Yes yes. Renewable proponents really love trotting out costs while ignoring the only reason costs have gone up is because we significantly ramped down our nuclear production efforts. Same would happen if we did that for solar. But that’s a choice we get to make. Also nuclear construction costs are particularly outsized in the US where regulations are intentionally constructed to strangle it. Japan, China, and Europe build it much more cheaply.

Existing heavy water reactors could be built more cheaply than they are now. And MSR/thorium designs are a step function cheaper beyond that because they generate even less waste, don’t need expensive fail-safe mechanisms because it’s inheritently physically impossible to melt down, and don’t need water to cool down which is both a cost savings & avoids the issue of warming waters due to global warming impacting the ability for reactors to run at times.

China has already started building MSR designs and it sucks that the DOE is dragging their feet in approving these designs & focusing instead on SMR designs. The regulatory capture of the US beuracracy by fossil fuel companies is a huge problem.

> it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to 80% carbon free grids

Got any existence proof for this claim? We’re building renewables as fast as we can and countries seem to generally tap out at ~20% ammortized across the year and are growing extremely slowly (~1% each year). By comparison France runs 90% carbon free and that’s because of their nuclear grid. Batteries will decrease over time but we still don’t yet know what grid-scale renewable base load looks like & I don’t think that 80% number is correct considering that baseload is 30-40% of maximum load (i.e. best case peak without batteries is 60-70%). But all the solar proponents also seem to ignore a major headwind for solar which is that while we build out more & more capacity, our energy demands grow faster than that. We’ve electrified 2% of consumer cars, 0% of trucks, 0% of ships, 0% of airplanes. Electrifying cars is going to add an insane amount of demands on the grid & solar can’t keep up (batteries either). And yes, there’s the argument of using batteries in EVs to do the grid balancing but we don’t actually have that tech & 0 regulations requiring it meaning that in 2035 which is the target when ostensibly we stop creating new ICE cars, we still won’t have that ability.

Building out nuclear capacity is still by far the quickest & cheapest option to not only convert our existing energy to carbon free but also to keep up with ever growing demands. Remember - the more capacity you build, the cheaper it gets per MW. Also, nuclear is way more land efficient than solar which is a separate unrelated discussion but also relevant. Again, my argument is not to stop solar investments but to remove all the regulatory and bueracratic roadblocks that inhibit nuclear fission so that those companies can compete fairly.

Denmark is an absolute best case because they are geographically advantaged for wind. Wind is much more resilient and cheaper than solar but is also more geography dependent. Fission can be installed anywhere.