
Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029 - goodcanadian
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51233444
======
grabbalacious
_> Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it
is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero
emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed._

Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to
need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and
to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently
evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.

~~~
AtlasLion
baby steps I'd say. Let's first fix all the mess we are making here on earth
before thinking of space exploration.

~~~
papreclip
I think space colonization is an even bigger fantasy than relying on "future
tech" that will magically terraform the earth and reverse climate change. We
can have a tiny structure housing 10 or 20 people somewhere in our solar
system for the price of millions of pounds of fuel and billions of dollars.

Inter-system travel will never happen. Forums like this tend to have a healthy
population of the sci-fi minded, so it won't be a popular opinion here, but
the laws of physics simply rule it out. And the "men once thought they
couldn't fly" argument doesn't carry water with me. We know a lot more about
what we don't know now than we did then

~~~
htfu
Nevermind the hocus pocus, and I agree as far as "travel", but all that's
really needed for (fairly dystopian attempts at) space colonization is surely
artificial wombs?

Which aren't far off.

We don't need to break the laws of physics, or have cryonics or singularity
shit work out to eventually consume the universe. All the nodes will just be
real isolated.

------
Beltiras
I'm amazed that the industry is still propagating the mistake made in the
early nuclear age of using PWR and solid fuel. The more I read about nuclear
the more convinced I become that SMRs for next gen plants are safest and most
efficient using the Thorium-U233 fuel cycle and employing molten salt to
transfer heat. It's automatically safe since if a runaway reaction takes place
the fuel will drain into a tank and reactions will stop. This happens if no
action is taken so all the humans at the plant and all the machinery could be
incapacitated and a meltdown automatically stops. It uses a cheaper fuel of
which we have a virtually endless supply of and enrichment is not needed as it
is with U238-U235. There's less waste as well and it's less problematic waste
(decaying in hundreds of years instead of millions). Operationally it's easier
to load up fuel and wastes are easier to remove. Is it just "this is how we
always do these things" or is there something else going on here?

~~~
pjc50
Plumbing is a problem for hot radioactive molten salt. It's one of the few
things that will erode ordinary stainless steel.

~~~
kerkeslager
Does titanium hold up to radioactive molten salt?

There are a bunch of places I've found where the difficulty (and therefore
cost) of working with titanium is really holding humanity back. If we could
find cheaper techniques for working with titanium it would revolutionize a lot
of industries, as it's plentiful, light, strong, non-reactive, and melts at
high temperatures. But the same attributes that make it hold up under the
stresses of use, make it very hard to shape.

~~~
akiselev
A _radioactive_ fluoride salt might just be one of the most corrosive
substances on the planet. Titanium might hold up a little longer but not by
much.

Any material that can resist the corrosion will be bombarded by neutrons until
it is transmuted into another material that can't, even with "slow" neutrons.

~~~
kerkeslager
Okay, what's the solution?

The Wikipedia article[1] says, "A 2011 MIT study concluded that although
_there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle_ , with
current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little
incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they
conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional
uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential
benefits." What did they know at MIT in 2011 that we don't? Or were they just
wrong?

If really no material will work for this, I can only imagine some sort of mag-
lev design that keeps the molten salt out of contact with other materials, but
that seems kind of far-fetched.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle)

~~~
Someone
_”I can only imagine some sort of mag-lev design that keeps the molten salt
out of contact with other materials”_

If you were to build that, how would you transfer the heat out of the molten
salt?

~~~
kerkeslager
I have no idea! Like I said, farfetched.

------
jillesvangurp
What's missing is a $/kwh quote. It's important because renewables are the
cheapest option on the market right now and nowhere near done dropping further
in price.

If the last ten years are any indication, an order of magnitude further drop
in prices before the end of the decade is not unreasonable considering mass
production of batteries, solar, and wind is still ramping up and considering
the enormous amount of R&D currently being spent on reducing cost and
increasing efficiencies further.

In the UK it's going to be hard to compete with wind (Scotland exports more of
that than its total energy consumption already) and people installing solar
panels on their roof and putting batteries in their house and cars (which can
power a house for several days).

