"The project features a 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system. The storage technology can boost the system’s output to 500 MW of power when needed, which is equivalent to the energy required to power around 400,000 homes. The energy storage capability allows the plant to integrate seamlessly with renewable resources and is the only advanced reactor design with this unique feature."
Getting all the permits and passing all the reviews without running out of money, etc, is really difficult in these projects. I hope they make it.
500 MW or 400,000 homes, but what is that in terms of data centers? Is that enough to power us-west-1? assuming 50kw per rack of Nvidia GPUs(which is high. usually it's closer to 10), that's 10,000 racks or about an acres worth of datacenter.
Presumably this should be very well positioned to do so -- these projects are expensive but Bill Gates has a net worth of well north of $100 billion. If it's a "money" or "timeline" problem, he can solve it -- if it's an economics one in the end, he might not want to.
In related news, if you've ever wondered how good Bill Gates is at poker, he played a little with some locals from Kemmerer while there for the groundbreaking.
Sodium melts 98°C, a bit less than the boiling point of water. For comparison, pressurized water reactors use water in a temperature range between 275°C and 315°C. The higher the temperature, the higher the thermal efficiency of the electricity generator. Because the critical point of water is 374°C, no pressurized water reactor can get beyond this temperature, and in fact they all stay well below it. This limits the efficiency to about 33%.
Sodium stays in liquid form all the way to 883°C. They will not run the reactor that hot, for various reasons, but they can run it at more than 500°C. Still, well below lava levels.
At least it's in the middle of nowhere. Sodium reactors tend to have sodium fires. The track record on that technology, which goes back to the 1950s, is not good.
Here's the NRC docket.[1] None of the documents seem to address sodium fires.
>TerraPower’s investors and development partners, including Bechtel, GE Hitachi, PacifiCorp, and Berkshire Hathaway.
For people not familiar, PacifiCorp is majority owned by Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett). They operate many coal-fired power plants in the region including near Kemmerer where the new TerraPower facility is. I see this as a positive sign for the success of the project.
Forgive me for being cynical at this point, but I'll believe it when it comes online. I sure hope they're successful, though. Nuclear is still the only thing we have going for relatively near-term non fossil-fuel baseload. Anything not near term is too late.
You might be one of those who embrace electric vehicles today, yet it's worth remembering that electric cars were once considered obsolete. They were revived through persistent belief and innovation, despite the dominance of internal combustion engines. This same principle of perseverance and innovation applies to nuclear energy and solar panels.
We cannot predict with certainty which technologies will dominate the future, but it's clear that innovation and research should always be our priorities. Dismissing nuclear power as a relic of the past is illogical. Instead, we should focus on improving it and continuing to explore all potential solutions for sustainable energy. Nobody can predict.
It's a race between nuclear, batteries, and using direct air capture to make up for remaining fossil fuels, concrete and other corner case greenhouse gas emissions.
I think direct air capture is going to be the technology that gets us over the finish line, simply because it's the only one that has a path to net-zero.
Nuclear, renewables and batteries all make carbon capture more affordable, so the ultimate answer is probably "all of the above".
Direct air capture is really about the least realistic of popular geoengineering proposals. The atmosphere is huge. We didn't get into this situation overnight - it took almost two centuries and oodles of factories, vehicles, concrete plants, etc. It's vastly cheaper just not to output more CO2 in the first place. Thermodynamic constraints mean that tremendous amounts of energy are required to do DAC in the first place, not to mention the knock-on biosphere effects of the production required to build that hitherto-unseen scale of capability.
We can't magic-tech our way out of this situation. It will take huge effort, and more importantly, sacrifice of the unthinking low-value abundance we have. Nuclear power is hard, but it is still much more realistic than unproven wundertech like DAC.
Yep. We basically doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. If we had a machine that could take some volume of air and scrub all the C02 out, we’d need to pass half of the atmosphere through it to cut the CO2 in half.
