nuclear is very slow to deploy and limited in capacity. the industry suffers from significant latency and tight bottlenecks.
the 2018 world nuclear outlook, a dubiously bullish and optimistic predictor of industry trends, shows that the most ambitious likelihoods for capacity growth will struggle to match total global demand growth - and that's assuming most plants up for (or past) retirement get license extensions. Nuclear is just too slow to make a meaningful dent in carbon-fueled power, and that's even before we consider cost.
renewables are our future, but also my present. My home produces more power than i need; half the houses in my street have their own solar panels; the shopping centre and church down the road are plastered in them. And although the local power company is 99% gas, they're buiding a medium-scale solar farm down the hiway; nearby small towns are fully solar already; and the next-largest city is building a battery farm to enable them to be more than 50% renewable within 10 years.
Small modular reactors in the US are already in the licensing/regulatory phase.[0] They are portable and have reasonable prospects of providing baseload where renewables/batteries can't. Many have very safe failure modes also, not requiring power/pumping. It's going to a niche future for nuclear though.
Cost-wise renewables are already winning in many parts of Earth and viable efficient storage has become the main problem.
Batteries are great for quick on-demand grid balancing, but are environmentally damaging and lose large amounts of capacity within half a decade.
Supercapacitors hold great promise, but like fusion always seem 20 years away. On a $/Ah scale they are useless today, but don't suffer from any of the flaws of batteries apart from weight/volume issues.
Gravity storage [1] seems the most promising, pumped hydro isn't that efficient and very site-dependant, rail or crane weight systems seem to outperform and hopefully they gain some traction
nuclear is very slow to deploy and limited in capacity. the industry suffers from significant latency and tight bottlenecks.
the 2018 world nuclear outlook, a dubiously bullish and optimistic predictor of industry trends, shows that the most ambitious likelihoods for capacity growth will struggle to match total global demand growth - and that's assuming most plants up for (or past) retirement get license extensions. Nuclear is just too slow to make a meaningful dent in carbon-fueled power, and that's even before we consider cost.
renewables are our future, but also my present. My home produces more power than i need; half the houses in my street have their own solar panels; the shopping centre and church down the road are plastered in them. And although the local power company is 99% gas, they're buiding a medium-scale solar farm down the hiway; nearby small towns are fully solar already; and the next-largest city is building a battery farm to enable them to be more than 50% renewable within 10 years.