~~~
wazoox
No, renewable are incredibly expensive, on the contrary. Why is that? Because
renewable produce when wind blows or sun shines, and not when we need power.
That's the first point, we need to produce exactly as much energy as we
consume, at any time. Renewables fail utterly at that, and that's why
renewable energy appears so cheap when you simply consider the price at which
it's sold on the markets: production occurs at random times when it isn't
needed, pushing market prices down in the toilet. But that's an undesirable
side-effect, and not a good thing.

Renewable produces only a fraction of their nominal output (typically 15-20%),
and at random times. So typically a huge, sprawling 12km2 900MW solar plant
produces a small amount of power during the year, in the best case (in the
desert) 1.4TWh, while a 900MW nuclear reactor produces typically (actual
numbers) 6.5TWh every year.

You also need to complement renewable production with an equivalent amount of
steerable power (usually natural gas), or a large amount of batteries which
multiplies the price by 5, 10 or more. So you can't consider the renewable
price alone; you must take into account the price of the substitute power
source, too... And its environmental price!

So renewable energy is cheap because it isn't worth much. It puts extra
pressure on the grid, it forces nuclear plant to run at reduced capacity,
which reduces the yield, and artificially lowers their profitability for no
good reason at all.

In fact, renewables, by reducing profitability of nuclear power, has another
very undesirable side-effect: making nuclear power companies cut corners on
safety to save money.

Renewable power is better than coal; but it isn't, by large, as good as
nuclear.

~~~
fsh
Do you have any sources for your claim of batteries multiplying the cost for
renewables by "5, 10 or more" in a realistic grid scenario? Did you take into
account that most energy storage is done with hydro, not batteries?

I haven't had time to carefully review the literature, but there seem to be
quite a few papers that claim that storage for a 100% renewable grid would not
be such a big issue.

~~~
wazoox
Basically renewables produce 15-20% of the time (30 to 40% for offshore wind).
Let's be generous and start with 30% of the time. You need storage to provide
70% of the demand. So for every GWh or required power, you need 700MWh of
storage. The famed Tesla Mega battery is a puny 129MWh...

You must account for the fact that there could be no sun or no wind for
several days, therefore be able to store incredible amounts of power, far
beyond the scale we know of.Then the sheer space required for renewable power
is staggering. As I said, the biggest solar plants are 600MW to 1GW and occupy
tens of square km. Now imagine supplying 10s of GW this way.

As someone joked on twitter, if you covered the whole Fukushima exclusion zone
(250 km2 or so)with solar panels, it wouldn't come close to the Daishi nuclear
plant annual power output.

For a detailed discussion on these matters, see
[https://jancovici.com/en/energy-
transition/renewables/100-re...](https://jancovici.com/en/energy-
transition/renewables/100-renewable-electricity-at-no-extra-cost-a-piece-of-
cake/)

~~~
fsh
Your calculation does not make much sense (GWh isn't even a unit of power).
One would have to look at actual power production and consumption curves in
order to estimate the required storage capacity. Battery storage is still very
exotic, pretty much the entire capacity is provided by hydro nowadays.

Current-gen solar panels average about 30 W/m² over the year in Japan's
latitude and climate. So a solar park the size of the Fukushima exclusion zone
would produce around 7 GW on average which is more than the combined nameplate
capacity of the six reactors (5.3 GW). Supplying the entire country with
electricity (~114 GW) would require about 3800 km² of solar panels, or about
1% of Japan's area.

~~~
wazoox
GWh _is_ the most relevant unit: the quantity of energy we need around the
year. GW of nominal output is relevant for nuclear or fire-based power that
can produce 24h/24 365d/year, but completely irrelevant for wind and solar
that provide power only part time.

A 1GW solar plant outs 1GW once every sunny day, at noon. The rest of the day,
it produces less, and nothing at all 12 hours a day. A 1GW solar plant roughly
produces 3GWh a day. OTOH, a 1GW nuclear plant produces _on a yearly average_
800MWh every hour, every day and night. So at the end of the year your 1GW
solar plant produced a grand total of 1100GWh, while your 1GW nuclear (or
coal-fired, or gas-fired) power plant produced 7000GWh.

