Many parts of the world will not be serviceable by solar. Too much darkness over extended periods. Storage is also still a huge issue that has its own particular environmental consequences. If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable? I doubt there is anything that raises standards of living quicker than abundant energy.
Old style reactors are "suuuuuuuper expensive", but several modern designs may be much less expensive. Older designs were inherently unstable and needed many layers of safety systems to "guarantee" safety. This of course also needed many layers of regulation and validation to make sure it would actually work. The rest of your concerns about completing builds hinge on these same factors.
A modern design that is inherently stable and safe should require a much simpler overall system design. We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
> If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable?
We have tried, and we have failed to make it affordable. And I think that it's unlikely that it will ever be affordable, because no matter how advanced the nuclear side of it is, it's still going to be used to boil water and drive a steam turbine for the business end of making electricity.
The thing about renewables and storage is that they cut our the Carnot cycle. All those steam turbines have been super optimized over the past centuries, and our materials science isn't making that process any cheaper any more.
Renewables and storage cut out that thermal process, and therefor have the ability to severely undercut the costs of all thermal process electricity generation. And from the way that cost curves are still falling like a rock, it really looks like they will be cheaper than just the thermal turbines and cooling systems that are required for thermal electricity generation. Which means that no matter how cheap and affordable nuclear becomes (lets say it's absolutely free), the 20th century tech of using steam to make electricity will be too expensive to compete with renewables and storage.
There are very few areas that won't be serviceable by some mixture of renewables, and those that aren't will liked be serviceable by fuels that are generated from renewables (hydrogen, methanol, methane, whatever ends up having the best properties.)
> We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
It's funny, because I 100% agree with the words in the sentence, but in the sense that nuclear is only advocated for because of emotional, tribal, and political connections to it (not necessarily all at the same time). When looking at our current technological capabilities, and construction abilities, nuclear is just not a very desirable technology due to its high degree of complexity. It requires high levels of skills that we no longer are very good at: managing extremely
complex construction and physical design of large structures, extremely skilled welding, concrete pours, etc. Stuff that we were good at in the 20th century, but no longer.
But we all grew up with the idea that nuclear was the "next" technology on a hierarchy of progression. And then we'd have fusion. And then space travel likely powered by fusion. But when reevaluating that "hierarchy" with actual technological development, I think that the futurists is the past got it wrong, and that all the sci-fi and video games we grew up on missed this one particular aspect of which technologies would win out.
Old style reactors are "suuuuuuuper expensive", but several modern designs may be much less expensive. Older designs were inherently unstable and needed many layers of safety systems to "guarantee" safety. This of course also needed many layers of regulation and validation to make sure it would actually work. The rest of your concerns about completing builds hinge on these same factors.
A modern design that is inherently stable and safe should require a much simpler overall system design. We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.