Comment by pfdietz
7 days ago
Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession".
The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs.
You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav Smil. But Smil used this argument to massively mispredict how solar would be go in the market. We don't hear him much anymore.
Nuclear advocates increasingly resort to conspiracy theoretic reasoning to explain away the failure of their technology to compete. This should be a red flag.
> The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive.
France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry.
We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.
We don't actually know how much that cost France, sine it was mixed in with their military nuclear effort. French auditors threw up their hands trying to figure out the actual costs.
What we do know is their attempt to build more NPPs now has gone spectacularly tits up, with costs completely out of control. This should make one view their earlier efforts with great suspicion. Have they become much worse, or were earlier problems concealed?
Costs are out of control due to nuclear regulation.
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> moving up the tech tree of civilization
Life isn't Civ 6, there is no tech tree to climb.
Incorrect. Compare Bangladesh to the United States.
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>The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive
I have a solution, take the subsidies spent on "renewables" and put them into nuclear! Easy peasy!
Too late, governments have already subsidized nuclear more than they've subsidized renewables.
Renewables have shown excellent experience effects. These effects are a kind of positive externality: improvements in the technology become available generally to future consumers. It makes sense to subsidize positive externalities, just as it makes sense to penalize negative ones.
If nuclear had shown good experience effects it too would have merited its subsidies. Unfortunately it hasn't done that.