It’s all NIMBYism. We absolutely could shit out a standardized reactor design and build as many as we need but you can’t get people to agree that we should do that, and even a lot of the people who DO want nuclear power want it as far away from them as possible.
Too many decades of mis/disinformation around things like TMI and Chernobyl have ruined several generations of people’s opinions on being near nuclear even if they generally approve of it. (And by near, I mean in the same state as them, even.)
This is strictly a public opinion problem, and one reason solar and wind is expanding so rapidly is nobody has any major objections to those.
Yup. But like any good solution to a complex problem, it’s best if we have a lot of options. We’re putting tariffs on China, which will increase the cost of solar and probably wind, as well as battery imports (and yes, we’re making more batteries here, but it’s going to be small potatoes for a while).
Nuclear really shouldn’t be impacted by any of this, so the time to really nail down the specifics is right now, or preferably several years ago.
