Volvo’s New River truck plant in Virginia

New nuclear generators are on the way, smaller, way safer and cheaper to build, they can make a huge difference in the way we power our grid today.
Look to this Wired article:


SCIENCE
The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Small, Svelte, and Safer
A new generation of reactors will start producing power in the next few years. They're comparatively tiny—and may be key to hitting our climate goals.

ILLUSTRATION: NUSCALE
For the last 20 years, the future of nuclear power has stood in a high bay laboratory tucked away on the Oregon State University campus in the western part of the state. Operated by NuScale Power, an Oregon-based energy startup, this prototype reactor represents a new chapter in the conflict-ridden, politically bedeviled saga of nuclear power plants.

NuScale’s reactor won’t need massive cooling towers or sprawling emergency zones. It can be built in a factory and shipped to any location, no matter how remote. Extensive simulations suggest it can handle almost any emergency without a meltdown. One reason is that it barely uses any nuclear fuel, at least compared with existing reactors. It’s also a fraction of the size of its predecessors.

This is good news for a planet in the grips of a climate crisis. Nuclear energy gets a bad rap in some environmentalist circles, but many energy experts and policymakers agree that splitting atoms is going to be an indispensable part of decarbonizing the world’s electricity. In the US, nuclear power accounts for about two-thirds of all clean electricity, but the existing reactors are rapidly approaching the end of their regulatory lifetimes. Only two new reactors are under construction in the US, but they’re billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

Enter the small modular reactor, designed to allow several reactors to be combined into one unit. Need a modest amount of energy? Install just a few modules. Want to fuel a sprawling city? Tack on several more. Coming up with a suitable power plant for a wide range of situations becomes that much easier. Because they are small, these reactors can be mass-produced and shipped to any location in a handful of pieces. Perhaps most importantly, small modular reactors can take advantage of several cooling and safety mechanisms unavailable to their big brothers, which all but guarantees they won’t become the next Chernobyl.

NuScale uses a light water reactor—by far the most common type of reactor in commercial nuclear power plants—but that’s about where the similarities end. NuScale’s reactor is 65 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, and is housed in a containment vessel only slightly larger. About the size of two school buses stacked end to end, you could fit around 100 of them in the containment chamber of a large conventional reactor. Yet this small reactor can crank out 60 megawatts of energy, which is about one-tenth the smallest operational reactor in the US today.

 

We can complaint as much as we want, true is the future isnt gonna be run by oil like its today, i am 5 years away from retirement but the youngers ones between us better be prepared for electric (and robot driven) autonomous trucks.

 

I've got to agree @Troady. I'm 45 and I don't care one bit what's powering them in 20 years. I'll be out or on my way out. Change is life. I hope to drive my 2015 about until I'm done driving or one like it just like plenty of people are driving their 90's era trucks now. There are a million or more trucks running around this country. They aren't going to just make people turn in the keys for an electric model.

 

We have 4 of them in Fontana. They are actually pretty cool!

 

I am trying to vision a 80 ish thousand pound vehicle climbing a 6% grade on battery power.
Seems like it would be like turning on my microwave without starting the truck.

 

lol