Activists who embrace nuclear power
Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It&#x27;s no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a &quot;let&#x27;s try everything and see what works best&quot; approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.<p>The issues aren&#x27;t safety, waste, and environments opposition. There are plenty of climate hawks that support nuclear too.  It&#x27;s all excessive costs.<p>They briefly mention the cooling retrofits for Diablo Canyon in San Lui Obispo, but they don&#x27;t mention that they bids from Bechtel to simply build a modern cooling system were all billions of dollars of expense. Just the cooling system is more expensive than alternatives.<p>And this is a trend we will see in the future. For primary generation of electrons, steam based thermodynamic cycles are pretty much obsolete. The number I typically hear is that it&#x27;s $1-2W to build, say, a cooling system for coal steam. A nuclear plants cooling is pretty much identical. Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon.<p>So the name of the game is now storage. Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.<p>The best estimate of what the cheapest possible future grid looks like is: solar&#x2F;wind capacity at 4x of total demand (thermal generators are roughly at 2x on the current grid), with 3-4 days of storage. This translates to world with abundant energy, at certain times, that&#x27;s generated at zero marginal cost.  There are still lots of transmission costs however. The future of energy is all about spatial and temporal arbitrage of renewable electrons.