Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things -

Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.

That sentence shows that you really aren't thinking about this as a practical means of power generation. I've found that most fission boosters don't so much like actual nuclear power, but the idea of nuclear power. It appeals to a certain kind of nerd who admires it from a physics and engineering perspective. And while it is cool technically, this tends to blind people to the actual cold realities of fission power.

There's also a lot of conspiratorial thinking among the pro-nuclear crowd. They'll blame nuclear's failures on the superstitious fear of the unwashed ignorant masses or the evil machinations of groups like Greenpeace. Then, at the same time, they'll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear's failure: it's just too fucking expensive.

Well if we had no alternative I would agree with you and I would be okay if we had to subsidize nuclear (which isn't emissions free due to the mining and refining of uranium bye the way). But if a country like France, which has a pretty high rate of acceptance regarding nuclear, can't get it to work, who will? Apart from maybe authoritarian countries. Just think about the amount of plants we have to build to create a significant impact, if hardly any plant has been built in a relative short timeframe. I'd say put money in research yeah but focus on renewable, network, storage and efficiency optimization for now.

If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat

That's an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don't use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.

The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (^238^Pu, usually as PuO~2~), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can't be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (^210^Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can't be extracted.

^90^Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn't used as RTG fuel today.

You don't need lithium. That's just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.

Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn't care if the building houising the batteries weighs 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).

PS: And the materials can also be recycled. Funnily there's always the pro-nuclear argument coming up then you can recycle waste to create new fuel rod (although it's never actually done), yet with battery tech the exact same argument is then ignored.

They're currently bringing sodium batteries to market (as in "the first vendor is selling them right now"). They're bulky but fairly robust IIRC and they don't need lithium.

you know that grid storage does not always mean "a huge battery", you can also just pump water in a higher basin oder push carts up a hill and release the potential energy when you need it...

This is old news now! Here's a link from 5 years ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fossil-fuels-buries-nuclear/

This is from last year: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/

As to uptime, they have the same legal requirements as all utilities.

I was pro nuke until finding out solar plus grid battery was cheaper.

Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.

So it's flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.

Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.

So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and ~~13gw~~ 2gw of production.

This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn't take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.

The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.

For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.

So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that's when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let's sick with 14.

For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW "storage" for 24hrs.

So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.

The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don't think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it's mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.

So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.

And hey, you know what, that's almost got a point. Firstly, I'm in the US, and I'll freely admit that my comment was highly US-normative. However, I believe my comment on government corruption stands for the US case, where there is an insane amount of space that is already partly-developed in random bits of desert.

Now, let's get into your claims against the Netherlands case. Let's do some "basic maths":

1. Unless the IEA is very, VERY wrong, your claim that the Netherlands consumes "2600 petajoule per day" is INSANELY high. Every statistic I can find shows electricity consumption being between 113 [2] and 121 [1] Terawatt-hours per annum. Let's divide that larger value by 365 (assuming uniform seasonal demand), then convert that into joules, and we get 1.19 Petajoules per day. more than a THOUSAND times smaller than your number.
2. Secondly, this "just 1 small country" bit is spurious, since your "small country" is the 33rd-greatest electricity consumer in the world for the 77th highest population [2]
3. The assumption that you must store an entire day's worth of energy demand is ludicrous. Let's be generous and assume that you have to store 50% of the day's energy demand, despite the fact that the off-hours are during the night, when electricity demands fall off.
4. Next, let us point out that we don't need to abandon literally every other method of energy generation. From wind energy to, yes, nuclear, the Netherlands is doing quite well for itself outside of solar. Let's assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let's assume 50%.
5. Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
6. Because I neither want nor need your supposedly-charitable assumptions, let's use the actual numbers from ARES in Nevada:

• Their facility's mass cars total 75000 tons in freedom units, or about 68040000 kg. [3]
• They claim 90+% efficiency round-trip [4], but let's assume that your condescending tone has made the train cars sad, so they're having a bad day, and only run at 80% efficiency, despite the fact that we've known how to convert to and from GPE with insane efficiency ever since Huygens invented the fucking pendulum clock.

7. Now, is this perfect for everywhere? Of course not. Not everywhere has the open space necessary. The ARES site requires a straight shot about 5 miles long, but they managed to find one that, in that distance, drops 2000 feet (~610 m) [5]
8. Now, let's do the math together: 475000000000J / 10m/s^2 / 68040000kg / 80% Efficiency = 880m total elevation needed
9. Thus, unless my math is quite off, we would only need 2 of the little proof-of-concept ARES stations running at 80% efficiency to more than cover the energy storage needs required for your country to completely divest from fossil fuels and go all-in on solar for the remainder of your needs.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/the-netherlands [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption [3] https://aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/ [4] https://aresnorthamerica.com/gravityline/ [5] https://energy.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/energynvgov/content/Programs/4%20-%20ARES.pdf

ETA: rectify a quote ("just 1 small country"), and make it more civil in response to the prior commenter removing some of their more condescending language.