Fifty years of fear has kept the world from switching out shitty coal

:rolleyes:

As someone who worked in the energy industry, and has relatives in the nuclear industry, let me disabuse you of this sophomoric belief.

The reason nuclear is dead is because, in spite of decades of effort, the industry remains incapable of controlling costs. When it was first introduced in the 1960s the CAPEX was approximately $2.60/Wp, in an era when coal was about $2 and hydro was $1 to $2. At that time wind was on the order of $10 and PV around $100.

In spite of it being more expensive, the expectation was that the cost of fuel would eventually overwhelm the small price advantage of coal. Instead, what actually happened, was that the price of the plants went up. A lot. This was not due to fear, but basic engineering. Things we thought were good ideas, like negative pressure containment, turn out to be incredibly bad ideas. The fixes for those problems cost a lot of money.

By the late 1990s, at the cusp of the expected nuclear renaissance, the estimated cost was around $4.50/Wp. That likely reflected the real cost of the designs all along. Had that price been offered in the 1960s, it is likely far fewer reactors would have been built in the first place, if any.

Unfortunately, this estimate also turned out to be hopelessly optimistic. Currently the best priced reactor in the western world is Vogtle 3&4, which are around $7.60/Wp, but have already started overrunning those estimates. Other reactors are far over budget, notably every one under construction in Europe, and in other cases the bids were so high the companies abandoned them - Darlington B and Crystal River being examples that came in at around $11/Wp.

Now some of this is due to issues outside their control. For instance, the price of concrete has over doubled since around 2005, and that doesn't help. But the people who fund these things don't care why it happened, only that it did.

And then there's the other problem... during the same period other sources got cheap. Really cheap. Wind is now $1.50/Wp fully commissioned. PV is down to $1/Wp. In spite of all the problems these sources have, they are so cheap and easy to install that no one cares. Together, they are being installed faster than any other source of electricity in history.

Nuclear didn't get killed, it committed suicide. As long as you ignore that reality, which is really not that easy to find with a little Googling, then nothing is going to change. If you really do support nuclear power, then complaining about strawmen isn't going to help, you should be complaining about exchange rates.