Today solar & wind are the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushes nuclear as a distraction.
He said no nuclear power plant was ever profitable
When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?
The histories of pretty much every green party in the western world and their anti-nuclear activism suggests otherwise.
Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.
In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.
Why do you think that is? Somehow I'm not convinced its the activism holding nuclear back.
E.g. for Germany - the most high profile nuclear exits: - nuclear and fossile energy producers were the exact same companies - why would they fund activists to campaign against their own assets? - coal mining and plant employees were (around the first exit) part of a significant worker voter population, especially for the social democrats but to a lesser degree for the conservatives, too. The largest state was heavily dependent on the coal industry and SPD/CDU politicians regularly moved to/from leadership positions in coal-dependent energy producers. No party except possibly the Greens would have remotely touched a coal exit and discussions around that only seriously started after the second (conservative reversal reversal) nuclear exit. - gas and nuclear fuel in major quantities came from Russia, from different Russian state companies - why would they cut into each other's business by funding activists? They were happy for Germany to depend on them in any and all ways. - the second nuclear exit was a political play for voter sentiment by conservatives after Fukushima - they didn't even try to explain why nuclear should be kept for all the reasons they reversed the previous exit and still killed of the nascent booming solar/wind industry - they certainly were not renewables activists. Just recently the reverse happened as part of conservatives pre-election promises to rebuild nuclear as a play for voter sentiment due to temporarily high (war-dependent, already normalized) energy prices. It wasn't important enough for them to include in the government coalition plans in any way whatsoever - the main conservative agitator for nuclear has now had to agree that nuclear is economically dead.
The reality is that nuclear in Germany was already dead when the first exit was voted on - nobody had built plants in a long time, nobody had any plans to build them. If not for the exit plans to start a renewables transition, fossil usage would be far higher today and because of the exit reversal and delay in coal exit due to the conservatives it is much higher today than it needed to be and we're much more dependent on Chinese manufacturers, too.
At most activists were somewhat involved in voter sentiment at some points, but it wasn't particularly crucial versus the actual economic and political realities.
The reason is, I think, that the progressives have rationally better policies - ones that become mainstream decades later, including much of what is mainstream now - so by demonizing the progressives the center and right prevent people from actually considering the policies.
More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased crime.
Consider perhaps the progressive policies have been considered and rejected for good reasons.
Crime increases were across the country, regardless of the politics of the prosecutor. They are believed to be tied to the pandemic. In places where progressive DAs remain, crime has subsequently decreased to historic lows - just like the rest of the country.
Second, this one study says only that property crimes seemed to increase 7% and that there is no other increase, including violent crimes.
Third, it omits the massive benefits of progressive prosecutors, including following the law (and not persecuting disliked people or groups; not manipulating trials with false evidence, etc.; making police and other goverment accountable), actual justice, and reducing jail and prison populations - which saves tax dollars and save enormous damage to communities as people who now can't get jobs become unproductive and as their families are left destitute.
That doesn't match the anti-progressive propaganda, which we should know by now is motivated not by truth or concern for the public, but self-centered political gain.
The problem is that new built nuclear power costs tens of billions.
From a single web search just now:
- 400MW of solar in Illinois and Texas, Feb 10 2025 Reuters https://archive.is/5x9VA - 20MW of Wisconsin solar, October 2024 https://nationalgridrenewables.com/press-release/national-gr... - 400MW of Texas solar, Apr 8 2024 https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/08/microsoft-signs-two-l...
and that's just the first three hits, there are so many more. TMI won't come online for years, it's planned for 2028, but we will have to see. It was shut down in 2019 because it couldn't compete with gas prices. Microsoft is buying at inflated prices to subsidize clean energy, but solar is also clean energy and when backed by batteries it is price competitive with gas.
The news was because "whoa Microsoft is paying for nuclear" not because "whoa nuclear makes a lot of sense."
There's only so many uneconomic nuclear reactors to start back up.
On the other side: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros...
This is a solved problem. The investment required to build grid storage for renewables, the TCO, the scalability, the capacity, and the build time, are all objectively better than nuclear.
So what's the real story? What is this obsession with an outdated last-century technology really about?
Which was followed by climate change denying conservatives who found their position untenable embracing nuclear power being able to create a culture war issue in debates about climate change.
All in the name of preventing the disruption of their fossil assets by stymying renewables.
Peter Dutton in Australia which now lost is the perfect example of this with his ”coal to nuclear” plan leading to massively increased emissions for decades to come.
- Renewables are not, or not nearly as much, big profits for big business. They don't require the capital investment of fossil fuels or nuclear, and therefore they don't have the large moats of those businesses.
- Anti-liberalism (or reactionaryism): Destroying liberalism is an openly stated goal for which many will sacrifice singificant wealth and cause significant harm. Nuclear is counter to anti-nuclear liberal campaigners of yesteryear (I think conservatives often have little idea of changes since the Cold War era; they still talk about 'Communists', etc.)
People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley Point C is approaching a decade.
In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.
Let’s compare to renewables:
- 600 GW solar PV added [1]
- 117 GW wind power [2]
- ~100 GW battery storage
Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.
But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.
[1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-w...
[2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-record...