it is not in most us areas. only problem is area covered, NOT price of technology. solar with 12 hour of storage was lower price than fission before covid hit. TCO, not one time nonsense.
fission has relatively low temperature heat, i.e. no metal reduction, no "concrete" production. you can cook hot dogs with it. also electrification of heat can provide lower losses stemming from regulation or lack thereof. with electricity you can say i need 293.5 degrees C and you just type it somewhere and you get it for almost free (regulation).
I am no fan of fission (I strongly oppose new fission plants). But one problem with solar+storage is that the cost of the storage component increases roughly linearly with the desired storage duration. That's not true of a fueled power plant (fission or fossil).
Lithium ion batteries are light with a high energy density, so are great for cars.
Flow batteries have a low energy density, but increasing the duration means a bigger tank, and the cost of bigger tanks increases as a function of the cube root (?) of their volume
Flow batteries are well over a century old, but I have been reading about improvements over the last two decades. Where are they?
Having trouble staying ahead of the enormous monster that is the lithium battery industry which through sheer scale are lowering the costs allowing it to break into one market after another.
It is the good old: Good enough beats theoretically perfect.
flow batteries are "controlled" by US patents. solar + batteries are not limited in bad way by US companies grip on patents.
china makes all panels, asia is making all batteries.
so US utilities / energy providers can not have harmful grip on PV + batteries.
US utilities / energy providers want to have docile customer who only pays every month. they do not want to invest money into grid and have customer not only demand but also supply grid. because they do not understand how to benefit from that. they can, it is just mental limit for them.
utilities / energy providers were too lazy to think about proper decentralized grid so every participant in us grid will suffer more because of that.
this will be flagged as conspiracy, be cause it is conspiracy, conspiracy against US citizen by US companies / US interests"
coal power plant needs to have 100 or so rail cars worth of material brought every single day. so you are simplifying too much.
every person doing anything with power generation should put into spreadsheet, what quantities of material is needed to provide power capacity for entire grid.
and you need people, infrastructure to bring, prepare, load that material. which adds COST OF LOCKING PEOPLE, locking workforce for nonsensical jobs. so if someone drives train supplying coal plant with coal he can not do programming job, job in services etc... labor/workforce "opportunity cost"
with PV + battery you bring material once per 10-15 years. and it is not in quantities as in fossil. and one coal plant worth of personnel can manage higher amount of generating capacity in PV/battery
Nuclear plant of ANY KIND will have to have even bigger workforce than whole coal plant, just to do NONTRIVIAL maintenance. just simple microcontroller, sensor.... used in nuclear power plant has to be made available for duration of plant lifetime 30-40 years. you can use any inverter, solar panel in pv, you can interchange them, mix them, this is not as simple with nuclear plant.
people involved in providing energy services and citizens drawing energy from grid, should start think like producers AND consumer, not only like consumers. that way a lot of "grid problem" will be easier to deal with.
There are any problems with fission that are all related to the extraordinary danger of handling the fuel, byproducts, and the sites themselves.
The cost of them is huge, some people are hoping that modularity will help with construction, but it is still astonishingly expensive.
The problems of handling the fuel has been solved, in theory and practise. Except when commerce is involved. When the money people get involved corners will get cut, and we are back to incredible danger. Technically solvable, but I would not go near it. I have known too many business people.
The problem of the long-term waste is entirely beyond us. There has been no practical progress on this front. Long term waste (including some parts of the assemblies themselves) are very dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is, with current technology that can be bought to bear, unsolvable.
The only thing we can do is put it in a stable site, be ready to move it when the site becomes unstable (nowhere on Earth is known to be stable on such time scales), and find a way of communication, across thousands of generations, just how poisonous this stuff is.
Maybe our ancestors will get lucky and find a way to safely dispose of it....
So fission power is making future generations pay for today's consumption.
Fortunately for us it is moot. The costs of renewables is dropped to the point that the only reason for fission is to build the capacity for nuclear weapons.
What exactly is the danger though? I'm imagining that another Chernobyl-level reactor breach is unlikely (not least since the other 3 reactors at Chernobyl of the same type kept running until 2000, and several more reactors of the same type are still operating today in various post Soviet countries). And while reactivity release is unfortunate, the effects tend to be localized (excepting Chernobyl), and let's not pretend that other modalities have 0 environment impact or risk factors.
If fact more people die from falling off wind turbines during maintenance than have died from nuclear accidents on a per-TWh basis [1].
And there were greater health effects in Fukushima due to panic and unnecessary evacuation than from radiation [2].
Again I agree radioactivity = bad, but I think it needs to be put in context.
And as for the disposal of nuclear waste, yes it's a problem for thousands of years, but we don't need a thousand year solution, it's not like we're leaving the planet. One possible outcome there is that eventually we develop cheap enough neutron sources that we can bombard the waste with neutrons until the various atoms capture enough neutrons to become stable isotopes. Considering the technological progress over the last 300 years, maybe in another 300 such a feat will be economically feasible.
And there is still very much a need for zero-carbon DISPATCHABLE electricity of witch nuclear is the ONLY choice. You simply cannot have 100% of your electricity from only solar and wind because it is far too variable and we simply don't have the technology to store electricity cheaply enough.
Your attitude towards nuclear energy is as irrational as the average antivaxer towards vaccines.
A) The area is not known to be geologically stable over the extraordinarily long time periods necessary. (Nowhere is....)
B) There is no containment vessel that can last that long
I get tired of the wishful thinking. Being charitable as describing it as that.
In the future, 600 generations from now, when the poisons we lay down now are bubbling up, perhaps people then will have forgotten us. If not, they will not forgive us
" the extraordinarily long time periods necessary. (Nowhere is....)"
This is the the lie that I'm really tired of people repeating. Nuclear waste isn't THAT dangerous and doesn't have to be kept perfectly isolated for THAT long.
"In the future, 600 generations from now, when the poisons we lay down now are bubbling up,"
You should really be more worried about the 36 billion tons of CO2 we are spewing into the atmosphere every year instead of a TINY amount of nuclear waste many thousands of years in the future.
You are like someone with a malignant tumor worrying about the risks of radiation therapy.
The longest lived fission products are actually the LEAST radioactive. This inverse relationship exists because of the fundamental relationship between half-life and radioactivity. The longer a radioisotope's half-life, the lower its specific activity (radioactivity per unit mass)
You are like a firefighter who opposes using water (nuclear energy) to extinguish fires (reduce CO2 emissions) because people might drown.
meant of the good spots are already used, but we can change how they are used to greatly increase their usefulness to a 0 carbon grid. we can make them all pumped hydro, and start treating hydro as a battery rather than a generation source.
fission has relatively low temperature heat, i.e. no metal reduction, no "concrete" production. you can cook hot dogs with it. also electrification of heat can provide lower losses stemming from regulation or lack thereof. with electricity you can say i need 293.5 degrees C and you just type it somewhere and you get it for almost free (regulation).