• frezik@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    Think in terms of probability, not absolute. I mentioned flow batteries because I think it’s the most promising and developed, but there are several others. If one doesn’t work, ten others are being pursued in parallel. Only one needs to work

    In a five year time frame, we’ll probably have at least one. More likely three or four.

    Nuclear, in contrast, has trouble pursuing multiple possibilities at once. It’s too expensive. A decade ago, it was the AP1000 design, which was supposed to avoid the purpose-built engineering that bogged down deployments in the past. That was a failure so hard that Westinghouse nearly collapsed permanently. Now it’s SMRs, and given the collapse of the project in Utah, it’s not looking good.