Grid scale batteries can do more than deal with the intermittency of solar power.

I recall news about the Tesla Megapack in Australia keeping the electric grid stable after a gigawatt scale coal power plant was somehow suddenly taken off the grid. So, consider how batteries could help in keeping electricity flowing should a gigawatt scale nuclear power plant have an unplanned shutdown, it's not like the electrons behave any different if they come from a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant.

If there's a need for grid scale electric storage then nuclear fission allows for energy storage at lower cost than batteries, and possibly lower cost than pumped hydro storage. Nuclear fission is uniquely suited for thermal energy storage since they can produce temperatures higher than concentrated solar thermal, thermodynamics tell us the higher the temperature in the "thermal battery" the better.

A nuclear power plant with thermal energy storage allows for ramping down power and diverting that heat into storage for using when solar power fades with clouds and nightfall. Thermal energy storage could be little more than a tank on a molten salt coolant loop. Because thermal energy storage is so simple the cost of construction and operation could be the cheapest option for grid scale storage. If batteries prove to be lower cost than thermal energy storage then a nuclear power plant can use batteries instead.

If we are going to be truthful with ourselves about the cost of energy then we should not ignore how batteries could be paired up with more than just solar.

Canada figured out how to build gigawatt scale CANDU nuclear reactors without large steel castings. If getting large steel cast parts is an issue for Americans then Americans could work out a deal with Canada, or develop similar reactors independently. That's assuming we'd want to continue building gigawatt scale reactors. Right now there's a Department of Energy contest of sorts to see who has the best small modular reactors. The winners of this competition would likely need a few years yet to get from these first-of-a-kind demonstration reactors to mass production, which means they can avoid any issues over sourcing large steel castings.

There's more to cost reduction with scale than keep building gigawatt scale reactors. SMRs can be designed to scale with quantity, and that's the sales pitch being used to find utilities willing to fund nuclear power plants.

I am continually baffled on how those opposed to nuclear power keep bringing up problems that have been solved decades ago.

That might be a problem right now but certainly solvable in something like five years. When I was attending university for an electrical engineering degree and planning out which courses to take for the next semester I discovered that the professor for one of the fluid dynamic classes had a degree in nuclear engineering. That made me wonder how many other professors teaching at American universities were nuclear engineers. There's few universities in the USA offering degrees in nuclear engineering, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a shortage of professors willing and able to teach nuclear engineering courses.

If universities see demand for nuclear engineers from both students and the energy industry then they can develop a nuclear engineering program. A nuclear power plant will need people trained in nuclear engineering but only a handful of them as there's plenty going on at nuclear power plants that will not require knowing anything related to nuclear fission. There's clearly enough nuclear engineers for the current demand, because if there were not then I would not see any university with professors trained in nuclear engineering teaching courses ion how to build windmills, they would instead be teaching at a university with a nuclear engineering program, or they'd be applying their expertise designing or operating nuclear power plants.

As it is now it takes about eight years to build a nuclear power plant from breaking ground to producing electricity. This gives the nuclear power industry time to avoid a future shortage of nuclear engineers. The nuclear power industry can, and almost certainly will, do what they can to speed the process along. While attending university I learned of scholarships from John Deere to get more agricultural engineers. If I had learned of this scholarship earlier then I would have switched to agricultural engineering to see my costs to attend university lowered. Much like that nuclear engineer teaching students how to build windmills the degree doesn't lock people into a narrow field of employment options. If I studied agricultural engineering at university I could find work programming binary load lifters by applying what I learned at university about moisture vaporators. The companies building nuclear power plants today can offer scholarships in nuclear engineering just like how John Deere offered scholarships for agricultural engineers.

I'd guess the authors of the fine article believed that the age of the power plant wasn't important enough to include. There are plenty of details not in the article since the authors of the article will have a maximum word count from their editors, this is so the readers are not given trivial details that would bore and/or confuse the reader. The editors and reporters will have a point they want to get across, the point I got from the article is that there's a growing demand for electricity which has forced people to reconsider the viability of nuclear fission as a source of electricity. If the reader wishes to learn that detail they can easily find that with a web search using the same computer used to read the article.

I'll save you from the trouble of searching this yourself, construction started in 1970 and the reactor commissioned in 1975 which would make this reactor about 50 years old.

That was in the article. The plant had been damaged by a powerful wind storm, as seen only in a once in a lifetime level of power. The reactor didn't see any damage, the damage was to property around the reactor that turns the reactor heat into electricity and sends that electricity to the local rural electric cooperative. At the time immediately after the storm the plant could not raise the money needed to repair it, while also paying for the refueling and maintenance that was in progress then. Minds were changed on restarting the reactor because of rising natural gas costs.

