Always bring up the cost of nuclear power plants and the time to build them, but ignore that all the power plants built in the US in recent years use 1950s technology and are made expensive by 50 years of excessive regulation driven by fear.
If we built exactly the same design tens to the low hundreds of times by the same handful of teams, the cost per unit would be dramatically lower. This is especially true of the modern, safer, and more cost effective designs.
All of the third generation EPR projects being built in Europe have run hugely over budget. I really thought if anyone could build nuclear plants cost effectively it would have been France so it's really made me lose hope in nuclear power.
What nuclear needs is massive subsidies, especially in reactors using small modular designs that are more amenable to mass-manufacturing techniques and transportability, and it needs them sustained for decades until the competitive forces of the large market for SMRs has brought the price of reactors down to levels where they're competitive in the market without subsidies, at which point the growth of privately funded nuclear power would be self-sustaining.
Over the years nuclear has enjoyed enormous subsidies. If it were not for the huge decrease in costs for renewables over the past couple of decades and huge increase in cost for nuclear I’d be much more enthusiastic about nuclear power.
I can’t believe that people are still arguing against nuclear. It’s an extremely proven technology. It can be built fast, cheap and safely.
But at the end of the day real resources matter. Where should labour effort be directed? Costs reflect that effort.
I’m not against nuclear but if redirecting effort (money, labour) from nuclear to renewables and storage seems likely to reduce co2 emissions faster then let’s redirect that effort. It’s fine for cool technologies to be abandoned when cheaper alternatives come along.
If it’s possible to come up with a far cheaper form of nuclear power then great! But it’s hard to compete with the big fusion reactor in the sky.
The best case scenario is solar/wind, along with their associated storage systems, continuing to see rapid cost reductions, and nuclear, through SMRs, becoming vastly more affordable alongside them.
The two classes of electricity generators would each find ideal use-cases and produce an energy system that provides electricity at a lower cost than either could provide on their own.
To expand a bit more on nuclear: we've never made a good effort at bringing down its cost. The SMR option I outlined is the route to achieving that. Giant plants built mostly on-site just don't benefit from large markets the way transportable goods that can be built off-site do.
The SMR industry needs subsidies while in its embryonic stage to have a chance of showing what it can do, with respect to cost-effective electricity generation, when it's more developed.
The subsidies have also not been directed at the SMR market, which is the only one that has the potential to see exponentially declining costs like what's seen in wind/solar.
they're expensive because we can't build ANYTHING big in this country without cost overruns.
I was anti-nuke when I was younger but recognize we fucked up terribly by not getting nuclear right and have now cooked the planet.
The appealing solution (to me) is to get SMRs into play with their associated promises of cost control and safety. My understanding is the blocker is really the existing insiders of the nuclear industry who see it as a threat to their work.
That is what makes industries with heavy regulation such risky investments.
We see consistently that big projects never come in on time and budget, which is why SMRs are the only economical way forward.
Maddening.