I think the point is that even if we can scale up DAC to work, we need some carbon-free source of energy to power it. Fixing the atmosphere essentially means we need enough non-emitting energy to run civilization since 1850 in reverse, and preferably much faster than 1x.
No argument from me. Trees work. Stopping forest loss is an absolutely low-hanging fruit, but one that we still cannot achieve. Rewilding of massive areas must be a primary goal. If we can't do that, we certainly can't do DAC. In general, the Earth's homeostasis (and thus, thus homeostasis of human civilization) depends on continued, robust functioning of the biosphere. The biosphere is resilient and adaptable. However, it has never faced intelligence before. Humans - more and more unfettered by their own physical limitations - will seek (as always) to bend their environment to their own particular wills - even when it conflicts with the interests of humanity as a whole. Even in a decaying and impoverished environment, people may still seek out ever more marginal benefits at greater and greater social costs. I hope I'm wrong, but we may be at the great filter.
Right now most of our cities are directly dealing with the problems of the "Heat Island effect". It's dangerous and causing very real, very scary death statistics.
We know the easy fixes: add more trees to parking lots. Replace more parking lots with trees.
We know exactly why that is an unpopular solution: most parking lots are privately owned and trees don't pay parking fees. Also, our cities are so car-centric parking is "important" and removing any parking spaces is seen as hurting surrounding businesses because fewer people will commute there from the suburbs/exurbs.
"Ban cars and reforest parking lots" is a joke of an extremist take, but also both one of the easiest solutions and one of the hardest solutions, to the Heat Island effect specifically, but also as a microcosm of the things we need to do to solve climate change issues in general.
Between now and 2030 there will be a lot of energy generation coming online. Hundreds of GW basically. The vast majority of that is going to be renewables. Nuclear is not going to contribute much at all. It might actually shrink proportionally as several reactors are scheduled to be decommissioned and there just isn't a whole lot being approved for construction.
This project is only adding some 340 MW. Not nothing of course but probably expensive and just not a lot in comparison. And of course that 2030 target date will likely slip. And in good tradition the article doesn't actually talk about budgets or money. Because obviously, this being a nuclear plant, it will blow through whatever budget was defined. By about 2x at least.
> Today couldn’t have happened without the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which is supporting the project with the largest single contribution the federal government has ever committed to a private project.
Which in short, is why Bill Gates is still involved at all: tax payer money is covering the budget and most of the risk. Which is substantial. And he gets to look all visionary if/when this thing comes online at great cost at some point in the 2030s.
I'm glad more renewables are coming online, but that's not the 24/7 base capacity that is really needed to fully replace fossil fuels. Solar and wind are cheap now, but they only generate power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Thus, energy storage on a huge scale is needed if they are to replace fossil fuels. Power grid unreliability is politically untenable. People will march headfirst into the destruction of industrial civilization, ignoring the warnings of climate scientists, before they will accept an electrical grid that is offline for 5% of the time. For as difficult as nuclear is, storage is much harder yet. Nuclear is proven tech. It works at scale. The main obstacles political, but they are much more easily overcome than objections people would have with an unreliable grid.
Baseload power producers ceased to be relevant decades ago. The nuclear industry has coopted the term because they know they can’t compete on cost.
With storage now coming online in large enough quantities to meaningfully affect the grid the window of opportunity for nuclear energy has passed. It had a chance if the reactors started in the 2000s had delivered on time and on budget. They did not deliver.
Baseload power is still very much relevant. People will not tolerate power outages when it's cloudy. Yes, storage has advanced, but it's nowhere near the capacity that's needed. If it were, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. It's far from the capacity of existing nuclear power supplies, right now - much less what is needed.
Given your answer it does not seem like you opened the linked article. Storage in California is supplying the equivalent to 4-6 nuclear reactors during the evening peaks. They are supplying nuclear scale level energy. We are having this discussion because a nuclear energy startup sees their window of opportunity vanish.
Baseload on the demand side still exists. Baseload powerplants not so much.
Look at the rate California is installing storage. Given the current rate, in 20 years time when what we install today reaches EOL, California will have 10 hours of storage during the summer peak.
