The head of the U.N. nuclear agency said Friday that he expects the use of nuclear power could more than triple by 2060.
Rafael Grossi said in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s annual report to the U.N. General Assembly that this will be driven by electrification, data centers powered by artificial intelligence and “technology companies’ appetite for reliable, carbon-free power.”
Nuclear energy is seen by a growing number of countries as key to improving their energy security, he said, stressing that it is on par with solar energy and “safer than every other option.”
I’m not anti-nuclear by a longshot
But I think the time to be building new nuclear plants was probably 20 years ago and that window has kind of passed.
The unfortunate truth is nuclear plants take a long time to get approval, build, and start generating electricity for the grid, and there’s only so much you can or should do to try to speed that process up, because if you cut too many corners the potential for things to go wrong is enormous.
Solar and wind can be deployed a lot faster and we need that grid capacity now and at this point I think we’d probably be better served by building out as much solar and wind as we possibly can
The one thing that’s hard to understand is that we need a baseline power supply that has real “cranking power” to bring the grid online from an outage. This is because of the immense resistance in the transformers, inverters, etc.
Solar, wind, and batteries do not have much cranking power at all. We’d need a non-negligible part of an eco-friendly grid to be nuclear, hydro, biomass, and/or huge flywheels. Basically a power source that has significant resistance (literally rotational inertia in most cases) to getting drawn down from high amps to lower amps, on demand. All of those are feasible, though from an ecology perspective there are good reasons to avoid hydro.
The benefit from nuclear is that it can provide a significant chunk of stable baseline power AND that cranking power to come back from outages.
There’s a great YouTube video on this from Practical Engineering.