People today have really forgotten how much people got lied to constantly about nuclear power. France which they like to pull out as this amazing nuclear country built all the reactors they hype up by faking safety checks on nuclear reactors.
It is just really naive to assume every nuclear plant is run by the books.
People complain about over regulation of the nuclear industry. Yeah… they kind of brought that upon themselves.
The only place I have heard of plans to build literally any coal plants at all is in China, but they have not broken ground on them. China also says it will build hundreds of nukes, but has started only a few. It is building out solar and wind farms like nobody's business. China is always happy to cancel plans for what they turn out not to need. They even abandon things they spent big money on that turn out redundant: lately, a record-setting bridge you can read about.
We read about coal plants being shut down and scrapped, everywhere. The only place where coal plants are brought back online is in Europe in response to a regional crisis involving a war. Are you sure you want to stake claims about long-term policy based on emergency response to a war? That seems like a very courageous position to take.
In reality the nuclear lobby heavily got politics to relax safety requirements, operators are corrupt and cut costs at every corner, inspections are not performed at all or not thoroughly, and when important decisions are being made, like where to store the waste, it's where politicians in charge find it convenient, and not where scientists and engineers actually recommend. Then you end up with metal containers in a salt mine, rusting away because thirty years ago who could have known the connection between salt and oxidation.
If we lynched a few of them every time a nuclear reactor blew up we'd have a lot fewer energy related deaths and the market would eventually self correct.
It is now cheaper to build a new solar farm to replace a coal plant than just to operate the already built coal plant. It is as cheap to build renewables as to operate an already built and paid for nuke.
Renewables cost is still in free fall. In ten years, renewables will be so cheap that overbuilding 10x, 20x, will be cheaper than operating a nuke.
What do we do at night?
Build storage for the solar plant? That's more expensive than a nuclear plant of the same capacity.
Build long range high voltage power lines? Again, more expensive than building a nuclear power plant of the same capacity.
People have been spoiled by the incredible energy ROI, portability and responsiveness of fossil fuels and think everything has the same capacity.
It doesn't.
By the time we need storage (after enough renewable generation is built to charge it from) storage will be very cheap. It will not be made of lithium batteries.
Storage is easy. It is just now an overwhelmingly better use of capital to build generating capacity, to displace carbon combustion, than to build storage. It is only after you have more than enough to displace almost all your carbon combustion that storage is a very useful at all.
Reactors have been ready for 80 years.
We keep putting them off because nuclear is scary and vaporware tech will save us.
Here we are, yet again, 10 years away from the green nirvana that was promised every 10 years since the 80s. Meanwhile Germany is building coal plants again and Britain has melted.
I am not committing suicide because of your fetish for solar panels and wind turbines.
>It is only after you have more than enough to displace almost all your carbon combustion that storage is a very useful at all.
I guess we can just turn society off at night.
Germany is not, in fact, building coal plants. Germany is building wind and solar farms.
Until you have enough renewables to charge your storage, you burn NG at night. It would be stupid to burn NG to charge up storage, as stupid as to burn NG when you have storage charged and ready.
Sounds good. Let's build nuclear reactors until we replace all energy generation with them. Dwelling on might-have-beens is to choose collapse after all.
We already need it. During summer we have an overabundance of energy. It would be so nice to have it stored and used in winter, wouldn't it?
Oh wait. "Cheap storage" in no way, shape or form translate into efficient storage. You might have to cover half of Europe in batteries to store just a few weeks worth of energy.
Long term storage doesn't need to be efficient, because the number of charge/discharge cycles is small and the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of such cycles.