWh.
Nuclear power due to the massive CAPEX is the worse solution imaginable to fix renewable shortcomings.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
Yet, most people live in cities, with plenty of appartement or shared houses where most of the requirements are just not feasible. And the trend isn't going in reverse.
So yes, YOU, may have your own individualistic solution but clearly, it's not something that is suitable for most people. Considering you do not have a real horse in the race, you should quit arguing and enjoy your own egotistical "solution" and let people who want to live collectively decide what's best for them.
The price dropped 22% in a year. Next year it could be the same price in "somewhat sunny" places.
Surely you don't need to power 100% of winter hours with summer sunshine. Electricity isn't grain to be stored in a silo.
Most places humans live in also get sunshine in the winter. Less sunshine admittedly, but that's where overbuilding panels and interconnecting grids comes in. And even dark, cold places get windy.
No.
So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.
This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.
I'm really happy I got to speak to such and adult then. Fuck you too.
For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.
Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.
Load throttling is one of those ideas that seems great as long as someone else is doing it.
If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.
Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.
I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.
There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.
As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.
No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.
Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.
FFS no. This is the reason environmentalists don't trust the nuclear industry.
(Hell, seawater is already ~3.3 * 10^-9 uranium.)