Plus your solar panel will provide energy mostly around noon, need it or not.
While the nuclear (or gas, or coal) plant will provide power _exactly when you
need it_.

Wind is even worse than solar, because production yield isn't even
particularly predictable. So when wind blows, electricity goes into the grid
without any consideration for the need for it. That's why its price drops to
negative at times: _because we don 't need it_. That's not because wind is
wonderfully efficient or something. It's because building wind farms is a
fantastic misallocation of resources. We're literally spending money for
electricity worth almost nothing, and it won't ever recoup its costs.

That's why Germany, after having dumped 300 billions euros on wind farms in 20
years, stop building them altogether in 2018. At some point some accountant
did the math.

~~~
fsh
It is completely obvious that renewables require significantly more storage
capacity than other power sources. However, a lot of experts seem to believe
that this is not nearly as big of an issue as you are implying.

As for wind energy, you are completely wrong. In 2019 25% of Germany's
electricity was generated by wind (compared to 13% nuclear). This has
significantly reduced the fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

The main reason for halting construction is that conservative politicians have
passed idiotic NIMBY regulations that now make it very difficult to build new
on-shore wind farms. Somehow they even managed to convince a signify fraction
of the population that wind turbines are somehow dangerous (probably the same
fraction that believes in electro-smog).

~~~
wazoox
If Germany had invested 300 billions in nuclear instead of wind, they would
have 0 emissions electric power right now.

It makes relative sense in Germany because they still rely a lot on coal for
power generation. If they hadn't stopped nuclear power in its tracks, they
would have achieved a much bigger reduction of their emissions, too.

If you take the example of Spain you can easily see that they fired up 1GW of
gas plant for every GW of wind farm. Because some days there isn't any wind.
You can't lower your emissions to zero with wind and solar.

Europe has very little room left for hydro storage. Most dams that could be
built have been built long ago. That drastically limit the efficiency of more
wind and more solar power. Nuclear, on the other hand, doesn't need much
backup. In fact in France it needs less than 2% of backup (EDF has the know-
how to modulate power very accurately to match consumption entirely on nuclear
power) so it would already be possible to do 0 emission with 95% nuclear and
5% hydro and nothing else.

Oh, look what I've found: [https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-
nuclear-poweran...](https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-
powerand-deadly-emissions-spiked/#intcid=recommendations_wired-homepage-right-
rail-popular_94bea38e-f8f2-4d71-9871-01f2a8f97481_popular4-1)

~~~
fsh
I don't see any credible source for the "300 billion" claim. The official
statistics list 168 billion since 2000 for all renewables combined:
[https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36306/umfrage...](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36306/umfrage/entwicklung-
der-verguetung-nach-dem-eeg-seit-2000/)

On the other hand, nuclear power has been subsidized with about 200 billion as
well without ever producing more than one third of the electricity output:
[https://foes.de/pdf/2010_FOES_Foerderungen_Atomenergie_1950-...](https://foes.de/pdf/2010_FOES_Foerderungen_Atomenergie_1950-2010.pdf)

The other elephant in the room is that nuclear energy relies on having cheap
sources of Uranium available. This works fine for the almost negligible amount
of nuclear energy being generated today. Scaling this up to a significant
fraction of the world energy consumption would require usage of breeder
reactors which nobody has been able to get to work at the required industrial
scales.

~~~
wazoox
Nuclear energy is capital-intensive, but not resource intensive. The cost of
the plant dwarves the cost of uranium to run it. In this way, it's similar to
wind.

France had 2 working breeders reactors, Phénix and SuperPhénix, and they
worked at industrial scale. They were cut off for purely political reasons.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix)

------
thomasedwards
I really wanted this to be about Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited rather than
Rolls-Royce Holdings plc. A nuclear-powered Rolls-Royce Phantom would be
incredibly boss.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Would a nuclear powered EV _ever_ need refuelling?

~~~
brnt
I remember Toshiba having a decay-based laptop battery in development (at
least 10 years ago, maybe 20). You wouldn't have to charge, ever. Now that
would be something!

~~~
Stratoscope
When I was five or so, I had a watch with a radium dial.

