Comment by jl6
16 hours ago
I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.
nuclear is a great option for ice breakers & submarines.
in a connected grid nuclear cannot economically compete against solar (which pushes the cost of daytime energy to effectively 0€) so it has to be heavily subsided, which raises the cost for everyone. a euro spent on nuclear is a euro not spent on batteries or hydrogen production
When it comes to Italy however, nuclear does not fit that niche of a plausible technology.
Finland? Sure! Italy has far better, cheaper, routes.
because certain political parties have made energy technologies part of their identities, which is... stupid.
>massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather.
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
Building nuclear today in the energy field is like building tanks in military whereis solar is like drones - i.e. we have choice between 2 classic paradigms - very limited vertical scalability with extremely costly units vs. unlimited horizontal scalability of extremely cheap units.