>scale
This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change (Edit: forgot a crucial clause: because "only" nuclear could scale). I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small, and it takes forever to build or expand.
Whereas solar can go small, go big, go medium, and the same with storage these days.
Many in the nuclear world are currently hoping to scale to "modular" size, because it's become clear that with 1GW scale, in advanced economies, construction is too expensive (IMHO due to the high cost of labor compared to less advanced economies). So shifting to a more "factory" model like airplanes is the investment pitch: scale smaller and make each reactor like factory parts so that it gets cheap to build. We will see! It's got enough hype that even non-small non-modular designs are calling themselves SMRs in order to try to garner interest. And there is some interest in new nuclear these days, despite the extremely high cost, and its going towards the more expensive SMRs rather than 1GW scale reactors, because the risk of failure is on a smaller overall quantity of money.
This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change (Edit: forgot a crucial clause: because "only" nuclear could scale). I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small, and it takes forever to build or expand.
Whereas solar can go small, go big, go medium, and the same with storage these days.
Many in the nuclear world are currently hoping to scale to "modular" size, because it's become clear that with 1GW scale, in advanced economies, construction is too expensive (IMHO due to the high cost of labor compared to less advanced economies). So shifting to a more "factory" model like airplanes is the investment pitch: scale smaller and make each reactor like factory parts so that it gets cheap to build. We will see! It's got enough hype that even non-small non-modular designs are calling themselves SMRs in order to try to garner interest. And there is some interest in new nuclear these days, despite the extremely high cost, and its going towards the more expensive SMRs rather than 1GW scale reactors, because the risk of failure is on a smaller overall quantity of money.