Yes. When I attended an IAEA Safeguards conference in 2018, there were a number of these civilian nuclear battery designs but none had been built. A small nuclear battery can replace building-size diesel generators which remote communities and islands, data centers, etc. currently use as a primary or backup power source.
$ 3 billion for 720 MW of power (2019 figure) [1]. More recent figure of $ 5.5 cents per KW/h [2]. So about 4x cost overrun leeway to be competitive in Europe. That seems manageable?
Solar panel imports are even slapped with tarriffs. It's unlikely if you compared like for like it would come anywhere near the subsidies nuclear demands.
Overbuild of solar and wind has become cheap. But overbuild required is nowhere near that commonly assumed.
Storage will of course be built too, at overwhelmingly less cost than nukes, and much, much faster. But, first, the generation capacity to charge it up from.
You still have the problem of transmission, and grid scale storage is basically not deployed anywhere outside of a pilot program in Australia right now.
This video [1] talks about some of the potential cost savings and reduction in time to deployment. There is one being installed near me so I guess time will tell how realistic the projections are.
The most reliable output of the nuke industry has always been dishonesty. There is no reason to expect this will change suddenly, or that it has already.
No. Fukushima is a price I'd gladly pay and I expect every reasonable person to agree.
The alternative isn't "no Fukushima", the alternative is hundreds of thousands deaths per year by burning coal. It's just not "one huge bang" so people don't realize it, because understanding abstract dangers is hard.
Zero known fatal injuries out of 20,000 were caused by the reactor.
If I've done the math right, a nominally operative coal plant over Fukishima's 40 year lifetime would have caused 5ish deaths.
Fukishima did cause a few cases of cancer, but so does nominally operative coal.
People can gripe about tail risks from environmental pollution when it's not displacing a worse modal risk. Right now it's unreasonable to. Proliferation risk is concerning; most of the rest is just scale insensitivity.
In hawaii they canceled a proposed inter-island power connector because batteries + solar were just cheaper.
Pumped storage is generally a lot more economic and can store a lot more than batteries but it cant be built quite as quickly & is somewhat geographically dependent. It takes 4-5 years to deploy rather than months.
Before a thing has been built, it needs to be built. Do you need this explained further?
The overwhelming bulk of utility storage will not be batteries, because that is the most expensive alternative. Utility storage will be whatever is cheap and locally practical.
You should look up the cost (in whatever metric you like: dollars, lives, cancers, etc.) and compare it to coal. Don't forget to normalize, since coal is much more common than nuclear power.
I learned on HN that we almost did this in the 1970s, albeit with large but modular reactors. The effort extended far into construction of the (very large!) factory facility.
The ability to centralize the production I imagine radically reduces the cost, or at least has the potential to.
With all the energy challenges we face, could the US government subsidize a program like this and make it a silver bullet?