You can iterate the argument one step further and say that affordable nuclear is too far into the future, and that we should instead focus on more immediately realizable options such as wind, solar, geothermal etc.
This is where much of the energy debate in Europe is at now. It is exactly the same argument being used against fission.
Pick any technology that has come to fruition in the last decade. Video streaming as a substitute for cable and terrestrial TV. Mass adoption of Smart Phones. EVs becoming a viable option for broad populations of car owners. A space startup that came from nowhere and rapidly out-competed the incumbents. All of them.
Remember the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon shitting on private space companies on C-SPAN not that many years ago?
Look at the time span between people dismissing these technologies as off in the distant future and when they arrived. People have a tendency to assume that tomorrow will be the same as today.
Affordable nuclear is still some years away. I think the events in Europe actually shortened that distance into the future by a significant amount just in the last 6 months. But fission power is still "too slow". Fusion is even more years away into the future. If/When it comes to fruition people are going to be surprised, and none more so than the experts.
Because the experts are almost always wrong for a good while after disruptive breakthroughs have already happened.
It means we have to think ahead and make sufficient bets on technologies that exist at all time scales. And the more potential they have for delivering stable base load, the higher the payoff.
Yes we have to invest in both fission and fusion. And we have to invest a lot more than we already do.
None of those technologies has ever been cheap exactly. It always costs someone a lot of money. But because it is desirable it can be justified. Nuclear power is identical to any other source of power as far as the consumer is concerned
Also, if we are going to be super optimistic about fission we can also be optimistic about battery storage and solar.
Lots of technologies have gone from "not cheap" to dirt cheap in my lifetime so this isn't really an argument.
Let me give you an example. Right now I have at least half a dozen 6-9 channel IMUs on my person. Most of which cost from a couple of dollars to a few cents apiece. When I was a kid a much less precise IMU could cost more than a decent car. If you asked people who worked on equipment containing IMUs back then they would probably not have predicted today's price point and the fact that billions of these devices are owned by people of all levels of wealth.
Before the advent of MEMS devices, cheap chip manufacturing and a mobile market to drive up volumes and drive down costs it was fairly hard to envision that you could make a decent precision IMU and make a profit selling it for pocket change.
In fact, when I was a kid, nobody very few people who ran numbers really believed that mobile phones could be had for less money than a dinner at a not-even-fantastic-restaurant within our lifetime.
If you are to argue that something can't happen, you kind of have to find compelling argument rooted in fundamental limitations.
I don't think fission is ever going to be cheap as it deals with materials that are tricky. But I'm not ready to make the assumption that they can't be made cheaper per kWh than, say wind or solar (as you have to combine these with storage to solve the same problem).
The kind of investment you see in those areas is not because the technology is amazing value for money (although it is), but because of the extrinsic value to a user. An iPhone or a Tesla is a very different value proposition than a landline phone or a petrol car. But nuclear power does not give that kind of value to a user. The product is perfectly fungible with other sources. That makes it harder to bootstrap an industry. These kind of technological jumps forward require lots of different factors to align. We absolutely should be optimistic and maybe nuclear can differentiate itself. But it is really not the same as an iPhone. An absolutely collosal amount of money went into the supply chain that makes a modern phone possible. That was not done because having IMUs in your pocket is amazing.
> But nuclear power does not give that kind of value to a user
That wasn't the point. The point is that right now people can't even envision that nuclear can be done more efficiently because there isn't being invested much in nuclear. Just as people couldn't imagine cheap IMUs or electrical cars that were actually as good, and often better, than cars with combustion engines.
It was an observation about people. Not things.
If you look at the current energy crisis in Europe, that's one of those wakeup calls that could, and should, change our awareness of energy mix. Even before the Ukraine war, Europe was heading for an energy crisis because it was not investing enough in constant power sources. Focus has been on renewables, which is well and good, but wind and solar are intermittent. And as Norway is discovering, with changing weather patterns, hydroelectric becomes a challenge as well.
To illustrate how serious the crisis is: a lot of businesses are energy intensive. For instance a grocery store requires enormous amounts of cooling. Bakeries require electricity to drive huge ovens. Some of these businesses see nearly an order of magnitude higher electricity costs. There are farms where crops get plowed into the ground because farmers can't afford the energy to process the produce and bring it to market.
This doesn't scare people nearly as much as it should. So the value is rather obvious at this point.
I don't think this is quite the same argument. I agree with funding the future.
But in this case the 'experts' seem to be putting all the funding toward fusion, which is likely decades away, if at all, and almost not at all toward new fission, which could be viable this decade.
No new nuke design begun today could produce any power before 2035. The money spent building it, spent on renewables instead, would produce immediately, displace CO2 immediately, and produce more.
