[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
I disagree, a bit.
Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That’s basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
We have four choices:
We can do all of them concurrently, provided there’s money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
“Base load” is not that much. Off shore wind is almost always blowing, and all the other renewables can be stored via batteries or hydrogen (or tanks, in case of biogas). Yes, that’s a whole lot of stuff, but the technology exists, can be produced on large scale and (most importantly) doesn’t cause any path dependencies.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, as the article highlighted. And to be cost effective, power has to be produced more or less constantly. Having a nuclear power plant just for the few hours at night when wind and sun don’t work is insane - and insanely expensive.
Nuclear is mostly expensive because of regulations and red tape that are mostly built upon FUD.
That needs to be re-addressed from the ground up. There needs to be a big PSA push on the safety of nuclear and on the true costs and hidden dangers of coal and oil plants to build massive public support, and then we got to fix the outdated regulations.
Also, coal plants aren’t cheap. And coal has costs that are heavily subsidized by society. If you could calculate all of the external costs and level out subsidies, nuclear is cheaper and, more importantly, far far safer, than any GHG plant.
The alternative to nuclear isn’t coal…
And if you seriously think regulations are the problem, you’re denser than the lead shielding you want to get rid of.