this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I wouldn't mind one in my basement... If I had a basement. But I do have a nice shed, where a 30MW reactor would fit nicely.
That's your opinion. My opinion is that we need distributed power generation that can handle baseload. And neither solar nor wind can do that. My personal experience is, that our wind turbine usually doesn't spin for several periods of up to 10 days in December through March. And energy storage with the required capacity still doesn't exist either. Thus the power plants will be burning LNG, biomass, garbage or oil and coal, for the foreseeable future.
A centrally controlled, well regulated, network of small reactors will solve the problem.
Look, friend: as much as I like nuclear energy and decentralization of the powder grid, per home reactors could never, ever work. For the simple reason that the majority of us filthy apes are complete idiots. Furthermore, nuclear works currently because it has oversight by educated, trained professionals in a setting where oversight can be effective. Even if you had some sort of travelling nuclear engineer that would check up on your garage reactor, if anything ever went wrong with it then the response time would be too long to adequately deal with the situation.
The only way a distributed network of reactors could work is if it either had massive overhead or if literally everyone had training on the maintenance of a nuclear reactor. And this isn't even mentioning the possibility of adverse weather events potentially damaging the reactor or how the waste would be dealt with.
Actually, none of them do. This other guy is insane and no one gets a reactor in their basement, but we have neither the production capacity nor the time to avoid nuclear being a significant portion of all energy in a fissile free future.
Nuclear reactors are ill-suited for baseloads, because they can't scale their output in an economical way.
You always want the cheapest power available to fulfill demand, which is solar and wind. Those regularly provide more than 100% of the demand. At this point, any other power sources would shut off due to economical reasons. Same with nuclear, nobody wants to buy expensive nuclear energy at peak solar/wind hours, so the reactor needs to turn off. And while some designs can fairly quickly power down, powering up is a different matter and doing either in an economically feasible way is a fantasy right now.
If solar and wind don't provide enough power to satisfy demand, some other power source needs to turn on. Studies have already shown that current-gen battery storage is capable of doing so. Alternatives could be hydrogen or gas power stations. Nuclear isn't an option economically speaking.