Just like I commented above there's only so much detail that can be put in a news article while also keeping the word count to something that can be easily processed by the intended audience.

Every nuclear power plant is required to show the NRC they have funds set aside for decommissioning before a license to operate is granted. In the end all Americans are contributing to this fund by electricity fees, taxes, and likely more. It appears you believe that there's better options than nuclear fission for producing electricity. I expect that the people working on restarting DAEC did the math on costs versus benefits and found restarting DAEC was their best option. I'm quite certain that these people know more about the costs and income than you do.

Why should anyone be all that concerned about how long the decommissioning will take? There's all kinds of infrastructure projects that take a similarly long time to complete, why should I think any different about a nuclear power plant?

What you've written doesn't mesh with nuclear power. It appears to me that you are simply ignorant about nuclear power and can't be bothered to do the slightest to educate your self. You clearly have a computer and internet, if you didn't then you'd not be posting comments to Slashdot, which allows you to find answers to your questions in only a few minutes. I'm reminded of a comment that's been attributed to Mark Twain, those who don't read will remain as ignorant as those that can't read.

There's two events that stick out in my mind that demonstrate to me how opinions are changing on nuclear fission for energy. The first event was seeing Andrew Yang advocated for nuclear power in his campaign for POTUS. If Yang believed Democrats would not support nuclear power then he'd not likely run as a Democrat. The national Democrat party platform included support for nuclear power shortly after Yang dropped out of the race for the White House, and I'm of the belief that leaders in the party made this shift because Yang was getting popular as a candidate. Yang speaking in favor of nuclear power, and getting plenty of votes in primary elections, likely got Democrat leaders nervous on their chances to win in that race. Yang forced other Democrats to comment on nuclear power, and those that spoke out against it were losing votes to Yang or Republicans.

The second event that tells me public opinions on nuclear power are changing happened in the last week or so, I'm seeing adverts in favor of nuclear power on YouTube. For something like 50 years Democrats were either openly opposed to nuclear power or were trying to pretend that nuclear power doesn't exist. If there's enough money to produce and distribute these adverts then there must be plenty of people willing to fund these adverts.

I'm aware of the distinction between the two words, I was trying to be funny. I set up the joke but then failed in delivering the punch line. I was referencing the "four boxes of liberty", with those boxes being soap, ballot, jury, and ammunition/cartridge/ordnance/whatever. If the local government fails to enact/pass legislation to change behavior, and/or fails in changing behavior by nonviolent means, then this could lead to violent enforcement, where violent enforcement includes handing out ammunition.

Sure, rarely in life is anything absolute.

Define "typical of an RV" for the class. I know people with an RV, and I've done a bit of looking on what an RV takes for power more generally, so I believe I have some idea on what an RV might take for power. If we are to take my brother's RV as something approaching "typical" then we will see two AC units for cooling. This allows for running a single AC unit if there is only a "travel trailer" outlet for power, which provides 120VAC @ 30A, or running both units if there is a 240VAC @ 40A outlet as found at more "up to date" campsites suited for larger camper trailers and RVs. On a warm Midwest summer day like today there could be a near constant running of the AC unit(s) from early afternoon until about midnight when the outdoor temperature gets below 70F. If we assume a cool fall or spring day for camping then there could be electric resistance heaters running constantly through the night and into the mid-morning when the sun starts to warm everything up.

I can understand that during much of the camping season the high power loads will be largely intermittent, such as microwave ovens as well as more intermittent use of heating and cooling, but that is not guaranteed. I don't know how an RV park would calculate loads to determine main service size but this still means that a BEV with a portable L2 charge cable is no worse than an RV during cool or warm weather.

If the choice is to spend $500 (the highway robbery DCFC fees such as in TFA plus fees for a motel room for the night) or to sleep in the car for the night during mild weather at a campsite for $25 then I'll choose sleeping in my car. If there is severe weather to the point sleeping in my car would not be safe, some hurry to get where I'm going, or some other unusual need, then I'll eat the $500. I won't like paying out $500, would likely dispute the fees as soon as possible as shown in TFA, but if I had to eat that then I'd consider it a once in a lifetime case of bad luck as well as a learning experience to better plan my travels in the future.