When simulating the Australian grid with 5 hours of storage at mean power levels that leads to 99% reliability. [1]
A nuclear plant to solve the last 1% is a non-starter.
Of course we also do not only rely on storage, there is also:
- Large grid to decouple weather patterns
- Demand response
People already get on hourly contracts and schedule car charging for when it is cheap. The next step is automating it and making it more streamlined.
Some companies already support chargers which integrate with the pricing, they can even give you money back through demand response.
It's worth noting that California is one of the wealthiest regions in the world, yet it faces extremely high electricity bills to achieve its goals.
On the other hand, nuclear power is criticized while France, which relies heavily on nuclear energy, enjoys some of the lowest electricity rates in Europe.
How can you apply California's model to poorer countries when even California hasn't fully decarbonized? France, on the other hand, achieved significant decarbonization decades ago.
It's ironic that people like you see the fight against climate change as an opportunity to attack nuclear power. Be honest about your intentions.
Mostly based on the huge payouts for forest fires and bankruptcy of PG&E.
Until they had the highest rates in Europe when their nuclear energy did not deliver. [1] Currently they are completely unable to construct any new nuclear power given the outcome of Flamanville 3 [2] and cost escalations of their upcoming reactors [3], before they have even started building. The future for the French nuclear industry is looking incredibly bleak.
Relying on data from the 50-80s to "show" that nuclear is viable today, and also only looking at the reactor and not the entire plant, is essentially lying with statistics.
Have a look at all projects in the west in the past 20 years. They've either been cancelled or taken 20+ years from announcement to commercial operation.
Given the extreme costs of and lengthy construction timelines of modern nuclear power investing in it today prolongs climate change.
> Until they had the highest rates in Europe when their nuclear energy did not deliver. [1] Currently they are completely unable to construct any new nuclear power given the outcome of Flamanville 3 [2] and cost escalations of their upcoming reactors [3], before they have even started building, the future for the French nuclear industry is looking incredibly bleak.
You are cherry-picking examples to support your argument, which is intellectually dishonest. For instance, if I took the construction time of the slowest wind farm and presented it as the norm, it would be equally misleading. I provide average and mean construction times, which are more representative of the overall picture.
> Have a look at all projects in the west in the past 20 years. They've either been cancelled or taken 20+ years from announcement until commercial operation.
This is another example of cherry-picking. Western countries have not invested in nuclear power on a large scale in recent decades. However, countries like South Korea and China, which have heavily invested in nuclear energy, have achieved much shorter construction times.
You mention statistics but fail to explain how building one nuclear plant per decade in the West represents any meaningful statistical evidence. It is misleading to generalize from such a small sample size.
> Given the extreme costs and lengthy construction timelines of modern nuclear power, investing in it today prolongs climate change.
Germany's Energiewende, which has cost 600 billion euros over 20 years, has not achieved significant decarbonization. Renewables remain the most heavily subsidized energy source in Europe.
To understand your position better, do you prioritize excluding nuclear power or achieving decarbonization?
South Korea was building until their corruptions scandals blew up the industry. They haven't been able to sign a single export agreement since. [1]
China has for every single passing year been reducing their nuclear targets in favor of renewables. They keep a toe in the nuclear business but it is not core to their energy strategy anymore. [2]
We can have a look at all reactors we have tried to construct in the past 20 years in the west. The French examples are the pretty picture.
Finished:
- Olkiluoto 3: Took 20 years.
- Flamanville 3: Incredible cost blow-out and delays.
- Vogtle: Laughably delayed and expensive.
Under construction:
- Hinkley Point C: Laughably delayed and expensive.
Cancelled after investment decision:
- Virgil C. Summer: The ratepayers are going to pay for this chaotic project for decades to come.
- Hanhikivi: Was apparently hard to certify a Russian reactor for western standards.
Cancelled before investment decision:
- NuScale: In the end it cost more than Vogtle in $/kW.
