The small local nukes I agree are the answer. Building huge plants in this country are likely not going to happen until such a time there is no other option, and then the time to get them in place will be so long and the cost so high there wont be the will or ability to do it. They are great set outside a major city where transmission losses are not so bad. No one wants one outside a major city any longer. No one wants super high voltage transmission lines hung over the country areas they live in and we are running low on areas that don’t fall into NIMBY.
Now where do you set a small nuke plant for a city of <100k or a small rural town of <10K. With at least 50% of the people in the country that are going to be strongly against one.
The factory I worked at where at its peak had 18,000 working there made all its power from a coal-fired power plant. We did huge welding and foundry work along with machining and process demands. The waste heat produced all the process and building heating and even compressed air for the 1 square mile plant was free. Likewise the city of Erie had a coal plant that was maybe 5-10 times as large as ours and their waste heat was pumped around the city and heated the whole downtown area. These stations were built circa 1910 and ran for 75-100 years. Ours in the plant every few years we would have to invest in better emissions stuff and it would be a couple million to get in compliance. We got a new young lady VP and our CEO made a statement saying the company was no longer a smokestack company. That’s all she had to hear and it was done. They ran a gas line into the plant large enough you could crawl thru. They spent 100s of millions and had a heating bill of something like $80k a week in the winter. The odd part was they left the smokestack standing.
We need a mindset change in this country and I’m not sure what form it will take. The likely way it will go IMO is the population will be groomed to expect less.
