> we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear.

It is cheaper now but my suggestion is that this is not inherent.

My whole point about a nuclear society was that if existed the economics would be different.

> The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity.

Again, part of my point is that the best way to solve these problems is having cheap high temperature reactors.

These reactors are prefect in replacing gas in heat production, and be used to for example to produce hydrogen that then would get further transformed into all kind of chemical fuels and feed-stocks.

> It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today.

People have such a narrow view of this. Nuclear provided gigantic amounts of clean energy when the only alternative was coal. This by itself saved far more lives then any nuclear accident ever killed (that number is very low).

Not being able to beat massively powerful fossil industry with 60s technology in the middle of a massive anti-nuclear weapons (and thus everything nuclear) push is hardly grounds to dismiss it.

If people had given a shit about climate change in the 1970 and willing to give it the same kind of subsidies that renewables have been getting then things would be different. This would have been more expensive then coal but the public heath aspect and the clean energy aspect would have made this worthwhile 10x over.

The fact is, the reason we even started building PWR is that the military wanted them for submarines. And despite even the designers of them saying they were a bad fit for civil nuclear, the government and industry pushed forward on these designs and pretty quickly hard locked themself into these designs for everything commercial. Everything else with a few exceptions was locked into research efforts and those were reduced consistently after the 60s.

> It's time to stop mythologizing the technology

It has nothing to do with mythologizing. It has to do with simply first principles approach to problems solving. We have an energy source that is literally freely available as a waste product from mining. Existing rare earth mines already have unlimited thorium as waste stream. Natural Uranium is plentiful as well.

This energy source turns out to be 10^12 more energy dense then fossil fuels that have powered society for a century and produced highly available energy at cheap prices.

> stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine

All of this is wrong. You conclusions are only based a reactor design, not on nuclear as a whole. A modern type of reactor (some are going threw regulatory process in Canada and could have been designed in the 70s) are far, far smaller then PWR type reactors and use orders of magnitude less concrete.

There have actually been a lot of study about what makes nuclear expensive. And its mainly two things, that nuclear reactors are basically gigantic civil engineering projects that has to be done at a very high standard and to get those in on time, on budget you really need a workforce that has experience. This type of knowledge was achieved in a few cases and in those PWR were able to be build in 4-5 years reliably.

The second part of what makes it commercially not viable is that financing these projects is actually a huge problem. Because of the long time it takes to build such a first time project, you require refinancing for 10 years and that is huge part of the overall cost.

Pretty much all next generation reactors have a far more energy dense core. This means a far smaller reactor vessel.

Because you don't use water coolant, you don't need to have a high pressure system and reactor vessel. Meaning both vessel and pipes are MASSIVELY simpler. You literally operate at atmospheric pressure.

High temperature operations make air-cooled means you can use the same turbines as CCGT plants and you don't need the large water towers.

So if the overall civil engineering project is far smaller, very comparable to a CCGT plants.

> but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades

This is an absurd claim. Gas power plants also need all of those things and are massively cheap and often beat renewables specially so if renewables were required to provide full reliability.

As I pointed out above, with the size of plant reduced to a CCGT gas plant, and the input being massively cheap compared to buying gas. A nuclear plant like this could have an very small staff (smaller then a CCGT gas plant) as the reactor is actually self balancing and you mostly need to monitor it and refuel it.

There has been a renewed interest in CO2 powered turbines that could potentially be more efficient and far smaller. Hopefully these will start to be commercialized at some point.