That's great but TFA is about a gentleman traveling through the Midwest USA, on what I assume to be a summer vacation, being left with what appeared to be limited options for recharging the BEV he rented. There's a lot of missing details on the situation so we'll have to speculate. If a motel with free EV charging was within the range left on the battery was available then I would expect the driver to take that option than gamble on the fees from an unfamiliar charger. Then consider the point I made above, there may have been more going on which dictated using the DCFC regardless of the fees than spend the night at a campsite in rural Michigan.

A quick look at DCFC fees tells me that $0.40/kWh is about as low as anyone can find in the USA. For a 65 kWh battery like in the Chevy Bolt that comes to about $25 for a full charge. Consider DCFC fees that would be from average to high and it might be double that, perhaps even triple or quadruple. A quick look at some local campsites and I see overnight fees for a spot with electricity being between $25 and $50. Maybe campsites cost more where you are but I'd expect most Midwest campsite fees would be in that $25 to $50 range. It's been a while since I rented a campsite but I doubt there's much difference in the fees over that time and over the general Midwest area, feel free to prove me wrong. Remember that we are talking about people traveling through rural USA, there may not be a Tesla Supercharger on the path from A to B.

I agree that Tesla appears to offer the best option for EV charging, regardless of which make of BEV being discussed, but Tesla chargers aren't always an option. I point to campsites as an option to recharge as (at least in my experience) fees are posted clearly, they will offer a safe place to rest for a few hours to overnight if necessary, will have toilets (though perhaps not the most modern and clean), and likely other amenities to make the stop at least relatively comfortable and likely more comfortable than the typical charging station which offers little more than a slab of asphalt baking in the summer sun. Assuming the BEV driver is not in a hurry, or lacking better options, then $50 for a few hours at a campsite to recharge (literally and figuratively) isn't that bad of an option. What's the better option here? A $200 tow to the next town with a Tesla Supercharger? Or a motel with free overnight EV charging?

The larger point is to keep an open mind on EV charge options when traveling through unfamiliar territory and/or sparsely populated areas like the Midwest USA. Instead of only looking for DCFC on an app consider also campsites, motels that have L2 chargers, truck stops that might not be listed on most EV charging networks, and so on. I've seen comments on Slashdot on how some hospitals and churches have EV chargers that are either free or low cost, they may not be DCFC but expect to at least have a safe place to rest while waiting to charge.

Like most local shops that treat their patrons like shit they made the local news for their actions. This often leads to corrections to this behavior in short order. The shop can change their behavior in response to locals being less likely to visit their shops (and therefore impact income) or the local government will pass some ordnance (or is it "ordinance"?) to more forcefully adjust their behavior.

EVs are still a new enough phenomenon that NACS as a standard charging port is only two years old (or something, it's close enough), so new that we might still be seeing CCS or whatever on new EVs for another two years. The "piece of shit" dealers with sky high fees on charging aren't likely to get away with this highway robbery for much longer. People will learn which dealers are pieces of shit, EV charger apps will learn to post fees as well as potentially just refuse to list charging sites that rob EV drivers, and laws will be passed to force fees charged to be posted prominently like we see now with filling stations.

I'm disappointed that anyone believes they can get away with this kind of robbery, but I'm also encouraged that this is making the news which will discourage this robbery in the future.

I've had generally pleasant experiences with local auto dealers so I've not been trained to believe that dealerships rip people off like I'll hear others express such happening to them. Again, I expect this to be self correcting, especially now that so many drivers will have a smartphone that can give rapidly updated information on anyone that could try to rob them with shady business tactics.

Oh, and a note to those looking to avoid high EV charging fees:
A tip I picked up is that it's cheap to charge up an EV at campsites for those thinking ahead to pack a portable charge cable, a cable that can be had for something like $100 from all kinds of shops be they online or brick and mortar. From experience a campsite will offer as much as a 240 VAC @ 40A outlet for "shore power", or at least some kind of electrical outlet, and charge something like $25 for the night regardless of how much electricity is consumed. You don't have to stay the night, presumably sleeping in your car, but you can if that means charging up cheap while spending the night in a safe place to sleep. Nearly every campsite will have toilets, showers, and WiFi for campers to use. The nicer campsites could also have a swimming pool, laundromat, perhaps a little convenience shop to pick up basic food items and/or toiletries, maybe a playground or hiking trails to get some exercise and/or distract any children traveling with you for a bit. My point is that by thinking outside the box on places to charge there are options to save money on EV charging, or at least having a more pleasant stop than the typical roadside charging spot that is lacking the most basic of comforts for the stop.

