Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.
https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...
It's not so hard. Lavish subsidies were used to make nuclear power semi-sort-of-competitive even though it's way more expensive.
The same thing could have been done with solar and wind but apparently we thought the best course of action was just to wait until they became cheaper than coal without subsidies (& then Obama and Trump slammed solar with tariffs).
As the article spends so many paragraphs to explain to us, the rest of the world is increasingly not burning fossil fuel for their new energy needs. Most of the fuel it burns is for the energy it already uses. And solar is starting to take a bite out of that too.
If it were cheaper, developing countries would buy even more of it, accelerating their own transition.
To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?
The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.
Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).
The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.
"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
We are in fact doing things soley because of cost, and pretty much only because of cost, because capitalisim. Solar and wind are now cheaper than all alternatives in most situations, so they are rapidly becoming all thats being built. We are doing the cheapest thing, which just so happens to be great for carbon, luckily for us. If we get out of this climate mess it will almost be by accident, because we made solar cheap, not because we chose to do the right thing.
Honestly you need to look into numbers for some of your points, and you'll see the folly. Land usage, its a non issue. For eg, its estimated that if around 1/3rd of the land the US currently uses for corn ethanol was converted to solar, it would power the whole country. And thats existing used land without talking about the insane amount of empty spaces that exist. non issue.
For storage, solar+24hr storage is now cheaper than new gas, and dropping fast (https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...).
Yes there are new nuke designs that are cool, but they're at least 10-20 years away from deployment at scale, by which time renewables and storage will be much cheaper still, and the transition will be mostly over. Im not anti at all, they're just too late, too slow and too expensive.
I think you need to catch up on developments in the last few years, and re-evaluate what seems ridiculous to you, a lot has changed very quickly. Cheap energy abundance via renewables is now a very likely outcome.
Becuase I'm interested in the future. The math with wind and solar checks out if all you care about is current energy needs. But we've already achieved most of the efficiency we can with at least PV. Even in a hypothetical future where you have some sort of quantum PV panels using MEG, your best possible hope is only 3x current efficiencies. But again, I'm more interested in our long-term future. Nuclear (fission and fusion) have much more unbounded potential than wind and solar.
Back to cost, the numbers in the article you link are cherry-picked. They rely on deploying solar to "the sunniest regions in the world" to get that performance. Most of the world is not the sunniest, unfortunately. Beyond that, the corn fields and insane amounts of empty space you mention are generally not co-located with areas of high power usage, making transmission another factor (which is doubly a factor since PV is such low-voltage that you require significant transformer infrastructure in order to step things up for transmission). So I strongly disagree, land usage is absolutely still an issue. There are also externalities caused by covering huge swathes of land with PV panels.
And it would need to be huge swathes of land, because in case it wasn't clear I would like to see humanity have huge amounts of power at our disposal – significantly more than we are using today. My back of the napkin map is that it would take 50,000 km2 of solar to accommodate current US energy needs. But I'd like to 100x our energy supply. That would require 5m km2, which is half the entire land area of the USA.
And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in. Meanwhile the numbers quoted for nuclear fission reactors are frequently absolutely all in, including the cost of decommissioning the reactor at some indeterminate point in the future and pre-allocating funds for disposal.
tl;dr – your right that solar/wind is already quite cost effective and moving rapidly on its own pace just fine. So if anything needs collective support to me it is nuclear which has potential for the future that solar/wind just lacks.
You should be less skeptical.
With a LCOE difference of 5x there is more than a little wiggle room to price in extra storage and transmission costs and still end up way cheaper.
That is how every kilowatt hour generated with solar and wind, stored with power2gas (the most expensive form of storage) and used on a cold, windless night still ends up being cheaper than nuclear power generated on a sunny, windy day.
Nuclear power survives exclusively because of its relationship with the military industrial complex. Thats why it gets deluged with lavish subsidies, that's most governments only want a few and that's why the governments who build them either have a bomb or want the ability to build one in a hurry (e.g. Iran who joined this club a long time ago or Poland who joined recently).
Transmission costs will require more than "wiggle room" if you are sending power from some cornfield in middle America to Seattle.
Also a big question in my mind is "where can the price go from here". I don't imagine there is a huge amount of room left for optimization of solar, where as with nuclear I think almost everyone agrees that it is about as expensive as it could be. There is infinite room to improve the economies of scale and unit economics of nuclear; not so much for solar.
Offshore wind is more like $70, but also has double the capacity factor, so requires less matching storage.
We've been told for about 3 decades that any day soon microreactors/thorium/fusion will lead to cheaper, safer nuclear power and no doubt for the next 3 decades some people will continue to believe.
To be more concrete: the first chart from this report[1] is showing "Solar PV + Storage—Utility" at $50-130 (mid-range: $90) and "U.S. Nuclear" at $141-220 (mid-range: $180).
I don't think we've had serious capitalized work on micro-reactors for 3 decades, it's a much more recent phenomenon. And China (who is massively outperforming the US in solar deployment) is also deploying Thorium reactors. Kinda strange for them to do that since they're so good at solar and nuclear is such a lost cause, esp since Thorium reactors are generally worse for the military/weapons case (which you claim is the only reason nuclear energy programs exist).
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
I kind of see where you're coming from now. However, I don't particularly care about 100x'ing our future at the moment. For right now, I care about solving the existential risk of climate change - lets get to 1x as carbon free as possible, as quickly as possible. And at present the quickest and cheapest way to do that is solar/wind + battery. Any dollar diverted from solar/etc right now to "go full nuclear" delays our progress against decarbonization.
Once we are out of the danger zone we can talk about our 100x future, and sure build nukes for that if you want, sounds great. Perhaps given 20 years of investment we can make them competitive, like we did for solar.