alt Hacker NewsNuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.
And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.
And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.
I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.
That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.
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IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.
Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.
> The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.
Found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol.
Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.
There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.
The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, which are the best means for long term energy storage, and also for applications like aircraft and spacecraft.
The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted carbon dioxide from air.
While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.
Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the existing bacteria, which use most of the captured energy to make substances useful for them, not for us, so unmodified bacteria would not have a high enough useful output.