I read in a kid's science book that if you went to bed and waited until your
eyes were adjusted to the dark, and then held the watch dial against your
closed eyelid, you would be able to see the sparks as individual radium atoms
decayed.

I did this, and it worked! I could see each spark!

~~~
missosoup
Radium is primarily an alpha emitter. Alpha won't cross through the glass of
the watch face, or even your skin. Maybe you were seeing the much more rare
beta decays.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
I doubt it was from the betas, they are all fairly low energy for typical
radium. It was probably from the gammas produced by Ra-226. Ra-226 produces a
186 keV gamma in 3.3% of decays. Cherenkov radiation flashes in the eye are
observed by patients undergoing clinical radiation therapy (see this
interesting paper where this was explored and tested:
[https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016(19)33947-1/ful...](https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016\(19\)33947-1/fulltext)
). The test done in the paper was with much higher energy gammas, but it is
feasible that the 186 keV lines could cause the same effect.

I've never observed this when working with radium, but then I don't stick it
in my eye.

------
Kaibeezy
_" Production line mistakes may lead to generic defects that propagate
throughout an entire fleet of reactors and are costly to fix," (person from
University College London) warned._

Wouldn’t the knowledge gained by fixing a large one-off reactor be of limited
transferable value, as compared to expensive knowledge that could be used to
upgrade an existing “fleet” plus improve subsequent versions?

~~~
osobo
The point is that every mistake propagated over 10 reactors has to be fixed 10
times. If you have a single reactor, you just fix it once.

~~~
imtringued
That's a massive benefit. That means there 10 opportunities to optimize the
process.

~~~
e12e
10 opportunities to charge for the fix, 10 opportunities for a broke buyer to
decline the fix.

------
socialdemocrat
Sure why not, but let us not get carried away and think THIS is the solution
to global warming. It is unproven, it will be too late, and not scale up quick
enough.

By unproven I mean that the economics of it is unproven. We have no proof that
SMR will be cheaper than large reactors. The article points this out as well.

By late I mean at current fast pace of development a lot of will happen with
wind and solar in the 10 years it will take for this to get online.

~~~
auiya
And the US at least has a long way to go before wind/solar even come close to
being the majority sources of our energy production -
[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3)

------
mechhacker
Having worked in the industry, I like seeing companies pledging to get
involved with nuclear power.

However, there is a dearth of people experienced with the design and
development of new reactor technology. The development pathway of building up
the supply lines, understanding the complexities of the various systems, etc.
is long.

I laughed at first many years ago when I saw some new reactor designs taking
10years but it turns out in a lot of cases that's optimistic.

It's a shame, because development in the mid 20th century was a LOT faster.
And the people involved moved from one new reactor design to the next,
bringing valuable experience.

Much of the work force entering this industry are entirely green and need an
understanding of existing reactor technologies and why some designs were made
a certain way before trying to reinvent them. Looking at the development in
Russia and India could be very helpful.

------
mrarjen
Personally I'm all for having mini reactors if it means we can generate
reliable energy with minimal pollution. Anything that helps reduce emissions
should be considered.

But this would need to be a fail save type of reactor and with a clear plan(s)
all the way down to how the waste is handled till it's no longer active.

~~~
pferdone
TerraPower [1] seem to have a good alternative with its Traveling Wave
Reactor. It can be run on nuclear waste we already have and provide energy to
10bln people with US per capita power consumption for basically eternity.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower)

~~~
nolok
Always be wary of grandiose claims like this that amount as much to facts as
to marketing material.

~~~
DennisP
These are well-known properties of any fast reactor, like Terrapower's.

Only about one percent of high-level nuclear waste is fission products, the
broken-apart atoms left after fission. The rest is U238, unused U235,
plutonium, and other transuranics produced by absorbing neutrons without
fissioning. Fast reactors can fission all of these. That's why they can run on
nuclear waste.

For the same reason, they can get over a hundred times as much energy from the
same amount of uranium ore. Conventional reactors can only use the U235, which
is 0.7% of natural uranium.

