NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.
Tldr: renewables are really cheap and utility partners backed out from buying the energy so it didn’t make economic sense.
I can’t help but feel that it would make more economic sense if we taxed the fuck out of other stable sources of energy that are killing us (coal/gas).
But it’s Utah: they don’t give a single shit about air quality or global warming.
There are locations where, judging by the general populations ignorant attitudes, they don’t have enough sense to give a shit about air quality or global warming.
However, in western “educated” society, those general attitudes have been formed due to corruption.
For example, where l live the general public are simply not exposed to the facts about air pollution & climate change. Many live in their own social bubbles & are exposed to industry propaganda
What’s funny is I tend to believe the average Utahn cares about air quality. They have some insanely toxic air when inversions set up in the valley.
But they keep electing politicians that run heavy industry (copper mining, steel smelting, oil and gas refining) in that selfsame valley with 0 oversight.
Also according to the guardian the project had massive cost overruns increasing the costs by a factor of five:
The projected cost of the NuScale project had blown out from US$3.6bn for 720 megawatts in 2020 to US$9.3bn for 462MW last year.
To answer your idea solar costs on a MW bases 30times less today, with falling prices. Solar runs something like 20-25% of the time and you need storage, but that is still much much cheaper then this nuclear plant would be. So you are really wasting money going for nuclear today.
Small modular nuclear reactor?
Not in my back yard, thanks. Not that these industries tend to ask.
