> Idiotic reasons such as that nuke always turned out, on examination, to cost much more than alternatives.
Nonsense. In the 60 they literally developed 100 of different types of nuclear reactor often for a tiny amounts of money. Any coherent strategy over the last 50 years clearly shows that if would been cheaper to reach basically zero carbon and it could have been done far earlier and earlier with nuclear.
Navy ships in lifetime analysis show that over the ship lifetime its very cost effective. Not to mention that you can do many things you simply couldn't do otherwise.
Real private innovation and capital were never unleashed for nuclear innovation after the early explosion in the 60s. The extreme restrictions on the materials, government picking winners early and shutting out everything else. At least at that point some research was still going on, but no real effort to go beyond. After the government lost interest in the technology almost every single project was shut down and a nuclear became basically no-go when asking for funding inside the government.
And of course if you have incredibly low volume systems, with a tiny base of educated people, based on technology that is essentially from the 60s you are not gone have an effective system.
Like everything else, nuclear plants, even incredibly sub-optimal PWR designs when built in large numbers will get significantly cheaper. This is clearly evident in any analysis on nuclear economics. If you can build essentially the same reactor with many of the same project leader and teams over and again the costs go down massively. Even outside the actual parts production getting cheaper.
The cost per reactor that France achieved during their expansion is actually very low and they did it with pretty old technology that was really not at all optimized to be effectively built.
There is a gigantic design space that has not been explored that could massively reduce both the build cost and the operation cost and even decommissioning cost. Alternative reactor designs can be far smaller, far safer and require less human operation in fact a properly built reactor should have almost no human interaction ever.
This was all known in the 60s and the foundations were clear put down. In the 70s some amazing stuff was shown but at that point budget had already gone down government had already picked the commercial winners.
Check out this picture:
https://i.cbc.ca/1.5764415.1602802493!/fileImage/httpImage/s...
A design of that size would have been possible with 70 technology. Had they actually tried to innovate on technology and attempted different designs or had given real advantages to CO2 free technology at the time and let private investors take care of it, designed like this would have happened.
These main reactor vessels are literally not much bigger then a tiny ship, and could easily be manufactured in a single factory on a assembly line, transported to location and dropped into a hole filled with concrete.
Current cost actually are a result of the massively complex large civil engineering, more then the actual nuclear part themselves. That is high cost construction over a long period that has major disadvantage in financing. Having 10x smaller vessels with 100x simpler cooling system absolutely would make building reactors far cheaper and if you build many of them and have teams that are not doing for the very first time there is no reason why a nuclear plant can be build at cheaper rates then coal plant, more comparable to modern gas plants.
If you have an energy source that has that much advantage in energy density. Not taking advantage of such a dense and easy to obtain energy source is insane. Thorium mining for the whole US could have been done in one small mine for all US needs for the next 100 years or thorium extract Throium from the waste product of other mining operations. The reactor above could run on thorium that was dissolved very simply, you don't even need complex fuel production (not that that fuel production currently matters that much for overall cost of plant operation).
So you have basically zero cost of fuel, basically zero CO2, almost no mining, could have been done in the 70s, for sure in the 80s and 90s.
This is what I am talking about when I say its a missed opportunity. Even the incredibly sub-optimal route France took, lead to results that were far, far better then the route anybody else took and France did the world a huge service.