That's a great start, but with such efficient use, it's practical to get the
uranium from seawater. We can do that now at five times the cost of mining; if
we only need 1% as much uranium, then total fuel cost would be 5% as much as
nuclear reactors spend on fuel today. Fast reactors fueled from seawater would
last for millions of years.

~~~
jabl
Breeders and seawater would likely last even longer than that, as U in
seawater is in a pseudo-equilibrium, constantly leaching from bedrock.

------
baybal2
I long said that "mini" reactors don't make sense when 1.7GW reactor and a
mini one both have dramatic minimal cost for a single unit, initial startup
cost, and operational costs.

Only if mini-reactor gets cheaper than the coal plant, can they get
competitive.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
On the other hand the huge projects like Hinkley Point C are so big they might
never come to fruition.

If Rolls Royce can get good at building these ractors they could be making
them quickly and cheaply enough to make a big difference.

------
Koshkin
The natural reserve of radioactive material, like that of fossil fuel, is
finite. We cannot count on it in the long run. On the other hand, we are awash
with the huge amounts of the free solar energy. We just need better batteries,
which is a purely technical problem.

~~~
Beltiras
If we moved to Thorium the supply is virtually endless.

~~~
Brometheus
Of which we have not a single working reactor. Just saying. We in Germany
spend a lot of money on it and did not get it to work.

------
ed_balls
I've been thinking about this for a bit and had a similar model in mind. You
build small nuclear reactors in a containers - similar how Google builds their
DC. You find an abandoned coal mine shaft and put them deep in the ground. The
cost optimizations come from:

\- economies of scale

\- no decommission costs - you just leave them to decay.

\- fewer security measures.

~~~
mkl
Wouldn't you need a water supply for steam turbines? And if there's water in
your mine, it seems like it could transport radioactive particles out.

~~~
ed_balls
Yes, you need to exchange heat, most likely water since it's most cost
effective.

> And if there's water in your mine, it seems like it could transport
> radioactive particles out

You need to pick a really deep and isolated shaft (Some gold mine shafts can
reach 4 km)

------
growlist
RR have a good background in this tech, having manufactured the reactors that
power the UK's nuclear deterrent: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-
Royce_PWR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_PWR)

------
rstuart4133
I wish them luck, but the projected price of £70/MW hr sounds very expensive.
I gather the retail price in the UK is about double that. That must put them
right on the edge of profitability now, and the things have a design life of
60 years. If they have to hit that 60 life to get that £70/MW hr they must
know they are already screwed, surely?

------
dana321
When a read the title i thought that maybe they were going to put tiny nuclear
reactors in everyone's home.

------
ptah
an aside: why d nuclear reactors have to be built on the coast? does that not
make them more vulnerable to natural disasters

~~~
mytailorisrich
They rely on water for cooling so are built near a source of it, be it the sea
or a river.

~~~
imtringued
Rivers tend to have different flow rates over the course of the year. If there
is a heat wave the plant may not have enough water for cooling. The ocean is
more dependable.

~~~
rjsw
France has some nuclear plants that are on rivers where this problem has been
seen.

~~~
shawabawa3
I believe the problem in France wasn't the flow rate of the river, but the
maximum temperature the power plants are allowed to leave the river at

During the heatwave the rivers were so warm the reactors weren't allowed to
dump any more heat into them

------
ainiriand
That sounds like a very bad idea. Although I am confident that the tech has
evolved since Chernobyl, terrorism has evolved as well. It just takes a bunch
of assholes to destroy a small town.

And yes, I think they will be pretty well guarded. But if you have lots of
them some of them will have security flaws.

~~~
majewsky
> terrorism has evolved as well

I stopped worrying about terrorism when I realized that they could easily take
out most of the European power grid with a few well-placed bombs on the
central very-high-voltage power lines. Yet for some reason, they don't.

If terrorists were really hellbent on killing as many enemy civilians as
possible, the world would look very different. What actually seems to be
happening is that they use the smallest possible intervention that causes
sufficient fear (and, conversely, sufficient support on their home turf). So I
don't think they'll be blowing up nuclear reactors anytime soon. That would be
unnecessary overkill (literally).

~~~
pintxo
Interesting idea. I'd say they are just not intelligent enough to really
figure out how to kill as many as possible. If they where intelligent, they
would understand that terrorism rarely works in achieving its stated goals and
do something more likely to work out in their favor.

------
LatteLazy
Lol, a technology we can't make work economically WITH economies of scale and
on site experts will now be offered without those benefits.

