Because the cost of construction AND timeline is not achievable before 2030 so the contribution of nuclear to the problem is post-2030. At best? you help to secure this form of power for 2040 and beyond. All nuclear under construction you are unable to shift its timeline. All nuclear in planning is subject to the regulatory delay of 10-15 years. The SMR push is not going to deliver power at scale by 2030, it will have at best a small handfull of megawatt units, when the demand is for terawatts.
If you invest in smart grid assist to balance wind, solar, battery, pumped hydro and can mitigate coal and gas load NOW then, as a new entrant, you have the choice to do that, or to invest in the longer term problem. If you want to invest in longterm Nuclear is no worse or better than any other choice. If you can reduce the cost of capital or increase productive efficiency now of the non-nuclear low carbon energy and grid, over the 10 year window you may have more effect.
There is nothing a new entrant engineer can do, to speed up nuclear. Its in regulatory and lawsuit hell. The engineer can help PV/Wind/Battery right now.
It's a choice, and goes to net present value, shape of the curve moving load, linear optimisation of choices...
Sometimes I wonder if people actually care about the climate at all, or if nuclear is just a political wedge issue used to distract from real solutions right now.
I think even people of good intent get stuck on blame-shifting and hindsight.
I opposed Torness (UK) in the 70s. I now would not protest an AGR, I think we need more nuclear not less. But, the time has passed where its economically viable in the necessary time window, for Australian power needs. LCOE, and time to construct has moved to wind, wave, solar and storage.
Some people can't get over this, and are stuck on energy density and scale.
Nuclear power has a lot of room for improvement. The problems are related to cost and complexity of the specific designs, not fundamental to the physics of using nuclear reactions for energy. Much like early computers, the current designs are large and difficult to build. There is a lot of potential to scale down and reduce costs, like was done for computers.
Molten salt reactors, for instance, offer a massive potential reduction in size and complexity (they eliminate a lot of the risks of water-cooled designs, so shouldn't need the same kind of massive containment structure to contain e.g. large volumes of highly radioactive steam in the event of a failure).
If next-gen fission research got even 10% of the resources that are currently spent on fusion, I think we would see a lot of progress towards improving the economics.
Not to disagree, but this lies in the "if we spent 5+ years we might improve in 10+ years and deploy in 15+ years" space.
If you look at the payback times on Battery, smarter networks, pumped hydro, windmill improvements, solar improvements, even now they are at their margins for 80/20 its probably shorter path to more beneficient outcome, but at a lower energy density.
The improvement in battery storage, and solar cell efficiency/cost is a good example. Over the same 5/10/15 year lifetime the drop has been continuous and at times above linear. We're now beyond the 2x improvement space, but the value of a 0.05% improvement in manufacturing for the volumes being made now, is really significant.
Nuclear, it would be very hard to project better than linear improvement in LCOE
I stress, I think we should do it. Its like the Manhatten project: Leslie Groves was asked to pick between thermal diffusion and gaseous centrifuge, and said "do both" -He was right: it turned out doing both improved feedstock quality going into the calutrons AND speed it up overall. Sometimes, its not pick A or B, its pick doing A and B and C
People are generally good. If you want them to do something that is both bad and expensive, like continue subsidizing fossil fuels, then you need to convince them that they are doing something good, or at the very least the other side are doing something bad.
Nuclear neatly fills this hole of being sonething that is better than fossil fuels and yet lets you demonize people trying to fix the fossil fuel problem as innumerate, unsophisticated, dreamers etc.
To what degree the people who fall for this scam are culpable is hard to establish. They are also victims of the most expensive propaganda campaign in history.
Ironically, they also believe that people supporting renewables are just propaganda victims. They're generally less charitable about it though, feeling that anyone who is confused by corporate propaganda is the problem, rather than the harmful corporate propaganda itself.
People realize we failed out of lazyness and ignorance and are despaired, so its just so tempting to start believing again in this free&easy energy dream.. I think the issue more is that the real renewables, despite being the only real free and now also already proven path in parts of the world, had and still have too much counter propaganda.. the rest is just humans
There are a lot of people who choose the perfect over the good, even when the perfect is impossible. They revel in it. Incremental movement forward is their enemy just as much as going backwards.
It's easy to manipulate people who demand perfection because the alternative to perfection is low-energy lazy cynicism. I don't know how prevalent this manipulation is, though.
The “90% clean grid” back casting model I mention very much includes nuclear! My little sentence there from 2020 is wrong, it should say “90% clean using wind, solar, batteries, hydro and the existing nuclear fleet”.
