this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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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?
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.