You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...
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Sorry, but I still don't see how nuclear power--or any baseload energy source--can work with soft energy (wind, solar, waterwheels, tidal power, etc., as opposed to baseload biomass and baseload-capable big hydro). Soft energy is a completely different system; it renders reliability irrelevant as long as it is possible to respond to other sources' unreliability.
2. "Three times the investment for the same production" assumes that windmills can back each other up. In practice, that doesn't work very well, and you still need backup generators--in most places, gas. Soft energy is a different way to produce power, not something that can work with the current system.