Or because people are waking up and realizing that climate change is gonna screw us faster than we can build the tech to prevent that and people are defecting toward nuclear which is relatively shovel ready compared to grid scale solar/wind and the storage they necessitate.
You're arguing for nuclear on the basis of its build speed? That doesn't seem to be born out in reality. Maybe another X* years when we've got cheap, factory built small modular reactors, but that certainly doesn't describe nuclear today. In which case we're back to waiting for new tech.
* X being some number of years that increments by 1 year, every year.
or we could apt remove coal_plant && apt install fission_plant on the same surface area and be certain that we'll be done in the 15 years that this takes to build.
I'm very much afraid the former isn't going to cut it. I also know solar is cheaper if you compare kWh produced by panels on roofs to kWh produced by nuclear plants, but we need to increase our energy production nearly tenfold and renewables only won't make it easy to get there. We need to continue on both fronts, we can't rule out nuclear if we want to avoid this disaster. Best case the money is wasted. Currently, the best case is that we'll succeed and the average case a disaster.
The axiom 'safe, cheap, fast; choose any 2' doesn't even apply to nuclear. It's more like choose 0. You might be able to argue for some version of 'safe' by talking about actual fatalities from nuclear energy being low, but I think the 5000ish square kilometers of exclusion zones from Chrenobyl/Fukushima should be part of the conversation about 'safety'. Safe for people perhaps, safe for property, apparently not. So maybe choose 0.5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...
No one denies that nuclear makes up the majority of France's generating capacity. It's more debatable as to whether or not France is capable of building them out at competitive prices compared to renewables. It's worth looking at the ongoing cost disaster that is Flamanville unit 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Short version: supposed to be 54 months to build at €3.3 billion, is currently now targeting 180 months of total construction time at €19.1 billion. Not a good look.
You're making a sharp pivot here, away from construction time to cost. Yes, nuclear is much cheaper when the same design is built repeatedly instead of first-of-a-kind reactors. This is already well known.
Solar and wind are cheaper in terms of raw generation costs, but don't actually offer a path to decarbonization because of their intermittency. Solar and wind are cheap when they supplement fossil fuels. But they need to be paired with storage to be used as a primary source of power, and we don't have a feasible plan to provide that much storage let alone how much it'd cost.
Ok, that's much more fair. Thanks for pointing out the fallacy.
> we don't have a feasible plan to provide that much storage let alone how much it'd cost.
I think part of the idea behind smart grid initiatives is to use electric vehicles as part of the storage mix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid
Not sure if you're writing that off as unfeasible, but clearly there are solutions being thought about, and there are companies in the market today selling storage with costs going down every single year. It's not unreasonable to think that the 'feasible' plan for storage is to, well, simply buy/install it; which becomes cheaper every single year.
Also, solar thermal plants (no storage required) are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
Yes, it is. There's enough known lithium deposits to produce 5 minutes worth of storage. With current mining techniques, there's an estimated 20 minutes worth of storage. [1]
> Also, solar thermal plants (no storage required) are a thing:
Solar thermal is more expensive than nuclear.
Some of the regulations are good, some are bad - and a lot were born out of irrational fears about an immature industry that we didn't fully understand at the time.
There is no reason a nuclear plant cannot be economically viable. They're all over Europe, Japan, Russia, China and I'm sure other countries as well.
https://www.powermag.com/nuscale-uamps-kick-off-idaho-smr-nu...
That would make it more expensive than onshore wind($45/MWh) and solar yet($48/MWh) cheaper than all other sources of energy including natural gas($59/MWh). Double the final cost of energy to $110/MWh and it would still be in theory cheaper than the average for coal($115/MWh). Granted I'm pulling these numbers from Wikipedia so it's not that simple but the numbers aren't unrealistic.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-t...
Are we really going to risk human civilization on the immediate invention and mass fabrication of new storage technologies orders of magnitude more efficient then what we have?
And guess what, at that point maybe some of the newer, safer, and cheaper nuclear designs would have been proven so the nuclear plays we build then for the next few decades are better than the ones we would build right now.
We can build more than one nuclear reactor at a time, you know.
If you start now, it'll still take you almost a decade (or maybe it even will be a decade. You never know with NPPs because they always take longer and cost more than projected) and in that decade renewables will jump generations of development. In the end you just wasted money which could have been invested into true clean energy which is still improving fast.