~~~
EliRivers
Is this not what we expect from technology? That over time it becomes
commodified and increasingly easy to operate?

~~~
LatteLazy
No, in a word.

You expect a technology to be made to work first, then to be made to work
profitably, and only then commodified, miniaturised, etc.

Nuclear works, but no one has made it work profitably. There is no reason to
think shrinking it will make more profitable.

Quite the opposite in fact: nuclear has big fixed costs. That's why you
usually see multiple reactors build close together on single sites. The more
profitable (less loss making really) sites are the biggest ones.

This is why the first computers were not laptops.

~~~
EliRivers
I believe you have not disagreed with me, but you have introduced additional
intermediate stages and conditions with which I disagree.

I disagree that it is necessary for technology to be made profitable before
becoming commoditised. I would argue that some technologies only become
profitable _when_ they are commoditised.

 _There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable._

I cannot see into the minds of Rolls Royce, but I would hazard that they think
it can be done. They suggest that if they can export this technology overseas
as well, they can turn a profit on it. While I don't know if they're correct,
they clearly believe it's possible.

~~~
stjohnswarts
He's also failing to identify hidden costs like destroying the global climate
that we're most likely going to absorb at the government level despite what
greedy lasseiz-fare capitalists want to admit

~~~
LatteLazy
Betting on a world wide, full funded program to reduce carbon is...
Courageous. Betting it will use nuclear and small nuclear and rr's small
nuclear and that they will get it ready on schedule and deliver it in time to
make any difference? Let me sell you some magic beans I have.

------
simonblack
Nuclear reactors' biggest drawback is the cost and danger of dismantling and
disposing of them after their working life is finished. Up till then they are
clean and cost-effective.

~~~
koheripbal
Why does no one ever factor in the cost of dismantling other major projects,
like the Hoover Dam, or the Three Gorges Dam? ...or thee solar plants being
built, or the wind turbines?

Why does nuclear power have this _enormous_ additional requirement that
literally no other power source seems to have to account for?

~~~
cesarb
> Why does nuclear power have this enormous additional requirement that
> literally no other power source seems to have to account for?

Because no other power source has the inner components become radioactive
during normal operation. Normally these radioactive parts are fully contained,
but that's no longer the case once it's dismantled. That makes dismantling a
nuclear power plant not only much more expensive, but also a requirement (you
can't just abandon it, otherwise it will gradually break down and lose the
containment).

------
radicalbyte
We shouldn't be using nuclear energy for power. Solar, wind and batteries will
solve that.

What we should be doing is using nuclear energy for HEAT. We need a LOT of
heat for a variety of chemical and industrial processes, not to mention
heating of homes in colder climates. For these uses nuclear fission has
massive potential.

~~~
hokkos
Why not both ? With cogeneration you raise the efficiency from only electric
generation from 40% to 80% with heat, but in summer you can still generate
electricity only. And SMR are better positioned than classic reactor because
the smaller size and inherent passive security from surface to volume problem
(heat raise with volume in power of 3 and cooling only with surface in power
of 2) make them easier to build them near populated cities.

~~~
radicalbyte
I should have been more nuanced: we shouldn't be building out the current
design of fission power in order to decarbonize our electricity production.
The biggest reason is that it just takes far too long to build: we're talking
15-20 years. Wind and solar can scale far more quickly than that.

Closing existing nuclear power plants like they're doing in Germany is
absolute lunacy.

For heat that timeline is acceptable given that it can be "decarbonized" by
switching to burning biomass to cover the transition.

If we could build safe nuclear electric plants within a reasonable timeframe
and cost then we should absolutely do it (this would make so much sense in
huge countries like the US or China because you can have the reactors located
well away from large populations).

------
benevol
We'll soon have the magnetic engine which will produce endless electricity. So
there won't really be a need for any new nuclear reactors anymore.

