Zane SelvansJigar Shah (current head of the US DOE's Loan Programs Office) recently wrote a long enthusiastic thread about the role he sees for #nuclear power in the US energy system. I've been surprised and kind of confused by this, given the cost overruns and delays associated with recent attempts to build new nuclear in the US, and the relative immaturity of smaller factory-built reactors that some hope can get onto technology learning curves and so reduce costs over time.
Some of his nuclear enthusiasm seems to come from pessimism about the prospects for clearing the interconnection queue traffic jam (~1 TW of renewables is currently waiting) and the difficulty of permitting and building out new transmission at the scale required by scenarios for rapid decarbonization through electrification. Which... yeah. Fair enough. Interconnection & transmission are currently very hard.
What surprises me is that he thinks nuclear would be *easier* -- it's got plenty of its own regulatory and permitting baggage!
He briefly talks about the problem in a more generic way in this podcast: On a zero-carbon grid *something* ultimately has to manage the non-dispatchability of renewables, and almost by definition, that thing is going to be utilized at a low capacity factor, and will raise costs relative to bulk renewables e.g. solar PV at $20/MWh.
We can build a continent-spanning super grid to provide geographic and resource diversity, and connect it to load centers, but that'll be expensive and slow and often that grid capacity won't be fully utilized.
Long-term electricity storage close to remote generation can improve transmission utilization and load following, but also won't be fully utilized.
Large banks of batteries, or pumped hydro, or any other capital intensive energy storage that are only on a seasonal basis, or during extreme gaps in renewable generation end up adding huge costs on a per MWh basis.
Engineered/Enhanced geothermal probably also needs transmission, and would also be pressed to operate at a high capacity factor to amortize up front costs over lots of MWh.
In theory nuclear is attractive because you can imagine dropping it in to replace existing centralized supply (coal or gas plants) without needing to build anything else, and get clean, dispatchable replacements. But again in a world where low-cost renewables dominate on an energy basis, even ignoring permitting, those will be some very expensive MWh, since they'd probably be load-following and not operating flat-out like most nuclear plants do today.
(though there are some designs for coupling thermal storage with nuclear so the reactor can run at constant capacity, while the electricity generation ramps up and down each day)
Webinar – Natrium: Latin for Sodium, Big for Advanced Nuclear
Dannyboyguyman@ZaneSelvans this is a more current summarized description of how SMRs can skip over the interconnect queue logjam