The question was asked in the fine article of why post the charger as available to the general public if the owners were doing everything possible to discourage the public from using it. I can make a couple guesses, including the guess in the fine article that the owners thought they might be able to get away with the high fees if anyone was desperate enough to actually use the charger they installed for the purpose of charging the EVs they were offering for sale.

Another reason I can speculate could be incentivizing this behavior is that there is (or was at the time of installation) some kind of government incentive for posting the charger as publicly available, such as some provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that had considerable incentives for promoting more EV sales. Regardless of the cause I expect this to be a self correcting issue. If this isn't fixed with legislation, such as marking the fees in ways clearly visible like current rules on refilling stations, then it will be fixed with competition on lower fess and with charger locator apps indicating what fees to expect at each location.

Even though I live in the relatively sparsely populated Midwest USA I'd feel confident I could get to where I need to go while also avoiding exorbitant fees on public chargers. When growing up on the family dairy farm we were about 15 miles from two small towns that offered most every service we'd need, such as dentists, optometrist, hospitals and clinics offering every basic medical service, schools, libraries, groceries, clothing, auto dealerships, restaurants, and more. Airports, "bigger" hospitals, the more niche shopping, etc. would be more like 50 to 100 miles away, something easily done on a single charge with most BEVs available in the last decade or so. To get to a major metro, such as Chicago or the Twin Cities, could be as much as 300 miles for a Midwesterner by my estimations. Such a large city will have many options for public chargers, making exorbitant fees on an EV charger unlikely to stand for long.

I guess where I'm going with this is that I'm as confused as anyone on how EV charging fees like this could exist in 2026. I don't have an EV currently but I'm thinking that my next vehicle will be a PHEV. Articles like this make me nervous to jump into EVs with both feet and look for a BEV. What also makes me nervous about a BEV is the "range anxiety" that comes from even the EV advocates when news like this is brought up. If BEV owners are so anxious about range that they are insistent that every restaurant, movie theater, parking ramp, and even their own workplace, have a place to plug in for charging, then why would I want a BEV? This leads me to believe that I could be left calling for a tow, or left paying sky high fees at a public EV charger, because my BEV lacks the single charge range to get me to work, shopping, religious services, places of education, or whatever.

If EV advocates want to see more people buy or rent BEVs then I suggest doing two things. First is to quit with the insistence that EV chargers be available at every parking spot, that only feeds the "range anxiety" that should have been left to history by now. Point out how most daily driving is within 100 miles of where people call home, and even an abused cheap used BEV will make up for those miles on a single overnight charge from a common 120 VAC outlet. Second, do some common sense advocacy with those providing the charging and other services, or act on this yourself by putting your own money into getting chargers installed. I believe that advocating for more legislation, such as tax incentives and subsidies, are often counterproductive. If you are calling for more laws on incentivizing BEV sales then that it likely to feed into public resistance as it justifies their unfounded "range anxiety", feeds into fears of government overreach, and more that will only get people to dig in their heels and hold tight to their dinosaur burners.

I'm wondering if EV advocates have become their own worst enemy.

The RBMK from 1980s Chernobyl is hardly a "modern" reactor. That's from ancient history. Even the RBMK reactors that were operating in the 1990s are hardly like those operating in the 1980s, after the Chernobyl incident the remaining RBMK reactors were decommissioned or updated with new safety systems.

Does anyone claim that a Tesla car could explode because of reports of exploding Fords and Chevys from decades ago? Does anyone claim that an electric car can't go more than 80 miles on a charge because that's all the GM EV1 could do? While I know someone will want to point this out as yet another bad car analogy but given the huge gains in safety, efficiency, and more in cars in only 30 years, and compare that to gains in nuclear power technology over the same time there's many parallels.

It's mind boggling that you believe a 40 year old meltdown in the USSR is somehow relevant to nuclear power safety in the USA today.

Who is listening to this BS any more? What makes anyone believe that the meltdown at Chernobyl is any kind of argument against building next generation nuclear power today?

I'm seeing huge shifts in the public attitude on nuclear fission power in the last decade or so, with perhaps the most notable shift around about 2020 when Andrew Yang was advocating for new nuclear power plants during his campaign for POTUS in 2019/2020. Yang obviously didn't win the election but he did force Democrats running against him to comment on the issue. Those outright opposed to nuclear power dropped out first. Those that supported nuclear power hung on a bit longer. The last to hold out were those that offered stupid "split the baby" options like keeping old nuclear power plants running but not building any new plants.

