First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled::NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.
Might save you a click:
Too many investors pulled out of the project, at least in part due to rapidly falling prices of renewables.
Interest rates too, I’d imagine. Investing in new nuclear and expecting a decent ROI would be a dumb move now.
I am surprised they got any investors. From what I see the only way to get investment money is to say you are making a new social media app or building a condo.
Yeah the same reason nuclear is being rejected everywhere, it’s economically unfeasible and a huge liability - no one wants to end up with a hugely expensive powerstation that no one wants to buy power from because it’s a thousand times more expensive per kWh than any other option.
Does solar power use some rare earth minerals and stuff like that? They own those, but you probably need them for nuclear and others
There’s not necessarily a need for batteries. I’m generating energy and use it up directly, and inject the overage back into the grid against a compensation, and then at night or during times of heavy cloud coverage, I draw power from the grid pretty much on par with the money I received. So far it’s a zero sum game or slightly profitable.
Yeah go ahead and make a solar system with the dirt you have on your land. All you are doing is supporting one group of corporations over another. Worst argument I have ever seen for solar is what you have presented today.
Hey everyone, this comment doesn’t say that solar is bad. It says this isn’t the argument for solar the OP thinks it is. Solar requires a whole lot of mining and refining. Nuclear actually requires less. Using the same argument, nuclear is the better option. It’s just a stupid argument.
I remember so many nuclear stans on lemmy a bit ago refusing to acknowledge that renewables are getting so good and cheap that they are more important to solving climate change than nuclear. I wonder how they feel seeing investors pull out in favor of renewables?
Like crap? Renewables are good in places where they work. Nuclear works everywhere and is more reliable.
Investors pulling out of a nuclear project like this just looks like a, really dumb kneejerk reaction. “Oh! New shiny thing!”
Nope, the writing was on the wall for almost a year on this one. The whole nuclear industry in general is a long history of cost and schedule overruns. This is more of the same. Investors are not dumb.
You can invest in a solar or wind deployment and have it running and producing revenue in six to twelve months. You can invest in nuclear with a stated schedule of five years, have it blow past that mark, needing more money to keep it going (or write the whole thing off), and then start actually getting revenue at the ten year mark. This isn’t mere speculation, it’s exactly what happens. Oh, and it’s producing at least half the MWh per invested dollar as that solar or wind farm.
It’s amazing anyone is putting any money into nuclear at this point. For the most part, they aren’t. The federal government has shown willingness to sign new licenses for plants. Nobody is buying.
SMRs do not appear to change any of this.
Now, something I think we should do is subsidize reactors that process old waste. Lots better than the current plan of letting it sit around, and probably better than storing it in a cave for millenia, too.
This. Green energy works best when complimented with nuclear energy. Then, we can ween away from big oil.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.
3 people got killed by one of these like 60 years ago due to blatant design flaws that could’ve been solved. This means they can never exist again.
Also remember that time that they wanted to test a safety system so they disabled the other safety systems and the protocols said they should have shut down the reactor instead of doing the test due to other factors but they did the test anyways and it exploded? Oh and their “emergency off” button was actually an “emergency increase power then off” button. Clearly there’s no way to do these things safely.
I’m in both camps. We need massive amount of renewable energy installed and we should keep going.
But there comes a point where the last 20% will be extremely expensive to do via renewables. We will do the last 20% much cheaper if we keep our nuclear expertise and plants going.
I’m not saying “build only nuclear”. I’m saying “keep it going”.
I agree with this. I like nuclear, I think it’s neat, but I think it will be a minor player in solving climate change and meeting energy demands (unless there is some miracle breakthrough in fusion). It is perfect for specific locations/contexts.
I’m just bothered by:
People who think nuclear everywhere is the only possible solution to getting off fossil fuels, and have unrealistic expectations about its ease of building and price
and
People who trash talk solar and wind while being wholly uninformed about how effective and cheap those things are, and how fast they are getting cheaper and more effective.
For some reason, these people are often the same people.
I wouldn’t say 20% is a minor player. But agree we can get 80% there with renewables, in some locations (like Scandinavia, blessed with abundant hydro and wind) probably to 90%.
There’s no doubt that integrating renewables is cheaper than nuclear right now, partly as a function of how little nuclear we’re building, but majoritively a function of how much steerable generation we have from fossil fuel (mainly gas) plants. But as steerable capacity disappears, we will need to build more and more very expensive storage to keep integrating renewables.
The fora I’m in where nuclear is discussed seems fairly even tempered to me. But it may be that you’re encountering some immaturity in renewable fora you’re in - I just haven’t come across very much.
Yes my political opponents are the people I disagree with. I don’t see your point here.
Fixing our energy demands so they stop fucking the planet doesn’t require us to hold hands and sing together, we just have to invest in the proper energy infrastructure. Arguing about what energy infrastructure is proper is a good way to make sure we are looking at all sides of this.
Edit: man, quiet downvotes annoy me. Please, let me know what I said that drew your ire so I can determine whether I’ve made an ass of myself or if we just don’t agree.
I’m not the one who downvoted you, but I understand where you’re coming from. I just think that both technologies are useful. Nuclear has clear advantages over all fossil fuels, so it would be a good thing to invest in. This would be in addition to solar, wind and battery farms.
Might be easier to get people’s opinions if you don’t insult them in the first sentence.
“stan” is a common word for excessive fanatic. It isn’t always purely an insult. I also was specifically referring to people that were pretty rude in their behavior before. Feel free to assume I’m not talking about you, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with people who like nuclear.
Think of me as a solar stan if it makes things simpler
I feel indifferent. Nuclear is good way to do shitload of energy. Not sure about the small reactors
Well you still can’t meet normal demand with how unreliable renewables are.
We still need the good and cheap batteries that doesn’t exist yet for it to be viable as a baseline power source.
Welp at least the Saudis will be happy.
True, it does prove their six billion investment in making the largest solar project in the world was a great idea.
Hopefully they’ll continue their plan to invest almost half a trillion dollars in renewables this decade.
Damn