Planning limbo because no one can agree on the costs:
- Wylfa-Newydd
- Sizewell C
- Oldbury B
- Bradwell B
- Moorside
Early stage planning:
- 6 new EPR2s by EDF in France: Continuously getting more expensive.
Given this horrific outcome taking statistics from the 70s and saying and saying it has any relevance to the costs and timelines of nuclear power construction in modern advanced economies is just sticking your head in the sand.
Please compare Germany and South Korea then. South Korea, the modern poster child for nuclear power held up as the paragon to emulate. Stuck at 450 gCO2/kWh which is worse than even Germany.
21st century nuclear power does not deliver decarbonization. Renewables do.
You are citing individual cases that don't reflect the broader picture. The reactors you listed don't represent large-scale construction efforts like those seen decades ago.
Additionally, you mention costs as if they are the final cost to consumers. While Olkiluoto 3 was expensive to build, electricity bills in Finland are now stable and relatively low because of it. Over the long term, once the construction costs are repaid, it will be even more economical.
Regarding China, your point isn't clear. The fact remains that China is demonstrating the effectiveness of building multiple reactors in parallel, which is faster and cheaper. Building reactors sporadically, as France is doing with new technologies, is indeed slow and costly.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927
As for Korea, your argument seems unrelated. I advocate for a mix of nuclear and renewables. Korea's current strategy lacks sufficient renewable energy, which is not ideal. I mentioned Korea specifically to highlight their nuclear power capabilities, not their overall decarbonization strategy. Both Korea and Germany show that decarbonization requires a mix of nuclear and renewable energy sources.
So, is your priority to exclude nuclear power, or to achieve decarbonization?
Incredible how every single reactor we have attempted to build in the west in the past 20 years are "individual cases" when you have to find a way to rationalize your own stand point.
Both the French and the American large-scale efforts ended in tears. Scale did not solve it.
> The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
> By the mid-1970s, it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent.
> [...]
> The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.
> Regarding China, your point isn't clear. The fact remains that China is demonstrating the effectiveness of building multiple reactors in parallel, which is faster and cheaper.
Love how your link says "Continues rapid growth" about the Chinese nuclear program while the curve obviously is stagnating.
> While Olkiluoto 3 was expensive to build, electricity bills in Finland are now stable and relatively low because of it. Over the long term, once the construction costs are repaid, it will be even more economical.
So now we just ignore basic economics. You don't get anything for free in the world. Someone paid. In the case of OL3 the French paid for the majority of the cost.
Do you think anyone will sign a contract like OL3 again where the supplier is certain to make a loss?
Lets have a look at Denmark and South Australia then? 150 gCO2/kWh and rapidly declining. Why accept being stuck at 450 gCO2/kWh like South Korea simply because they build nuclear?
Because you don't really care about nuclear plants but understands that the discussion has shifted and now promote nuclear to prolong our reliance on fossil fuels.
> Because you don't really care about nuclear plants but understands that the discussion has shifted and now promote nuclear to prolong our reliance on fossil fuels.
This shows all your intellectual dishonesty.
I'm for any effective way to break down our dependency on fossil fuels. I support research and investment in any type of technology that can effectively help us achieve net-zero emissions. Unlike you, I don't ideologically exclude one technology over another. Excluding a technology only complicates things.
I am well aware of the limitations of both nuclear and renewable energy sources, but this is not a sensible reason to exclude either from the mix. There has never been a single solution to our energy problems, but rather a need for a balanced mix and compromises.
The last attempt at an SMR failed due to out of control costs and that was a conventional water cooled plant (NuScale Power). I would be shocked if TerraPower built anything before 2030 close to their projected costs.
This is interesting news, of course, but I find it hard to get excited about nuclear power from fission these days. Ten or twenty years ago, sure, but not today.
As with all things, it comes down to the unstoppable power of change over time; the situation today is almost irrelevant. The unfortunate reality is that barring a breakthrough, the passage of time will not be kind to nuclear power.