It's thinking like that that created the fear of nuclear power from Fukushima. TEPCO had new reactor units 7 & 8 planned at Fukushima to replace the older units 1, 2, & 3, the units that self destructed after being hit with a tsunami. Had those units been closed as originally scheduled, and units 4, 5, & 6 been in a maintenance shutdown as they were at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, then we could have expected units 7 & 8 to keep operating through the event as they were designed to hold up to such an event. People opposed to nuclear power like @phantomfive are creating the safety problems in nuclear power that scare them so much.

We aren't going to close down nuclear power in the USA any time soon because it produces nearly 20%, or about 100 GW, of the electricity in the USA and there's no quick and easy path to replacing that. KEPCO built about 5.5 GW of new nuclear power capacity in UAE over about 12 years, not including the planning time before that. What would it take for renewable energy construction companie to produce similar amounts of electrical output in the same time period?

What's your plan for generating electricity, or energy more generally, for the future? More of the same with wind and solar? I see more nuclear fission power in our future, or more energy shortages and the rising energy costs that come with those shortages.

That's not relevant unless the pollution and other problems of other options are also considered. Someone could give some kind of volume, mass, or cost for mitigation on the waste and pollution produced from nuclear power but that would be meaningless. We'd have to consider how much of this downside is produced when compared to upside (such as the watt-hours or dollar value of energy produced) then compare that to other options like solar, wind, hydro, or simply doing without this energy.

Most any thing can "potentially" happen. What we have now is over 50 years of experience with 2nd generation nuclear power, something like 30 years of experience with 3rd generation nuclear power, which means we can apply that experience to produce 4th generation and "3-1/2" generation nuclear power for even greater safety, efficiency, and reduced costs.

I watched some YouTube videos in the last week that laid out how new rules from the US NRC should reduce costs of future nuclear power beyond just that achieved with new technology, this is because a large part of nuclear power costs are from regulation than that from materials and labor. Current rules on nuclear safety are from a time when there were very high standards on safety because the real risks of nuclear power were not understood as well as they are now. We benefit from this somewhat today because the over engineered reactors built at the time can now be expected to run for 80, 100, or possibly more years with exceptional safety margins remaining. Spreading out the cost of construction over this amount of time means we are likely to enjoy very low energy costs in the future, we need only use the new proposed rules based on evidence and science than the old rules based on speculation and superstition.

It's been clear to me for some time that the majority of people that frequent Slashdot are deeply opposed to new nuclear power. They maintain this opposition by believing that future nuclear power will be something like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island. While most people will claim that the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl wee 2nd generation I could make an argument that it was instead a late 1st generation plant. Chernobyl lacked the containment dome that is nearly the definition of 2nd generation. The RBMK, as designed at the time, was a "dual use" reactor built with the intent for producing weapon grade plutonium than produce power, and such dual use ability was a defining feature of 1st generation reactors. The failed reactors at TMI and Fukushima were 2nd generation reactors built at about the same time as the RBMK at Chernobyl and so lacked so many safety features that would have come later on, such as a number of passive systems that when combined would make what we consider 3rd generation. Nobody has built a 2nd generation nuclear power plant for some time. We've yet to see a 3rd generation power plant produce anything close to the kind of safety issues that 2nd generation has produced. Anything new would be built to the higher safety standards of 3-1/2 or 4th generation nuclear power.

No currently operating civilian nuclear power reactor is capable of a "China Syndrome" as posed in popular culture, or a rapid steam explosion as seen in the RBMK. Nobody would dare build such a reactor today since no such design would be licensed, or if somehow some people could build a reactor without some kind of government oversight they'd not be built simply because that puts the reactor at risk of self destruction when well documented designs that avoid these risks can be built with no real added costs in construction. We know how to build better reactors now, fears of repeats of events from 40 years ago are unfounded. Fear of nuclear power today would be like fear of buying a new Tesla car because of reports of gasoline explosions from Ford cars and Chevy trucks from decades ago. Because of new technology, and a better understanding of radiation safety, we need new rules. It appears we are finally getting new rules, and from that I expect lower costs and higher safety. It's not like nuclear power was "unsafe" before, it is merely that we better understand the risks and so can provide higher safety with lower costs because we are putting our money and efforts into places where it counts than waste it on places where it does not.

Who is suggesting any nation get 100% of their electricity from nuclear? I certainly made no such suggestion.

