The once unlikely alliance took root in Texas and now reaches right into the White House, where President Trump wants to ban wind energy projects.
The once unlikely alliance took root in Texas and now reaches right into the White House, where President Trump wants to ban wind energy projects.
Look, I hate fossil fuels as much as the next guy, but am missing why this article is pitching nuclear as a bad idea.
As I understand it, the coal and natural gas plants that have been decommissions still have millions of dollars per site of mostly workable infrastructure (in the form of steam pipes, valves, turbines, etc) and Small Modular Reactors really seem a promising tech to make use of that infrastructure. They might be “unproven” (as the article claims), but its my understanding is that its mostly regulations and finding investors that have kept them from being built (since they need to be completely certified as a full nuclear reactor would be, which takes the better part of a decade to do, thus investment has been slow rolling).
The prospect of a small nuclear plant replacing Indian River as a base load provider seems a lot more promising than wind without properly built mass grid storage. I’m sad to see fossil fuels reemerging, but this lumping of nuclear with fossil fuels feels disingenuous.
Am I really missing something in all this?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/28/after-a-career-as-an-environment-writer-heres-what-i-have-learned
There arn’t really a lot of fossile fuel plants that are decomissioned before the end of their lifespan, so this is more of an hypothetical solution for maybe sometimes in the future, all the while we continue burning fossile fuels. So basically it is an distraction from doing what is needed now.
And once a fossile fuel plant reaches the end of its lifespan the only usable things that are still there and can be reused is the electricity network connection. So those sites are good locations for cheap grid level battery storage (and maybe novel geothermal), but not small nuclear reactors that still need turbines and cooling towers etc.
Research has found you cannot control nuclear proliferation with half measures.
If you allow nuclear work, there will be accidents and fake “accidents.” It will get increasingly difficult to keep nuclear weapons impossible to make at scale for random jihadists, and that’s maybe not even as big of a problem as constantly increasing accidents.
Right now the “orphan source” category of accidents already happens way too many times a year. That’s where nuclear material ends up “lost” in unknown locations, just out in the world somewhere, and people get killed by randomly finding these sometimes (so far mainly in eastern Europe, but let’s not make it worldwide).
Also, fundamentally, nuclear power is just a way to get energy, not a way to balance energy needs. As long as we have a mindset of “consume as much energy as we can as fast as we can and see what kind of record setting mass extinction we can die in,” it’s inherently not really helpful to have another way to consume energy fast. A billion gigawatt hours generated with nuclear energy don’t actually save a billion gigawatt hours from being generated with coal unless you’re actually smart enough to limit your energy use. And if you’re smart enough to do that, you might as well limit it to pretty much what you can get with the safest possible renewables, not nuclear
The thing about nuclear which drove us to large plants in the first place is that bigger reactors have significant economies of scale. Even with big reactors, nuclear has been very expensive to build, and hasn’t really come down in cost in a long time, and takes a very long time to actually build.
By contrast, wind, solar, and storage are cheap and can be deployed rapidly in small increments with much more site flexibility.
So what’s going on is a false promise of future nuclear being used to prevent the deployment of renewables now.
Ugh, yeah that is a frustrating part of any discussion I have with a lot of people I know IRL: they seem to think of it in an “exclusive or” (one or the other but not both) mindset.
In my most humble of opinions, we need to be doing classic nuclear, renewables, and SMRs (and as pipe-dream-ish as it might be, research into nuclear fusion) all at once. Oh, and let’s not forget the mass-scale grid storage.
Would that be a hella expensive investments? Yes, but worth it in the long run.
If it was the only alternative nuclear power would be a solution to reducing coal and gas, but there’s no point building nuclear reactors if the renewables are better in almost every way. Solar + Wind + Batteries are faster and cheaper to build, require less specialized skills and materials, easier to get approvals for, cheaper to run (doesn’t use any kind of fuel), lower emissions, better safety, more distributed (with the advantages that come along with that like being more fault-tolerant, etc).
Looking at generators all over Australia, Solar, Wind and Batteries are just popping up everywhere partly because they’re cheap and easy to build and run.