U.S. Approves $1.5 Billion Loan to Restart Michigan Nuclear Plant

I feel like people are looking at renewables the wrong way. a distributed grid makes sense. the same goes for grid-scale storage. when I looked at it last, it wasn't too much to get around ~week's storage for myself. Some solar panels on the roof, some storage tucked into a utlity closet, in every house, you have a distributed grid.

Supplement it with other renewables like wind, tidal and hydro; maybe pay people to store stuff, too, like they do with power going into the grid.

But yea, Nuclear is a reliable grid scale system.

when I looked at it last, it wasn’t too much to get around ~week’s storage for myself. Some solar panels on the roof, some storage tucked into a utlity closet, in every house, you have a distributed grid.
In the USA you're looking at a price tag probably close to $150k+ for one family's worth for total grid independence unless you're willing to restrict which geography you live in or make pretty drastic lifestyle reductions. That week's worth of storage batteries is going to set you back a lot.
- You must be talking about more than just energy. Solar panels and a $10k battery don't cost that much.
Putting solar panels and a battery in every house is ok if everyone owns an actual house, has enough space for a battery and gets enough sunlight but it wouldn’t be possible in most cities where hundreds of people share a single roof that doesn’t have the space for all the panels required.
In some countries the houses wouldn’t be big enough to install batteries without taking up valuable living space, most terraced houses in the uk couldn’t fit a power bank inside without filling an entire room’s usable space.
You also have to deal with the fact that many grids aren’t built to deal with the power fluctuation that comes from each house providing power, my university has a solar and wind farm that has to be shut down sometimes because the nearby city can’t handle all the power it produces in the summer and that’s from a centralised source.
- Powergrids need to be upgraded anyway, simply because of EVs and heat pumps. All the energy that was formerly distributed via gas stations and pipes now has to be pushed through the grid.
  Apart from that, local storage is actually pretty great for handling fluctuations, since it's essentially a smoothing capacitor.
  Cities are a problem, but that's what large scale production like wind is for. Obviously, large storage facilities are also needed, but hydro power, hydrogen and a few local batteries could easily supplement the grid.
- All true, but if you slap panels on every rooftop you can- every square foot of rooftop panel is one less square foot of dedicated land needed for solar farms.
  Most current homes could easily accommodate something (including a storage shack tucked against the house.)
  The grid is an issue that’s going to have to get fixed anyway; we’re going away from mega-plants that produce power for entire states no matter anyhow.
  Also we need to be distributed for climate resilience.
- Well that is just silly instead of turning it off they should just mine some crypto.
The time for repositioning our renewables stance and grid was the 70s-00s. Now, it's renewables at any cost, since a considerable portion of the country didn't feel like climate change was a big deal until it was upon us.
Priority #1 is now reducing our carbon output by any means necessary, and we are still gonna get hit decently by climate change even if we meet our commitments (assuming 100% democratic wins/no undoing of policy through 2050)
- Oh hey it's my favorite big energy talking point, "it's too late to decentralize the grid and rob us of our monopoly!"
  We can do both, both is the fastest option. Both is the best way to deal with the inevitable effects of climate change.
  I don't care if there's a nice shiny nuclear plant a state over if the lines have been shredded by massive storms.

This whole thing feels like a giant money pocketing scam. They shouldn't have shut it down in the first place.

People are still afraid of nuclear power. It doesn't matter that is a reliable green energy source that will last longer than we'll ever need it to. It doesn't matter that often the alternative is fossil fuels. Politicians don't even want to touch this N word.
Radiation is scary, so plants are getting shut down all the time. Huge plants that were 60 year investments, that took 10 years to build, and are currently working great are being shut down right and left, guaranteeing that they'll never make back the massive investment.
Shortsightedness is a huge (and expensive) problem as well as perhaps the most consistent aspect of human civilization.
In other words, this is an example of Hanlon's Razor, it's not a scam, it's just pure, organic, all-natural stupidity.
- I think nuclear energy is the way. I just don't think human civilization is stable or responsible enough to house the waste for the 500k-1 million years for the half life to happen.
  That said, it's still the best way, even with waste being considered.
  I hope our decendants loooove cleaning up messes.

Everybody cheering on nuclear seems to forget one big problem associated with it ... nuclear waste. It's just assumed that people living in remote regions will be fine and dandy having nuclear waste buried in their backyards, possibly poisoning their groundwater. Nevermind the transportation of said waste through more heavily populated areas which would lead to at least one catastrophic accident.

Imo the cost of that is far more important than what it costs to build in the first place.

Yes, nuclear waste is a problem. One we'll need to solve in the next few decades. Those few decades will buy us time to get off of fossil fuels and onto more permanent renewable solutions though.
In* the short term, I'd much rather see more nuclear plants opening up, even with the long term drawbacks around waste storage, rather than more gas or coal plants. It's the lesser of the two evils by a long shot.
- That’s what they said in the 1970s. We still haven’t solved the problem fifty years later.
- "In the short term"
  The main problem is that all this theory doesn't track with reality.
  The mean construction time for nuclear reactors worldwide is 9.4 years and the US seemingly only finished one reactor (Watts Bar 2) in the last ten years which took 42.8 years to complete and ended up costing more than 12 billion. Watts Bar 1 was finished after 23 years and two others were abandoned, one by TVA after 47 years.
  Correction: Unit 3 of the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor (Vogtle) was finished in 2023 in only 14 years costing 34 billion, while Unit 4 is still in construction.
  The reason why China was able to build 39 reactors in a short amount of time is because they are using them to increase their nuclear arsenal. Projects like this tend to go faster if a dictatorship wants it to be done no matter the cost, public opinion and safety concerns.
- Beyond replacing fossil fuels plants, nuclear plants can also help power atmospheric decarbonization (with their excess baseband power) as well as desalination plants if close enough to a coast.
  There's a lot of projects that depend on cheap and abundant energy that can further help undo some of the damage from a century of fossil fuels usage.
  While the design lifespan of nuclear plants might be 30-40 years, newer ones are designed for 40-60 years of operation right off the bat.
  So it's a bit of a sticker shock at first but even getting just 40 years of benefits from each plant is huge.
  A big part of the problem is we don't look at these longtime operation periods and we externalize (or just ignore) the CO2 emissions as costs of running cheaper gas and coal power plants.