Technologists forget that the main input of nuclear power is not fissile material but rather men and women. This small plant will require 1,600 skilled laborers to build; before them came a small army of designers and regulators; after will come yet more skilled employees for its operation. A comparable solar plant more than double its size, on-line today, employed seven hundred in its construction. What will happen in ten years' time? The cost of solar power and batteries will continue to fall off a cliff - and the cost of labor will rise. The far more labor-intensive nuclear sadly cannot win.
So, you confidently state that the cost of solar will continue to drop while the cost of nuclear will not. This prediction implies you can foresee future technological advancements and market trends with certainty. (funny)
Let's consider the labor aspect. While it's true that solar panels require fewer workers during construction, the production, maintenance, and recycling of increasingly sophisticated solar panels also demand skilled labor. These panels rely on advanced materials and manufacturing processes that are continually evolving.
Your argument seems to be driven by ideology rather than a comprehensive understanding of the energy landscape. Thankfully, companies invest in diverse research and development, ensuring a balanced approach to energy solutions.
You might be one of those who embrace electric vehicles today, yet it's worth remembering that electric cars were once considered obsolete. They were revived through persistent belief and innovation, despite the dominance of internal combustion engines. This same principle of perseverance and innovation applies to nuclear energy and even to the solar panels you favor.
Our current priority is to decarbonize, and nuclear power has already demonstrated its capability to significantly reduce carbon emissions. While your long-term prediction about solar might be accurate (or maybe not), we urgently need solutions for the immediate future, specifically by 2050. Nuclear energy has proven to be a reliable and substantial contributor to this goal.
Dismissing nuclear energy outright suggests that your priority might not be decarbonization but rather an aversion to nuclear power itself. It's crucial to embrace a diversified energy strategy that includes nuclear as part of the solution.
I would be curious to see this learning curve without all the subsidies that renewables received. These are impossible comparisons as the magnitude of hype and wishful thinking around these technologies is incomparable.
Also, nuclear gets subsidies. They are not on the hook for liability.
Thanks to this policy, should a catastrophic accident happen at one of the 54 nuclear plants operating in the United States, the nuclear industry would be liable for the first $16.1 billion in damages and taxpayers would be on the hook to cover the remainder. The Fukushima nuclear disaster has already been reported to exceed $90 billion. The full value of the Price-Anderson nuclear subsidy is difficult to estimate, but if nuclear operators had to carry the full cost of insurance against a nuclear accident, the plants would most likely become uneconomic to build: https://environmentamerica.org/updates/feds-extend-nuclear-p...
Using LCOE to look at the price of renewables is quite funny. Also, this report for nuclear use as metric the most expensive reactor in US
> Also, nuclear gets subsidies. They are not on the hook for liability.
The International Renewable Energy Agency tracked some $634 billion in energy-sector subsidies in 2020, and found that around 70% were fossil fuel subsidies. About 20% went to renewable power generation, 6% to biofuels and just over 3% to nuclear.
Thats about more than 120 billions every year. 87 bilions only in EU.
In EU its way more than 20% (in 2022 more than 50%), nuclear something like 1%.
> Thanks to this policy, should a catastrophic accident happen at one of the 54 nuclear plants operating in the United States, the nuclear industry would be liable for the first $16.1 billion in damages and taxpayers would be on the hook to cover the remainder. The Fukushima nuclear disaster has already been reported to exceed $90 billion. The full value of the Price-Anderson nuclear subsidy is difficult to estimate, but if nuclear operators had to carry the full cost of insurance against a nuclear accident, the plants would most likely become uneconomic to build: https://environmentamerica.org/updates/feds-extend-nuclear-p...
And? Dams have been shown to be much more dangerous than nuclear power, but I don't see any such thing existing. Don't associate political choices to technologies.
Either way, it's less than what renewables get every year, which says a lot about the public perception of the costs of nuclear and renewable.
As for the Fukushima "disaster," I do not minimize the costs, simply comparing the nuclear power of 60 years ago with the nuclear power in the article is intellectually dishonest. And I don't understand in which timeline it should be considered as a valid argument to be against modern and new nuclear technologies.
