It took me a bit to come around to windmills, but I got used to them. It would be pretty tragic if the landscape was homogeneously windmills though (of course, if that's the only way to stave off climate change, so be it).
It did in the past, and could in the far future, but nuclear is incredibly expensive, and the construction logistics are so difficult and slow that it is not a feasible solution for the energy interchange. Perhaps in 2060 or 2070, we could build enough.
Our ability to manufacture has so outpaced our ability to construct that nuclear doesn't really fit modern economies very well.
I probably agree with this for traditional reactors, but I'm not sure if this holds for small modular reactors. A lot of our nuclear dialogue assumes a very narrow kind of nuclear. I don't think nuclear needs to be the only approach, but we should definitely diversify even if one of the options is more expensive.
If we allow SMRs as a feasible tech, that aren't shipping and have no reliable cost estimates, we may as well also assume that advanced storage tech that isn't even shipping will be feasible. Storage companies have a far better track record of delivering on their promises than the nuclear industry does, so the we must assume that engineering of nuclear is too difficult to provide reliable cost estimates ahead of time.
> If we allow SMRs as a feasible tech, that aren't shipping and have no reliable cost estimates, we may as well also assume that advanced storage tech that isn't even shipping will be feasible.
Yes, we should invest in both SMRs and advanced storage, not because we are assuming feasibility, but because we can't know their feasibility without trying them.
> Storage companies have a far better track record of delivering on their promises than the nuclear industry does
I disagree, and anyway I'm not saying "invest in SMRs instead of storage" but rather in addition to because it increases our odds of finding a viable solution and moreover a diverse grid is a robust grid (different energy sources are likely to have different failure modes, such that we have a fallback in case one source experiences a catastrophic failure).
We are researching SMRs, but they're not ready and they may never be. Just this week some research came out showing they make the nuclear waste worse than large scale reactors which would have serious cost implications.
