It's amusing that a silicon-valley web site has such rampant conservatism about extrapolating cost declines in highly modular technologies manufactured by the millions.
Well I am quite bullish on small reactors bringing the cost of nuclear down.
Assume we get good at both. Surely society with the energy output of nuclear is going to be much richer than one that is clearing its farms and forests for solar? (Wind is at least better on that front I suppose.)
One one hand, there is unit costs, on the other hand, there is the efficiency of big infra. Trains are better than cars, for example, no matter how efficient the production of cars gets. I don't actually want small nuclear reactors, I just want small reactors to iron out the production process, overcome the regulatory hurdles, and generally dispell the FUD.
Once that is gone, we should just crank out bigger and bigger prefab PPs, until no more global warming or fusion or whatever.
Why are you bullish about cost decline in nuclear? We've heard that song and dance before. Nuclear, unlike renewables, doesn't have a sustained and demonstrated tendency to get cheaper. If anything, the opposite has happened.
I think the problems with nuclear are fairly artificial:
- Very hard regulations
- Each nuclear power plant was so good, that there wasn't enough economic pressure to stop special-snowflaking them, simply because they were built only one at a time.
It's a lot like NASA rockets getting more and more expensive, because no one wants to crank out single-use rockets. Reusable rockets is the analog to smaller nuclear reactors, which allows one to refine the production process through repetition without loosing tons of money.
To be fair, I do expect storage and solar panels to get cheaper and cheaper too. But the energy density challenges for storage are still really hard! With "electrify everything", we will need a hell of a lot of electricity. Solar and storage feels like energy austerity regardless of the price because the shear physical challenges of what's needed.
And then there are the grid coordination issues. America seems too decrepit to run such a fancy grid, I do not trust it to pull that off at scale without a huge culture shift. Decentralization here is more problems, not fewer.
Simply put, I am bullish on everything getting cheaper but am bearish on solar and storage getting better. Nuclear is already good enough! Just need to get rid of the price bullshitary.