It seems that your entire account history is dedicated to producing low-quality, low-information comments in favor of nuclear energy. This makes it all the more ironic when you then accuse me and others of being "driven by ideology" despite the second sentence of my comment mentioning how I was in favor of nuclear power for many years.
Most of your comment is information-free, but I will respond to the single point you made. You mention the production, maintenance, and disposal of solar panels also require labor. Yes, obviously. Do you not realize that nuclear energy is far more labor-intensive per watt for each of those, or do you simply not care?
My argument is simple: labor costs will dominate for both battery-solar and nuclear; labor costs per watt are significantly higher for nuclear; thus as the cost of labor increases with time, nuclear fission will be increasingly unaffordable. If you want to debate that, please come armed with relevant facts, not vague statements and unrelated tangents.
I honestly write about nuclear power because I find the discussions around the topic interesting. It is by no means a primary topic in my everyday life, though, quite the contrary. Having said that, I don't understand what you can be interested in and what it adds to the discussion how I spend my free time, you are invited to argue in context if you want to argue on the merits. Also because I don't think that wasting time looking at my profile is much better.
First of all I would like to see some data, I know as far as nuclear is concerned, operating and maintenance costs are only a fraction of the costs in the bill, which in some charts is 10 to 25 percent usually. So even if labor costs were double, there would not be a doubling of prices. Just as if the price of uranium triples, the impact is very small.
The staff needed according to this report is 1.5 people/Mw on small plants (the older ones), 1 for large plants, up to 0.7 people for large plants with multiple reactors.
And SMRs will serve to lower this number even further. Although the number is highly variable since we are talking about so many different design types, and that especially as more reactors are installed fewer people per Mw are needed.
But as you can see the trend is quite negative, both in terms of normal reactors already in operation and future prospects.
Do you have any data about solar? And I would like to emphasize that solar alone is not enough, so the staff needed to store some of the energy would also need to be considered (battery?).
Otherwise we have to considers nuclear + renewable (my ideal mix), but at that point there would be nothing to argue about probably, since for me it's not a renewable vs. nuclear war, but I consider them both necessary.
Finally, just for intellectual honesty, it is worth underlining that one MW of nuclear power cannot in any way be considered on par with one MW of solar power, due to intermittency. I think it is a necessary premise to be able to make any type of comparison between the two.
I am not here to consider nuclear energy the best or flawless source of energy, on the contrary I recognize its limits and problems. I am simply here to defend it against those who want to exclude it to decarbonize. Because I am convinced that there is a lot, too much, wishful thinking around renewables. And that this is the first obstacle to being able to decarbonize.
If you do not realize that labor is by far the largest cost in nuclear power then I am not sure you have done even elementary thinking or research on the subject and we have nothing to discuss here. Obviously labor costs go beyond operating and maintenance. Have you considered design, regulatory, construction, legal costs (all mostly labor?)
Similarly, if you do not realize that the labor associated with the design, construction and maintenance of solar is a fraction of that of nuclear I would be quite impressed at the depth to which you have buried your head in the sand. Do you truly believe that the operation of a solar panel (wipe clean occasionally) or a battery (swap for a new one if it dies) is comparable to that of a nuclear reactor?
I suspect you have gone for the operation labor angle because it is the only one without obvious easily-Googleable figures showing the dramatic delta between battery-solar and nuclear. Amusingly, the figures are not easily Googleable because they are so small, but I will provide two for real-world solar plants. The Oberon solar plant near Odessa, Texas is 180MW and will employ 2 (two) FTE plus 2-3 seasonal local jobs for maintenance [1] and the also-named-Oberon battery-solar plant in California is 500MW and will employ a maximum of 10 employees at any time [2]. The labor to operate battery-solar plants is insignificant.
I am sorry that your frustration is so great that you have to insult and make unnecessary comments. I do not intend to continue the discussion any further. Bye.
