But for real, with the prevalence of AI its only a matter of time before the narrative becomes that it never happened and the photo we’re all familiar with is just an AI fake.
And it wont matter howe much evidence there is that the photo existed for decades before good AI, that can just be handwaved away. We are truly in the post-truth era.
The whole base load situation is largely over hyped, as a diverse and slightly overbuilt network of renewable would compensate for fluctuations with minimal storage needed. Iirc you would just need 118% capacity with a 2 hour storage buffer to achieve stability rates on par with a traditional grid. And nuclears small footprint actually hinders it when filling a base load requirement, as nuclear provides a lot of power at a single location, but if you want to base load a national grid you want a little power at lots of locations. (Which can be argued that SMRs will fill that role, but that’s a whole other argument)
You can look up the costs of nuclear in a country like France which is easily the most consistent builder of nuclear in the west and its not much better.
Cool, so you’re either going to have to completely get rid of all the nimbys and people that don’t understand nuclear, then build a massive population of qualified workers to build them and staff them and then fund them in the hundreds of billions for at least 2 decades to build up the knowledge base required to be able to build them quickly and efficiently.
Or accept the reality that nuclear is dead in the water.
And this shows exactly why investing in nuclear is not the answer every tech bro thinks it is. Its far cheaper to built renewable and more importantly far far far quicker.