Well some progress has been made in Texas ... those carpetbagging ‘woke’ ERCOT board members have all been sent packing and the hardening of coal and natural gas generating plants is underway. Their biggest problem was getting coal / natural gas into the plants so generation could happen. They didn’t keep enough fuel close by.
The windmills may be getting heaters as an upgrade. That is good but the number of windmills is still way to high. Some Texas power companies rely on windmills to supply over 30% of the power they sell. That is way too much exposure. Texas should be starting construction on 2-4 nukes way out in the badlands of West Texas where an accident (unlikely) would affect only the wildlife.
“Texas should be starting construction on 2-4 nukes way out in the badlands of West Texas where an accident (unlikely) would affect only the wildlife.”
Texas has four large nuclear reactors at two sites. Those sites were designed for double the capacity they are at now. They each have empty pads for two more reactors at each site and more importantly the cooling ponds were sized for four reactors one sites the two they are at now. Nuclear power is about 18% of total Texas power just adding to the existing sites would double that without having to even apply for more land or exclusion zones. Those pad sites don’t have to be used for massive concrete some PWR era reactors the cooling ponds only care about the thermal flux per hour. Texas should use the next Gen III+ tech that would be the ESBWR for the 1200 gigawatt capacity range. With 7 days of walk away safe built in and after 7 days you only need to put water in the condenser pools via a fire hose or tanker truck. You could also just put a surface level water tank outside the containment building that holds enough water to fill those condenser pools three more times using a simple gravity flow line to a automatic floating ball valve in the pools as the water evaporates the ball sinks letting exterior water inside the pool. You only need three more 7 days worth of water to bring the reactor to cold shut down a tank that size would be 50 feet in diameter and twice that height not large enough to worry about just build in 30 days of condenser pool reserve and have full scram to cold shut down with not a live human on site.
https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-power-plants-overview/esbwr
Then Texas should plan for small modular reactors near the cities that also do district heating / cooling water grids plus desalination on the coast.
A good one is the modular BWRX 300 that has capital and O&M costs that are natural gas level.
https://www.reutersevents.com/nuclear/ge-hitachi-chases-gas-plant-displacement-new-300-mw-reactor
Rolls Royce is also making SMRs that will be competitive with gas plants on a LCOE basis. That have exclusion zones of 100 meters by 100 meters. Rolls makes submarine reactors for the British government they have a perfect safety record just like the U.S. Navy does.
https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx
Korea has already proven that the costs of reprocessing “waste” into new fuel rods is not that much more than a once through fuel cycle this eliminates the need for massive under ground storage of tonnes of spent fuel. Reprocessing wastes are orders of magnitude smaller and more dense you then take those and put them down a bore hole into granite and seal it with bentonite mud and concrete. The cost difference is under half a cent per kWh to reprocess spent fuel into new fuel while closing the fuel cycle. The costs were 6.78 mils/kWh vs 6.34 mils/kWh one mil is one thousandth of a U.S. dollar so the fuel costs were 0.678 US cents per kWh vs 0.634 the difference is 0.44 cents per kWh to not only double the amount of energy you get per lb of mined uranium but to eliminate the spent fuel “waste” issue. The antinuke zealots got Carter to ban reprocessing in the USA this was designed from the start to cripple the U.S. nuclear industry with a mountain of spent fuel that has to be stored for millions of years. The wastes from reprocessing are such small volumes that deep bore hole storage works economically deep bore hole into granite that has been tectonic stable for billions of years will easily hold reprocessing wastes for the few thousand years it need a to decay back to natural uranium ore levels. It cannot be stressed enough spent fuel is not wastes it contains 96% perfectly good reactor fuel 99% of its original energy content and only 4% fission products with only two of those having half lives above 10,000 years the vast majority have HL in the 30 to 1,000 year ranges. It is the major / minor actinides that have long half lives and every one of those is either fissile fuel or fertile that with thermal neutron capture becomes fissile. With MOX capable reactors you quadruple your energy per lb mined and the waste volume drops to 4% by mass the USA are absolute fools for not reprocessing spent fuel into MOX its criminal what Carter did an actual crime against humanity.
https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/521381