Comment Re:Doctor Evil 2.0 (Score 1) 287
Living in the world of "should" leads to all sorts of bad decisions. Right now, solar is the fastest and easiest form of green energy to deploy. Last year, the U.S. installed 43 GW of solar power and is projected to install about 40 GW per year through 2030, despite Trump's bad decisions.
SMRs generate up to 300MW. So, to match solar output, we would need to produce roughly 1200+ SMR units per year. Classic nuclear reactors produce a gigawatt, so we would need to build 40ish nuclear reactors per year to match the incremental solar, the yearly increase in solar power.
There is the issue of storage, which is necessary for both solar and nuclear power generation. For solar, it's storing excess production, and for nuclear, it is storing at times of insufficient consumption.
Given that SMR is not here yet and is at least 5 to 10 years away, and that large nuclear power plants take 15 to 20 years to come online, solar has a 400-gigawatt head start, and a better land use footprint, assuming cities started covering parking garages and parking lots with solar panels, and farmers took advantage of the agrivoltaic possibilities of solar farms. When you add in the additional factor that solar farms modify the local ecology in a positive direction (improved biodiversity, better soil moisture retention, and better environment for grazing animals), one could ask why you would want to use a nuclear-powered tea kettle.
There are many storage options, but battery seems to be the most practical/effective system, in part because it can be deployed incrementally and serve as the basis for a distributed grid. Right now, ordinary people can buy a 16-kilowatt-hour battery pack for $1,700. This makes it practical to take advantage of time-of-use tariffs and significantly drop your energy bill. It's even better financially if you can convert a grid-tied solar system to zero export with a pack of that size. I haven't done the math yet, but I suspect that even with a small 3-5 kilowatt-hour battery and a kilowatt solar panel array, combined with time-of-use tariffs, you could also significantly reduce your power bill by importing electricity when it is cheap.