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Comment by dualvariable | Hacker News Reader

> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.

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People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.

That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.

And nuclear has still sat there being too expensive and solving nothing, proving the point, but apparently this is evidence of the opposite.

My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.

We did try to build nuclear. Massive subsidy programs were created, it just didn’t deliver.

Renewables passed nuclear a long time ago. If the economics of renewables weren't making sense, the economics of nuclear were worse.

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