Indeed. Still, 8 GE Haliades ≈ 1 nuscale SMR Though SMR has leftover heat to play with.

Good write-up at ergosphere. "....average generation of 65% seems reasonable". GE claims 63% capacity factor for new 12 MW wind turbines. Already sold multiple Gigawatts worth. Big step toward making floating platform wind cheap.

Maybe Small Modular Reactors will break the duopoly of nuclear stasis: mass hysteria and regulatory compliance. Manufacturing of SMRs can be scaled rapidly. Alternative to crushing dunite: MIT claims atmospheric CO2 can be extracted at scale for 1 gigajoule/ton using quinones. Side note: PPA from the first SMR nukes is about $55/MWH. This will get cheaper. Wind/Solar PPAs are in the $25-50/MWH range and getting cheaper. CO2 sucking provides a good alternative to dumping excess. If MIT is right , it's $8 to suck down a ton of CO2 at $30/MWH. A trillion tons is maybe 10% of world's $80 trillion annual GDP. Spread it out over 15 or 20 years, that's a fraction of a percent.

IBM has been quiet about batteries since they announced a few years ago (maybe 5 or 6) they were beginning development of a lithium metal battery. They were big on AI to help search for good combinations of materials.

Battery production capacity constraints are key to the EA study results. Study refers to projections from here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/toyota-grant-open-patent-access-drive-industry-uptake-kevin-f-brown/ Which projects BEV battery capacity of 16 GWhr by 2030, while 800GWhr capacity is needed. Others project vastly more production capacity. Here 1,000GWhr is projected by 2028: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/battery-megafactory-forecast-1-twh-capacity-2028/

Emissions Analytics' business is testing emissions. BEVs will put them out of business.

E.P., Here's a link to a 1977 NYT report of Carter cutting breeder research funding: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/23/archives/carter-seeks-to-cut-200-million-from-breeder-reactor-program.html And here's a link to a 1997 brief summary of the previous 2 decades of nuclear policy: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/rossin.html Note the references to reactor plutonium use in weapons, including this: "The facts were classified SECRET, but the U. S. had actually exploded a device made of "reactor-grade plutonium" at the Nevada Test site in 1962." As you observed, "...not one terrorist action has gone after nuclear fuel...". Did the anti-breeder policy begun by Carter (and anti-proliferation in general) and finished by Clinton help keep the fuel out of bad hands? Hard to say. But its easy to say that nuclear energy has proved to be far safer by any rational measure than energy from any fossil fuel.

In the early 1970s, plutonium breeder reactors which produced essentially free fuel were thought to be the solution for providing more clean, economical energy to a growing U.S. economy. The Carter administration scotched the idea because it is cheap to enrich fuel grade plutonium to weapons grade plutonium, and studies even then identified terrorists getting their hands on fuel as the most significant risk to broadly-deployed nuclear power. This left the USA with the need to enrich Uranium, which is much harder to enrich from fuel grade to weapons grade, on a much larger scale and at less cost than was possible with the existing gas diffusion facilities. I helped build the centrifuges that were to provide economical enriched Uranium fuel at scale. By the mid 1980s, the clatter of later-morphing-into-"green" protests decimated the voice of reason, the enriching program was dumped, nukes in America were shouted into history, and coal plants happily and with barely a whimper of protest moved in to fill the void. Sometimes you get what you ask for. Asking for Hydrogen? Better find out what you're really asking for.

That nuclear energy, far safer by any credible measure than any fossil fuel and even safer than hydro energy, managed to acquire a reputation so besmirched is testament to the vast capacity of humans to be hoodwinked. Such an ideal fit for ship propulsion could not compete with the national shunning of "dangerous" nuclear in favor of "safe" coal in the 1970s and 80s.

Assuming per ton energy requirement with losses is 5MWH and energy price is $50/MWH, Energy cost/ton is $250, about a third of the calculated CNT cost cited in the article, which is in the ballpark of the cost of steel. Solar/Wind auctions are down to $20/$40 MWH in places; it's not unreasonable to expect energy cost to continue falling. If this stuff could be used for building material, that would be something.

Battery prices falling at 13% per year are 50% in 5 years. Last few year decline is steeper than this. It's hard to imagine that oil price can decline enough to compete with batteries in 5 years. While a barrel of profitably fracked oil dropped from $80 to $60 in the last few years, can it drop a lot more? EV uptake will act as a hedge against oil price increase, but oil price can't fall much as long as fracked oil is required to meet demand.