[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 wouldn’t mind one in my basement… If I had a basement. But I do have a nice shed, where a 30MW reactor would fit nicely.
That’s your opinion. My opinion is that we need distributed power generation that can handle baseload. And neither solar nor wind can do that. My personal experience is, that our wind turbine usually doesn’t spin for several periods of up to 10 days in December through March. And energy storage with the required capacity still doesn’t exist either. Thus the power plants will be burning LNG, biomass, garbage or oil and coal, for the foreseeable future.
A centrally controlled, well regulated, network of small reactors will solve the problem.
Look, friend: as much as I like nuclear energy and decentralization of the powder grid, per home reactors could never, ever work. For the simple reason that the majority of us filthy apes are complete idiots. Furthermore, nuclear works currently because it has oversight by educated, trained professionals in a setting where oversight can be effective. Even if you had some sort of travelling nuclear engineer that would check up on your garage reactor, if anything ever went wrong with it then the response time would be too long to adequately deal with the situation.
The only way a distributed network of reactors could work is if it either had massive overhead or if literally everyone had training on the maintenance of a nuclear reactor. And this isn’t even mentioning the possibility of adverse weather events potentially damaging the reactor or how the waste would be dealt with.
The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.
Actually, none of them do. This other guy is insane and no one gets a reactor in their basement, but we have neither the production capacity nor the time to avoid nuclear being a significant portion of all energy in a fissile free future.
You’d better let the International Energy Agency, a department of the OECD, know that their research and report is wrong, then.
“Substantiated by in-depth case studies, this report infers that, almost anywhere on the planet, nearly 100% variable renewable energy (VRE) resources such as solar and wind power grids firmly supplying clean power and meeting demand 24/365 are not only possible but would be economically viable.”
Nuclear reactors are ill-suited for baseloads, because they can’t scale their output in an economical way.
You always want the cheapest power available to fulfill demand, which is solar and wind. Those regularly provide more than 100% of the demand. At this point, any other power sources would shut off due to economical reasons. Same with nuclear, nobody wants to buy expensive nuclear energy at peak solar/wind hours, so the reactor needs to turn off. And while some designs can fairly quickly power down, powering up is a different matter and doing either in an economically feasible way is a fantasy right now.
If solar and wind don’t provide enough power to satisfy demand, some other power source needs to turn on. Studies have already shown that current-gen battery storage is capable of doing so. Alternatives could be hydrogen or gas power stations. Nuclear isn’t an option economically speaking.