I've seen similar claims before, I have my doubts on the practicality of running a national electrical grid with that level of renewable energy sources on the grid. The reason I have doubts is those that make a counter claim would show their work while those that argue for all renewable have a more "trust me, bro" attitude on the calculations. Another reason to have doubts is the recent Iberian power outage, an outage that impacted a lot of people with an over reliance on renewable energy as the primary suspect as the cause. Certainly there was a human factor in this, likely people that wanted "bragging rights" on reaching some kind of record on renewable energy on the grid. The human factor could instead be improper training and/or protocols on managing the grid that were lacking in some way.

If it were that simple to run a grid on 90+% renewable energy then I would expect some nation would have made it work by now. Wind and solar power isn't new, it's not like there wasn't time in the last 50 years or so to make that happen. I'm picking 50 years somewhat arbitrarily, this is about the time when concern over pollution and such from energy really got going as well as about when solar PV was something that was low cost enough that it found uses beyond powering satellites in orbit. This is also about the time that Three Mile Island had a meltdown and created opposition to nuclear power among the general public.

50 years have gone by and nobody has made it work. Those that made the most effort on an all renewable grid have seen rising energy costs and blackouts.

It's not just oil and natural gas impacted by blocking off trade bottle necks like Hormuz. Oil and gas can't get out while also nothing can get in. Well, it would appear that there is allowances for food and medicine to get in as the war is with the leadership in Iran than the innocent citizens of Iran. Which gets to the next point...

If China does something stupid that could cause nations in the region to blockage ships carrying solar PV panels and battery-electric vehicles then there could be all kinds of issues getting energy in any form. France decided long ago to build a large fleet of nuclear power plants as they have very little in fossil fuels, not much in hydro, and so on. They needed to reach some level of energy independence or see their national wealth evaporate from having to export cash for energy imports. It's the same motivations driving China to build dozens of nuclear power plants at a time.

There's only so far that buying solar PV, electric cars, and such can go in reaching energy independence. It would be impractical to run a nation on only wind, water, sun, and geothermal. Nuclear power will have to be included as part of the mix of energy sources, it is a need to have technology than a nice to have technology. One hurdle to avoid fossil fuels and nuclear fission is like France where they lack the geography, geology, climate, and so on to rely only on renewable energy sources.

I expect to see large reductions in CO2 emissions as something of a happy accident while nations wake up to the need to reach a point were disruptions in trade won't leave them in the cold and dark. Nuclear fission, onshore wind, hydro, and maybe also geothermal, are all options that have proved to be competitive on price with fossil fuels. I'd expect someone to reply on the costs of nuclear power not being competitive if I didn't point out what should be obvious, as the global trade in fossil fuels are restricted due to blockades the price will keep rising until it reaches whatever cost people believe nuclear power costs. We can plot out the costs of fossil fuels to nuclear fission over time on a graph as blockades impede trade in fossil fuels, when those two lines meet then it would be economic suicide to not build nuclear power plants.

As nations build nuclear power plants to replace electricity from fossil fuels their CO2 emissions will go down. As nations gain experience in building nuclear power plants the costs for nuclear power will go down. Concern on CO2 emissions is a luxury, something that a nation will only look to addressing once more important issues have been dealt with. The same goes for opposition to nuclear power, that's a luxury that can only be maintained so long as energy costs are tolerable.

To those that believe nuclear power plants take "too long" (in scare quotes because that is subjective) I can make two points on that. First is that we've seen nuclear power plants go from planning to putting electricity on the grid in under four years, which is near parity on the build time for large solar and wind projects. Second, if there wasn't the irrational fear of nuclear power then we could have plausibly seen many nations able to be relatively unconcerned about fossil fuel prices, even if we assume a nuclear power plant takes more than a decade before it puts power on the grid. The need for nations to maintain some level of energy independence isn't new, what is new is that the fears of restrictions on the global energy trade has become real.

Those trucks do not claim to have a 500 mile range on a single charge like the Tesla Semi. If the Volvo examples given could get 500 miles on a charge while retaining a cab-over design then you would have a point. They claim 700 km, or about 435 miles. That might be only a 15% difference but I have a suspicion that it would be enough to force a significant redesign of the truck to get to 500 miles, to the point that it could no longer retain the cab-over format as it is currently understood/defined.

Maybe we could see some new battery chemistry that can allow for all kinds of new capabilities but this will come at a cost, and not necessarily a monetary cost. In the search for batteries with increasing energy density we are seeing batteries that are made in ways that make them increasingly more delicate, and should there be damage then they can burn in ways that are difficult to control. This has lead toward a trend in battery-electric vehicles to use battery chemistry and construction that give up energy density so as to be more durable, use less expensive materials, and address other concerns. It is because of these trends I'm suspicious of battery-electric long haul trucks seeing success in wide adoption.

