> I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.
Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our society are the closest things we get to planners so we're pretty fucked.
If you add district heating to LWRs their effective efficiency goes from 33% to over 57%. If we adjust markets to value on-demand (including nights/weekends/winters) low-carbon heat and electricity, LWR economics would be good, even in the USA.
They're already expected to be essential for decarbonizing at scale.
I have plenty of rants about how LCOE is wholly inappropriate as a metric of overall decarbonized system costs. If you look from that perspective, LWRs built by Koreans, Chinese, Indians, or Russians are an incredible deal.
We just need to have the Koreans come over and re-teach us how to build reactors. It's beautifully symmetric because we originally taught them. They've perfected the knowledge, enhanced it, saved it, and can now teach us.
That is probably a good idea, but comes with the major political problem of putting nuclear reactors very close to large populations of people who can complain about the zoning.
This is a solvable problem if there's political will to solve it.
Much of the uncertainty and cost of a new fission plant is tied to regulatory, permitting and litigation costs. No one's suggesting eliminating regulation, but the near-limitless ability to hold up a project with specious lawsuits could be curtailed.
Well, a comment posting without financials pretty much underlines why more fission reactors don't get built: the nuclear community is insanely bad at pitching to investors without magic on the line. Unfortunately, investors in our society are the closest things we get to planners so we're pretty fucked.