My "frustration is so great" because you litter this site with ideological flamewars, baiting comments, name-calling etc; every single one of your account's comments are on a single topic - nuclear energy - of which you seem to have strangely little knowledge. When someone disagrees with you, you call them a Marxist, accuse them of intellectual dishonesty, pure ideology, or call them a paid shill.
First of all, your arguments may be as valid as you like, but your insults and personal attacks, as far as I'm concerned, nullify your reasoning entirely. You can criticize my positions all you want, but I've never attacked you personally, whereas you have.
That said, the pattern in all my discussions is very clear: those who criticize nuclear power often pick a single metric to argue against it, defending this metric to the extreme while completely ignoring the overall complexity of the issue.
You are doing exactly the same thing, insisting that the number of workers required is somehow a definitive metric to demonstrate the inadequacy of nuclear power.
You are probably correct that the number of personnel needed to maintain a photovoltaic plant is lower. However, this alone proves nothing beyond that specific point.
If we aimed for a fully nuclear-powered economy, the numbers for electricity generation would indeed be what I've stated (between 1 and 0.7 people per MW). In addition, this number is hugely outsized for reasons of over-regulation, scalability, technology, etc. If nuclear power received at least one-tenth of the subsidies and from the flexibility of renewables, how would it rule out a landscape with new, less labor-intensive reactors? Most of the reactors in operation are very old, and technology changes come very late because of little investment and overregulation.
Regarding total solar energy generation, one must consider the entire cost of a smart grid, personnel for storage, etc. Additionally, solar panels have a much shorter lifespan compared to nuclear power plants, and we're dealing with vastly different volumes and quantities of materials (assuming we want to recycle every panel). Furthermore, the solar industry is significantly less transparent than the nuclear industry, including the number of people required for panel production and their working conditions. ( https://enduyghurforcedlabour.org/solar/ )
There are likely many other hidden costs that I haven't mentioned, which would further increase the prices and the number of required personnel. Therefore, if you want to continue debating on this basis, go ahead. However, I want to emphasize that even if renewables required more personnel than a nuclear power plant, the discussion would still be pointless for me. The number of people involved says very little about the technology itself or its future prospective.
And again, my point is not to choose nuclear over renewable. But rather why do people like you prefer to rule it out when the IPCC itself calls it necessary for decarbonization? I want to decarbonize in a diversified way, focus on all available technologies, do you?
When you litter this site with low-quality inflammatory comments where you call people a Marxist, accuse them of intellectual dishonesty, pure ideology, call them a paid shill etc that is fine.
When I call you out on that behavior that "nullifies my reasoning entirely" (???)
This site has high quality discussions in part of the higher level of effort people put in their comments. There are plenty of interesting arguments against my original comment! You could argue that labor costs may not continue to rise. Or you could argue that a large portion of the labor costs around nuclear are white-collar and could be reduced by using AI. Or you could argue that cost isn't everything and that a nuclear power program has several benefits for national security. I'd love to read a well-thought out response of any kind. Instead you wrote a huge list of low-quality points in every one of your responses. We all know that the manufacture of solar panels is evolving, and that nuclear can reduce carbon emissions, and that 1MW solar is not the same as 1MW nuclear, and that solar without batteries is not enough; similarly it should be obvious to anyone that maintaining a nuclear reactor is harder than maintaining a field of solar panels; commenting these things is a waste of everyone's time. Making twelve different tangentially-related points and offhand comments doesn't serve anyone. That is why I am frustrated.
I reinvite you to re-read the discussion. You are the one who started making completely unnecessary and inappropriate comments about my personal profile, and how I spend my time.
Besides all that, with every comment I have always been in the topic, I have always brought arguments. However, I consider the discussion closed.
"The project features a 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system. The storage technology can boost the system’s output to 500 MW of power when needed, which is equivalent to the energy required to power around 400,000 homes. The energy storage capability allows the plant to integrate seamlessly with renewable resources and is the only advanced reactor design with this unique feature."
Getting all the permits and passing all the reviews without running out of money, etc, is really difficult in these projects. I hope they make it.