I see an overwhelming interest in Nuclear power in our media and in online articles posted to reddit and HN. In many discussions I have had online and in person most people are significantly misinformed in that they think that Nuclear power is playing a larger role than it is currently or that we can not scale EVs/heat pumps/AI Datacenters without building a lot more Nuclear power plants. Most people scoff at the idea that wind power, solar power and hydro power with batteries could ever totally meet our needs.

Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso

In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:

* Very inflexible. * Very expensive to build. * Very time consuming to build. * Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.

I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?

Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...

Solar has tripled in 4 years: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Sol...

So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?

I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.

For a high up-front price, nuclear plants give us an extremely large amount of consistent, emissions-free power that can also provide frequency stability to the grid. It's also very energy-dense in terms of Gigawatts per acre. Spent fuel is a largely solved problem, we should reprocess it into new fuel and place the residue into long-term geological storage. Modern nuclear reactors also do online refueling so they aren't shutting down to swap the fuel out.

That said, it's entirely possible to make an argument that the combination of wind, solar, battery energy storage, and kinetic (flywheel?) energy storage can solve the above needs for less money over the long term than nuclear. They can be built more incrementally and in smaller chunks, but there's also a certain value in having huge amounts of energy that can be sited basically anywhere. A big challenge with nuclear is that every time someone costs out a plant, by the time they can gather money solar and wind have gotten cheaper faster than expected.

Overall, I'd like to see a diversity of power sources. I think we should try building some big modern nuclear plants, convert some combustion plants with small modular reactors, subsidize solar and wind preferentially in areas where it makes the most sense, and fund hydro projects where it won't impact the environment.