Which companies would benefit from a shift to nuclear power? Apparently, 76% of the US public favors nuclear energy in 2023 compared with 49% in the 1983. Which public companies would stand to gain the most? |
Which companies would benefit from a shift to nuclear power? Apparently, 76% of the US public favors nuclear energy in 2023 compared with 49% in the 1983. Which public companies would stand to gain the most? |
General Electric is getting a lot of early interest in the BWRX300 but it is based on the ESBWR which got no firm orders and the previous ABWR sold very few units.
There are not many orders in the west for large LWRs (Russia is the only country that is building them on an n-th-of-a-kind basis today) and those are all running terribly late. The economics of the LWR will never be great, even if the constructibility problems are solved. China is far along on the ACP100 small LWR and there is Nuscale, that BWRX300 and some others. Such a machine might get to an nth-of-a-kind basis for constructibility but the economics on paper usually aren’t better than the large LWR though the hope is somehow you can delete something from the design and still have good safety.
The economics may not have to be great if the social price of carbon is added to fossil fuels and if the current level of exuberance over renewables subsides (say storage turns out to be as hard as we thought it was in 2000, or building more power lines takes as long as building large LWRs, …)
Then there is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
which might improve on the economics because the steam turbine is a major weight on the LWR. In principle a reactor without water can operate at much higher temperatures and power a closed-cycle gas turbine or maybe make hydrogen directly with a thermochemical process. None of those is a bird in the hand neither in terms of the nuclear part nor the “what are you going to do with the heat?” question.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/23/americans...
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Record-level-of-US-s...
Also, 76% seems inconsistent with the 2022 Gallup Poll on the same issue (which gets 51% for the same question):
https://news.gallup.com/poll/392831/americans-divided-nuclea...
If you asked conservatives if they wanted to trade their gas stove for one powered by nuclear electricity you might get a different opinion ;-)
There have always been exceptions. Atomic Rod operated nuclear reactors in the land of submarines and was so impressed by the experience that he's become an evangelist for small modular reactors. He's a Democrat, even if he sees everything as nuke vs anti-nuke.