And it doesn't matter why, the cost of nuclear is the cost, and improving the cost with solid fuel designs seems like a dead end. The problem with all the nuclear startups is they got tainted by NuScale, and I've been told that NuScale is a special case of incompetence, before it cancelled the projects it was mentioned along with other "new nuclear" startups. So what will happen when the other "new nuclear" startups rubber hits the road and can't deliver the cost savings?
So when the industry basically says that NuScale wasn't "real next gen nuclear" as soon as they fail, I take a dim view. Just sounds like an industry desperate to keep the investment money train going, not one that has a legitimate answer.
The LCOE economics of wind/solar/storage are just a brutal hammer, solar in particular, because I believe that solar will drop to 1/3 the current cost or less in another 10 years. That has to be hard to look at for other power generation forms. You cling to existing funding, grid leveling, and hold on as long as you can.
I do believe that there theoretically exists a nuclear formula that can be competitive, the power density of nuclear energy is just too many orders of magnitude of superiority.
The LFTR/MSR design, practicalities of molten salt aside, showed:
- a reactor can scale from closet sized and up
- can breed fuel from non-fissile uranium and thorium
- is virtually meltdown proof with the plug design
- uses a far higher percentage of fuel / generates far less waste
- could theoretically be used to breed/consume existing solid fuel waste
From what I've read of pebble bed, that has some of those abilities as well, maybe all of them if you could reprocess the spent pebbles economically.
But the industry, from people to support to regulations to engineering, is focused on huge massive solid fuel rod designs, and those simply aren't going to be competitive even if wind/solar never drop in price. And again, if you are in the business of trying to keep nuclear relevant, you should plan for wind or solar to drop to 1/3 of the current costs in 10 years, and plan for practical grid storage of a day or two to not be more than 10-20% premium over the cost.
And solar+storage is very very scalable. So scalable that, even with the outrageous markups on home consumer solar, is very economical.
I also think that there was a political/cultural issue in nuclear. Almost everyone I talk to in the nuclear industry is quite conservative, I think that comes from the left owning the anti-nuclear political tentpole. But nuclear was a green power solution to address global warming/carbon neutrality. If it had been aggressively positioned in the early days of global warming's scientific findings in the 80s or even 90s when IPCC reports started coming out... but the entire industry is right-wing it seems, so that was simply against the political culture of nuclear.
Being a "right wing" culture for nuclear means that the regulatory/safety aspects of nuclear are treated with scorn and derision. Something like LFTR which had safety and (allegedly) nonproliferation built-in was dismissed by the nuclear establishment early on. So as someone that loves the technology and science of nuclear, but looks into the nuclear power culture and politics, it seems like a bunch of bitter, unreasonable people set in their ways, and unfortunately, that's on the good end of evaluating things.
It is pretty frustrating as a nuclear advocate to have things like Fukushima happen, rife with bad engineering decisions, and to REALLY compound things, you get a spotlight into TEPCO management failings and corruption. And of course the nuclear industry will try to say that is Japan's management cultural issues. But... I think those management issues exist in bland US power companies as well.
I just thing the entire "new nuclear" industry needs a total reboot with different people, a different culture, a different approach. Because the previous culture simply doesn't work. And that probably can't happen until the lights shut off on old nuclear plants, but for now I support keeping those running for grid leveling, because the alternative is natural gas turbine or (shudder) coal.
I think the US national labs should start doing some moonshot nuclear research. I see that MSR research is being funded now (probably because China has been doing it). What would solve all of nuclear's problems is a cheap scalable reactor that has little waste and is meltdown proof that is provably just 2-3x as expensive as wind/solar.
