Comment by fch42
3 days ago
nuclear never got economy of scale? There were hundreds of nuclear power plants built across the world in the 1970s/1980s. Developed countries went from "no nuclear" to "~20..30% nuclear" or more in less than 20 years. If that's not sufficient scale to be economical, then I don't know what would have been.
Historical evidence therefore rather suggests nuclear isn't economical at any scale once active subsidies are out. Current nuclear power plants under construction in the US or Europe, or recently completed there add more than evidence for high cost and major overruns to the pile.
Of course, one can go all conspiracy and claim that's only because of the deep anti-atom lobby, and because the cheap SMRs have always been torpedoed, or because Thorium molten salt reactors have been secretly killed by the military-industrial complex or whatever.
Occam's razor makes me think though, could it just be that nuclear was, is, and likely, at least for quite a while still, will be just so friggin' expensive that pretty much any "alternative" is more economical?
(back-of-envelope calcs say that if ~1.5GW electric from a new nuclear power plant cost ~20..40G$ to build .. between ~13..28$/W ... solar is <1$/W, there's a lot of spare change for batteries in that. Ok, that's pub talk. Still, if I have influence where my money goes, I'd only grudgingly accept nuclear for base load, subsidised as needed. Economics say, build what's cheap capex to build and then gives zero-opex energy when "running". There's no economic alternative to the "alternatives")
The US decision to abandon thorium cycle research wasn't particularly secret. It wasn't some conspiracy, just a policy decision on where to invest DOE money to get the most "bang" for the buck (literally, since plutonium production was part of the reasoning). It made sense at the time, but the decision was never reviewed after Carter's anti-reprocessing policies went into place.
And if economics were the only hurdle for SMRs, the arctic would be full of them. Flying in diesel or jet fuel to run generators is expensive as hell.
As far as the anti-atom lobby, they're like right there, out in the open, proud of what they do and vocal about it. It's no conspiracy.
Economics is a reason for the lack of nuclear after the 80s, but it's far from the only one.