Winners in the industry. Who that’s going to be is not so clear.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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, …)<p>Then there is<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor</a><p>which <i>might</i> 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.
Only 35% of Americans believe the government should encourage production of nuclear power. In constrast, 72% answer affirmatively for the same question about wind and solar.<p><a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/23/americans-continue-to-express-mixed-views-about-nuclear-power/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/23/americans...</a>