There’s a slip of the slide rule in your nuclear plant calculation. 10 terawatts = 10 000 gigawatts, so using your 500 megawatt/plant estimate that requires building 20,000 plants. If we can ever get the ball rolling on nuclear power my guess is the plant sizes will be mostly larger — like the Westinghouse AP1000 = 1 gigawatt plant. I will speculate that once serious deployment begins we will see Generation IV technology becoming commercial — e.g., modular pebble bed reactors. Personally I can get excited about the prospects for mass production of factory certified nuclear modules. I.e., gaining the benefits of production learning curves and quality control. If it proves to be truly practical to “bolt the modules together” at the site, today’s ten year start-to-power-on time could come down to months.

Success at mass manufacturing is what we require to achieve the numbers implied by a 10 terawatt goal. If my speculation of say 1 gW average plant is valid, we would have to average 1.5 new nuclear plants per day to ramp up 10 terawatts by 2025. Since the plausible serious deployment start is probably at least 5 years out, we will be wanting to deploy an average of 2+ plants/day globally.

Which I hope reinforces your central point — we can do this, but it is definitely not easy — and is impossible with current technology and methods.

There’s a slip of the slide rule in your nuclear plant calculation. 10 terawatts = 10 000 gigawatts, so using your 500 megawatt/plant estimate that requires building 20,000 plants. If we can ever get the ball rolling on nuclear power my guess is the plant sizes will be mostly larger — like the Westinghouse AP1000 = 1 gigawatt plant. I will speculate that once serious deployment begins we will see Generation IV technology becoming commercial — e.g., modular pebble bed reactors. Personally I can get excited about the prospects for mass production of factory certified nuclear modules. I.e., gaining the benefits of production learning curves and quality control. If it proves to be truly practical to “bolt the modules together” at the site, today’s ten year start-to-power-on time could come down to months.

Success at mass manufacturing is what we require to achieve the numbers implied by a 10 terawatt goal. If my speculation of say 1 gW average plant is valid, we would have to average 1.5 new nuclear plants per day to ramp up 10 terawatts by 2025. Since the plausible serious deployment start is probably at least 5 years out, we will be wanting to deploy an average of 2+ plants/day globally.

Which I hope reinforces your central point — we can do this, but it is definitely not easy — and is impossible with current technology and methods.