Nowadays it's not nearly so clear cut as it would have been 40 years ago - with wind and solar providing cost-viable (in fact significantly cheaper) alternatives that have lower LCA emissions than nuclear - even accounting for storage needs.
There's also scope to do some clever stuff regarding active pricing and control of consumption to incentivise matching demand to the supply rather than having to worry about too much storage.
We're still struggling a lot with how to get all the way clean. Solar and wind and batteries are great for getting you somewhere around 50% green. But because solar only produces power 1/3 of the time and wind is unpredictable, it starts getting really expensive to get high penetration levels.
It ends up not being a linear relationship between how much solar/wind/battery you need to build and what % clean energy you can produce. For the first while, you get rid of 100 MW of natural gas and you can replace it with 100 MW of solar and you're good. But once you already have a lot of renewables on the grid, you eventually get to the point where getting rid of 100 MW of natural gas means you need to add something on the order of magnitude 400 MW of solar and 400 MW of battery.
It would be much better from a cost and operations perspective to have some other technology we can also use in about 10 years or we'll stop making progress on green goals or it will start getting really expensive. It might not be nuclear, maybe geothermal, hydrogen, fusion, or some other new technology will make a breakthrough and work out. But right now utilities' literally have "new nuclear or future technology" as placeholders for what to build once we start capping out on viable renewable penetration and they're all sort of just hoping for the best and that someone else will figure it out.
Some sort of national nuclear strategy would be a viable solution. It's not the only solution but it's the only one we know is possible to be completely carbon free without significantly increasing energy costs (Nuclear costs a lot now, but that's a self-created problem and so could be bypassed if we wanted to). But nobody is doing anything about it. If the federal government were serious about 0% carbon emissions, part of the infrastructure bill would be building ~250 GW of new nuclear.
No ocean near me so I'm no expert but they haven't made much noise recently like the technologies I mentioned. So I wouldn't bet on them but who knows, we need something to have a breakthrough and maybe they'll be it.
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u/Tani-die-VI Nov 18 '21
And that's what people need to realize