Comment by dyauspitr
7 hours ago
Yeah, nuclear is fine. It just at this point it can’t really compete with solar+battery for how quickly you can bring things online. The 10 or 15 years required to build a nuclear plant is pretty devastating for it when you can build up solar in 1-2 years instead.
It also can't compete on cost. Nuclear is crazy expensive and prone to cost overruns, so no market party is willing to build it without the government taking on all of the financial risks. And with the rapidly evolving power landscape the long payback time only makes things worse.
That's the most depressing thing. Nuclear has been successfuly overregulated.
It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.
Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
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If you deregulated it and made it pay for its own disaster insurance it would stop existing.
Without price anderson act dumping the liability on to taxpayers nobody would build nuclear reactors even at the cost they are.
A completely predictable outcome of being under regulated and having several disastrous outcomes.
Unfortunate, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.