Which currently-deployable renewables work at night, when there's no wind, and can produce enough for our base load needs?
Small modular reactors could well be operating before the end of the decade, with government assistance, esp. regarding permitting.
But that's beside the point, and your argument is exactly that criticized above - ie we should spend today on current tech rather than research for tomorrow. Renewables are now essentially 'baked', and from the government pov it's just a matter of tweaking regulations etc to encourage further commercial rollout.
But we should also be researching for the future, and new nuclear needs help to actually develop the technology to commercial viability, along with say, deep geothermal. In comparison fusion is pie-in-the-sky, and doesn't warrant it's outsized funding - some funding (for the science), yes.
lol, go and do some calculations, and come back and tell us how many batteries we'll need to cover base load during a couple of weeks of calm, dark-skies snow or rain.
I agree we should be investing in storage technologies too, just not to the exclusion of other options.
> Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.
US residences currently use ~1kW per household. This means that current car-battery sized storage (~100kwh) would already last almost a week.
Note that other western industrialized nations are significantly less wasteful with residential electricity; the same storage would last the average german household already over 2 weeks for example. Part of the difference might be explained by air conditioning-- but this conveniently requires very little storage anyway.
You made a categorical statement, yet provided no reasonable argument to back it up, so please don't be upset if I'm inclined to not enthusiastically adopt your position.
I've spent much of my life listening to what people say various things can't be done. And then either seeing people do what was "impossible" or, in a few cases, participating in doing what other people said couldn't be done. It is the same kind of mental pitfall that magicians exploit: the audience fail to imagine the amount of effort that can be brought to bear and hence make assumptions about what is possible within a scope that wasn't as limited as they thought.
It doesn't happen often, but it happens often enough that I'm disinclined to dismiss possibilities before they have been properly explored.
I'm not saying fission can be accelerated to, say, a sub decade path to realization. I'm saying that categorically stating this timetable can't be accelerated is a bit premature before anyone has made a serious attempt.
So what do I mean by "serious attempt"?
If you look at investment in fission over the past decade, in my book that qualifies as the world not having made a serious attempt. The level of investment needs to be perhaps on the order of 2-3 magnitudes higher for it to be a "serious attempt". And it doesn't have to be a null sum game in the sense that it would all have to come from reallocating investments from other energy sectors - it could be that we allocate more resources to the energy sector.
We have many decades' experience with fission projects.
The most reliable prediction, historically, has been that they were lying about costs. No fission project has ever been gone forward without massive public subsidy. There are no projects in progress now or proposed that do not rely on massive subsidies. These go back to the first "too cheap to meter" claims.
We have decades more experience with electrical cars. And for over 100 years, electrical cars were a curiosity. For at least half of the time we've had nuclear power we've also had people saying that electrical won't have a chance at displacing ICU cars. "Experts" being far more adamant than laypeople because they "know" it isn't going to happen.
And yet, this appears to be happening.
The thing is, arguing that "X can't happen because X hasn't happened before" isn't a proper argument because everything around you has spent more time not happening than happening.
A compelling argument is one that argues how X can't happen for reasons we can know. For instance if we bang up against hard limits imposed by natural law that we just can't get around.
There is no record of electrical car promoters systematically lying about their costs.
Electric cars were not, in fact, a practical prospect until lithium battery technology improved radically. It was not the prospect of electric cars that drove the improvement. It was cell phones. As soon as the batteries got good enough, practical electric cars started to be offered, cash on the barrelhead, what you see is what you get.
Nuke experience resembles this in exactly zero details. It is frankly weird you thought otherwise.
This is where much of the energy debate in Europe is at now. It is exactly the same argument being used against fission.
Pick any technology that has come to fruition in the last decade. Video streaming as a substitute for cable and terrestrial TV. Mass adoption of Smart Phones. EVs becoming a viable option for broad populations of car owners. A space startup that came from nowhere and rapidly out-competed the incumbents. All of them.
Remember the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon shitting on private space companies on C-SPAN not that many years ago?
Look at the time span between people dismissing these technologies as off in the distant future and when they arrived. People have a tendency to assume that tomorrow will be the same as today.
Affordable nuclear is still some years away. I think the events in Europe actually shortened that distance into the future by a significant amount just in the last 6 months. But fission power is still "too slow". Fusion is even more years away into the future. If/When it comes to fruition people are going to be surprised, and none more so than the experts.
Because the experts are almost always wrong for a good while after disruptive breakthroughs have already happened.
It means we have to think ahead and make sufficient bets on technologies that exist at all time scales. And the more potential they have for delivering stable base load, the higher the payoff.
Yes we have to invest in both fission and fusion. And we have to invest a lot more than we already do.