I recently saw a video on YouTube singing the praises on gains being made in "solar fuel" technology. This is the same fuel synthesis technology that has existed for something like a century now but this time the heat and electricity for producing diesel fuel, jet fuel, or whatever, comes from sunlight. Is the goal to move cargo by battery power? Or move cargo in a manner that doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere? Solar fuels will allow using the same diesel trucks we have now but with carbon neutral fuel than fossil fuel.

I believe we should be looking at new fuels than new trucks. Solve the fuel problem and we make all existing vehicles carbon neutral than set ourselves up for trying to replace what took us a century to build in logistics and infrastructure. Change the fuel and we could reach carbon neutral in a decade or two. Changing to all battery-electric vehicles will likely take more than a century. If I were to make a bet on which comes first then I know where I'd put my money.

That worked well for the time because routes the trucks took were short so the range requirements were minimal. Then is that with deliveries being in the early mornings, while people were still asleep and wanting milk with their breakfast, being quiet was important. The load needing to be carried was relatively small and light and so no real concern on the battery-electric milk truck being so big that navigating tight corners in residential areas could be a problem, or so heavy that there could be a concern on breaking the pavement.

Does any of this apply for the Tesla Semi? A Class 8 vehicle? These are trucks meant to haul 20+ tons of cargo over hundreds of miles. These trucks are not meant for tight confines seen in residential areas but the wide open highways, no need for the shorter cab-over designs common in Europe. It might be difficult to make a practical cab-over battery electric Class 8 truck given the volume the battery required for the range and power demanded of the vehicle.

Isn't there a rule that allows electric trucks to exceed the normal weight limits for Class 8 trucks? I recall it is about an extra 2000 pounds over the limit for a diesel truck. I expect this was necessary or the Tesla Semi would be dead on arrival. Without that allowance for extra battery weight then the people operating the trucks would have to make up for it by reducing the mass of the cargo carried. Since trucking runs on moving cargo mass over miles that would make a dent in profits that few companies and owner-operators would tolerate.

I have my doubts that any Class 8 battery-electric truck will prove successful. Had this been something like a Ford Transit or GMC Topkick, Class 6 vehicles at most, then I would have higher expectations for success. These are trucks that would do the kind of work that the old milk delivery trucks would do, as in short hauls with "light" loads (at least "light" when compared to Class 8) and long periods of being idle for a recharge. Short haul semi trucks are certainly a thing but these are also the cab-over trucks that tend to be popular in Europe because these are the kinds of trucks that make that "last mile" delivery to grocery stores and such, and so need to be able to navigate in tighter spaces. The size of the battery, as I mentioned before, is certainly incompatible with this shorter cab design.

The United States Postal Service tried to experiment with battery electric delivery trucks. The problem they ran into was getting enough electrical capacity to the overnight parking lots to charge all the trucks. Issues like that could pose problems for wide adoption of the Tesla Semi and similar vehicles.

Where? I'm guessing here that we'd start with new reactors at existing nuclear power plants. Then we'd likely see old fossil fuel plants get converted to nuclear, these are places with existing wires, rail lines, water, and so on to minimize cost for new nuclear capacity.

Similarly I expect new nuclear reactors built on land owned by hydroelectric operators, there's typically a lot of land around the dams that's been set aside for matters of facility security, future expansion, and so on that could accommodate a nuclear reactor. Also, like with conversion of fossil fuel plants to nuclear, a hydroelectric dam will have things like wires, water (a lot of water), rail, and so on already in place to make new construction almost trivial.

We can build a lot of new nuclear power capacity at existing sites before we need to worry about finding new places to build. Before we run out of existing power plants to use for land we'd likely start looking to existing government land with lots of space and existing security perimeters, such as military bases, airports, national labs, universities, and maybe little bits carved off of nature reserves and national parks. I expect people will protest such ideas but the alternatives would be solar panels and windmills that take up far more land for the same output as a much smaller nuclear reactor. It's not like windmills and solar panels are free from issues. Windmills kill large and rare birds, as well as create issues with radar used for tracking aircraft and weather. Solar panels also kill birds, and create problems for aircraft with the reflections that come off them. Maybe we could see nuclear power plants built on barges and floated to ports near population centers, Russia is experimenting with this idea. Floating power plants can solve a lot of issues surrounding construction and siting.

