Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where 50% of all electricity currently comes from nuclear power:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data?type=supply
I have no problem with getting more CANDU reactors (which is the current plan).
As an Ontarian, the thought of spending $500B on a couple of reactors makes me furious. Ontario is not going to become competitive again with the most expensive electricity in the world.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Until a few years ago it was cheaper than methane/natural gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
At least when it comes to refurbishment, the independent (reports to provincial parliament) FAO found:
> Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
* https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Nuclear-Refurb...
Their projections go to 2064.
New-nuclear is worthy of discussion, but given we have stood up supply chains via the refurbishment process, there's a lot of knowledge out there. My current largest complaint with the new-nuclear plans is the SMRs.
I did find this (potential?) $100B number on Ontario nuclear energy:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...
but if you take that number and 'ammortize' it over the average 40-year life span of reactors, it comes to $2.5B/year (in capex), which is about ~1% of the provincial budget. I'm not sure how much raw GW capacity that would add, or how many GWh would be generated annually, to do the math on the per-kWh (capex?) cost.
The article goes over the pros and cons of various points in the energy mix debate.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...
Today's politicians can't even be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure, leading to things like the Ponte Morandi collapse, or the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, or the Carola Bridge collapse, and so on and so on.
They can't even properly maintain fairly trivial infrastructure, routinely leading to at most a few dozen deaths per incident. Why would you assume they'd do any better with nuclear reactors - where a second Chernobyl is the potential result of an incident?
Do you trust today's politicians to provide all the money the engineers ask for?
Besides an engineering problem, they are also a political problem for as long as they exist, and even longer. Remember how Russia bombed Chernobyl in the Ukraine war?
I don’t totally disagree though. You can reduce it to economics. Nuclear has a safety profile whose far tail becomes exponentially expensive. It also has a lot of hidden costs that often get hand waved away.
There have been much worse industrial accidents than Chernobyl in terms of life lost, like Bhopal which I think is still the record. But I believe Fukushima may have even passed Chernobyl as the most expensive industrial accident in history.
For the cost of one Fukushima cleanup, Japan could have built wind solar and batteries equal to many Fukushima plants combined output.
That’s really the problem. Amortized over the whole fleet over decades, and also including either waste disposal or recycling (which is also expensive), nuclear may just not be cost competitive. Fission power is a tech that looks spectacular on paper.
I’m talking about fission of course. If we make fusion work that will be different. It isn’t dangerous to those outside the plant and produces a tiny fraction of the waste. (It would make some due to neutron activation but much less and much less “hot.”)