Of course most don’t actually even believe it, that’s just the pitch to get that VC juice. It’s basically fraud all the way down.

Solar panels are incredibly thin and light. There is no reason not to include them.

Nobody gives a flying fuck about campaign finance laws with this supreme court.

LLMs: using statistics to generate reasonable-sounding wrong answers from bad data.

People have a hard-on about nuclear being “baseload” power and renewables being intermittent. Solar/wind plus batteries to add dispatchability is a valid comparison to nuclear if you only want to talk about baseload.

This is due to corporate greed. Solar and wind are the cheapest sources of energy in the history of the world.

Even current lithium-based battery storage is already cheaper than nuclear.

Hydro is often turned on and off as pumped storage. Nuclear never is

Out of those you listed, nuclear is the least flexible in terms of output regulation. PV with batteries is the most flexible.

Yeah the poster above you is wrong. Solar is WAY less than half the price.

Solar plus batteries are already cheaper than nuclear, and only going down. Nuclear has always gotten more expensive over time. For the cost of the most recently completed nuclear plant in the US they could have built 12 times the nameplate capacity worth of solar with 24 hours of battery backup. (A totally unnecessary amount of dispatchability.)

Solar and batteries easily “pay” for their manufacturing carbon emissions within 1-2 years max (as does nuclear). This payback period only goes down as the grid gets greener.

I want everything to be toggle switches. If I could get a keyboard made of 105 classic toggle switches it would be worth the effort to type with it.

oyo

You can build entirely new solar supply chains from mining through manufacturing faster than a single new nuclear plant.

The fact that you are even considering CSP shows you know nothing about the current state of renewables. What’s more likely is you’re parroting or copy-pasting some bullshit talking points from a right wing think tank. Nukes have ALWAYS gotten more expensive. I’m waiting for any production plant SMR, MSR whatever to buck this trend but it hasn’t happened.

The nameplate cost of this plant is $32 per watt. Even at smaller scales, utility-scale solar plants are $1 per watt. Do you know how many grid storage batteries you could buy with the extra $31 per watt? (6 hour storage is around $2.50 per watt or $.40/Wh.) You could build a solar plant 4x the nameplate capacity of the nuke (in order to match the capacity factor), and add 24 hours of storage to make it fully dispatchable, and still have enough money left over to build 2 more of the same thing. This doesn’t even include the fact the nuclear has fuel costs, waste disposal, higher continued operational costs, and unaccounted publicly involuntarily subsidized disaster insurance.