At what rate? In the USA? Well, slowly at first then likely exceeding the peak rate reached in the 1970s two or four times over. In the 1970s the USA was putting 1 GW on the grid of new nuclear power every month, so I'd expect we could reach 1 GW per week in the USA within a decade or two. Given that we are currently seeing about 60 GW of new electrical generating capacity per year added to the grid it shouldn't be too big of a reach to see a decent sized chunk of that be nuclear if the USA were committed to lowering CO2 emissions while improving reliability of electrical generation. The global build rate is anyone's guess, there's a lot of variables to consider.

I see at least two issues with bringing those up as examples to oppose new nuclear power. The first issue is that they are first-of-a-kind and in any "first" there will be a lot of lessons to be learned. As we gain experience on construction costs should come down. As the technology develops with lessons learned costs should come down. As regulators learn more about what keeps nuclear power safe we should be able to reduce regulatory costs. A related issue to this is that you picked two outliers among dozens of nuclear power plants. Why not look at average costs? Or look for a couple successes to go with the failures to give a range on what to expect?

Second, the reason we are seeing a renewed interest in nuclear power is because costs for all other energy sources are going up. We are currently seeing a number of trade wars driving up energy costs globally, as well as some shooting wars that are driving up demand while driving down production. It's not too much of a leap to believe that we can see current trends in rising energy get extrapolated out to where $50 billion for a new 3-ish GW nuclear power plant look like a bargain.

If you want to argue against nuclear power because of the costs then it might be a wise to do it somewhere other than the comment section on a news article on how nuclear power costs are coming down. We are seeing more people consider nuclear power because cost on nuclear power are coming down and the costs of alternatives are going up. At some point those two lines on the graph will cross and then so much opposition to new nuclear power will fall.

A quick look at Wikipedia tells me that construction started on Chernobyl in 1972, and construction on Fukushima started in 1967. Fukushima is hardly the more modern power plant. We could look deeper into which is "newer", such as which had the engineering plans drawn first or which came into operation first, but we'd still end up with them being contemporary designs for the most part. I'd argue that the failures in engineering were such that they were so rare and random that it simply took longer for the flaws in Fukushima to manifest. Both designs were almost certain to fail before their planned operational life, it's just that we had to see dozens of both designs built and many decades to pass before those failures became obvious.

What bothers me the most is that the meltdowns at Fukushima could have been avoided if the oldest reactors were shutdown as planned in March of 2011 than allowed to be operating in May when the tsunami hit. The reactors were still operating because of delays in construction of new reactors over lawsuits and protests on new nuclear reactors, reactors built to higher standards on quake tolerances and flooding hazards. This could have been avoided if people weren't protesting, or the government had enough of a spine to keep new construction on schedule in spite of the protests.

If nuclear power safety concerns you then get out of the way of new nuclear power construction. If we can't build new nuclear power plants then our other options are energy scarcity, or keeping old and unsafe reactors operating until they blow up in our faces or some other better option comes along. If you believe better options already exist, such as wind and solar power, then we'd have already shutdown these old reactors. Your protests created this problem, and people died from it. Your efforts to "save the planet" has resulted in real and actual people ending up dead.

This is also a problem that is a creation of protests. Stop getting in the way of solutions and we'd have this solved already. One example of this is a proposed design for a pressurized heavy water reactor that can "eat" the waste from current nuclear power reactors. There will still be some waste materials from these reactors but it will be of shorter life isotopes, and isotopes that are known to be useful for industry and medicine and so not exactly "waste" that needs to be disposed of at considerable expense. Those processing the waste could sell off the valued isotopes to pay for the disposal of what they cannot use.

Stop getting in the way of new nuclear power plants and we'd have these problems solved already.

Right, we can't allow new nuclear power plants being built because that could mean people investing in solar power could see their investments tank.

Electricity from nuclear fission is really only a threat to solar power. Fossil fuels don't see nuclear power as a threat because most of their money is in liquid fuels and chemicals, until we figure out how make airplanes fly over oceans on battery power there's going to be demand for fossil fuels. Wind and hydro don't fear nuclear power because there's little reason to expect nuclear power to be lower cost and/or scale as well as they can. Solar power has a very powerful lobby, to the point that they make more money from government subsidy than they do from actual useful energy.

So much of what is holding nuclear power back is FUD. 40 years of rising energy costs is making people reconsider nuclear power as an option. So much of what anti-nuclear people complain about are problems they constructed by regulation and protests. As people learn this the barriers to new nuclear power will fall away. We will get more nuclear power plants, you'll just have to deal with that.