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SC's proposed nuclear reboot: 'We're going to finish these reactors'
20 mpweiher 19 8/15/2025, 3:30:14 PM scdailygazette.com ↗
I'm also glad to see attention brought to the Savannah River site's challenges even if not directly impacted by this work. Nuclear can be done cleaner than we have done in the past.
Not only is this providing a false binary, it’s also a pretty great example of the sunk cost fallacy. The article itself describes that the projects were abandoned due to cost reasons, why would it cost any less now.
Depending on how SC prices electricity, it might not be able to compete with wind/solar/batteries.
As I got older and understood the technology better, I came around to be conceptually pro nuclear. In fact, if we hadn't had those disasters and had successfully extended our nuclear power fleet we likely wouldn't be this far into climate change.
The pitch is still compelling, but the elephant in the room is cost: renewables (including storage) are cheaper and getting cheaper still.
The antidote to this might be SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) that cut costs by mass producing reactors on an assembly line rather than thesse bespoke behemoths, but even then they apparently can't compete.
We need all the non-carbon energy we can get, and if nuclear can get us there affordably we should embrace that. The economics should be a driving force rather than pure ideology.
We need to ramp up base load capacity so everyone can charge their EVs at night, or run their heat pumps through a cold winter night.
We’re not shooting at a static electric usage target. In our house, we have been electrifying everything and it’s quite surprising how much our electricity usage has gone up. In much of the country, you have design-point winter days where you need 90k BTU that’s currently being supplied by heating oil. Even with an efficient heat pump, that’s 12-13 kW, for everyone at the same time, all night. That’s an insane amount of energy storage.
Even places like Australia, which are naturally blessed in terms of wind and sun prevalence, are not able to divest from large scale coal power plants.
Intermittency is a huge problems for grids, and many of the widely deployable energy resources are inherently intermittent (which projects like Xlinks try to solve with other flaky engineering solutions)
This is not true.
In Australia Coal generation peaked at 179135 GWh in 2008 and was down to 126475 GWh in 2024 [1].
The state of Southern Australia generated 71.9% of it's electricity with renewables and only used batteries for 1.1% of generation. It replaced it's coal generation with gas generation, and gas generation is declining.
1. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/au/?range=all&...
2. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all...
If you aren't serious about nuclear power, you aren't serious about climate change. We should have nuclearized our grid decades ago. The US Navy has run reactors for over 50 years without incident. It can be done.
Immobilize it in glass, stick it underground in a remote area.
If it can be done cheaper with renewables and batteries, we should do that instead .
Moreover, there's a distinct possibility of future weaponized weather modification, such as an enemy power releasing aerosols to reduce solar production, or saboteurs starting forest fires.