Why is my view of the state of industry with concrete, affordable renewable energy technologies that are already available for purchase and rapidly scaling up just by market forces wishful? Why isn’t your belief that nuclear will suddenly buck it’s 50+ year trend of always being extremely expensive at least as wishful?
Not all production needs to be economic, mind you. It’s fine for the state to pursue an expensive technology because it has some other benefit, and there are concrete benefits of nuclear – specifically how firm it is, to the point where it’s basically irresponsible to ever curtail it or adjust production based on grid demand. But capital isn’t infinite and these tradeoffs need to be considered very seriously. On the flip side, spend five minutes searching for what the Georgia PSC has to say about the two new AP1000s at Vogtle. They are not happy at all about the cost overruns and failures. Would the next reactor cost less? Probably… so long as it starts construction soon before those couple thousand of newly-trained workers all find new jobs and progress is lost, as usually happens. But it won’t, because no one wants to feel like the next sucker.
I’m totally pragmatic about this. It nuclear stops being ludicrously expensive, we definitely ought to pursue it. And if a new technology shows actual evidence and promise of making it more affordable, it’s worth the R&D. But at least so far, it shows no signs of doing so. It’s definitely not going to keep following the nearly Moore’s Law-like learning curve solar has been on. The french are uniquely good at building reactors because of their long history and even still they are clearly signaling in e.g., their NECP plan that renewables are the primary technology of their future. They’re pretty much the best in the world at it and they’re still plainly chasing solar because of its affordability.
Nuclear is really just metal in a big water tank. The cost comes from trying to maximize safety. It can be cheap if we mass produce it. People are pretty much engaging in special pleading every time they declare nuclear to be uneconomical.
If you really believe that, then you’d support nuclear power. It is extremely safe these days and is a much better option than to deal with more climate change. You want more options, not less options, in this fight.
Why is my view of the state of industry with concrete, affordable renewable energy technologies that are already available for purchase and rapidly scaling up just by market forces wishful? Why isn’t your belief that nuclear will suddenly buck it’s 50+ year trend of always being extremely expensive at least as wishful?
Not all production needs to be economic, mind you. It’s fine for the state to pursue an expensive technology because it has some other benefit, and there are concrete benefits of nuclear – specifically how firm it is, to the point where it’s basically irresponsible to ever curtail it or adjust production based on grid demand. But capital isn’t infinite and these tradeoffs need to be considered very seriously. On the flip side, spend five minutes searching for what the Georgia PSC has to say about the two new AP1000s at Vogtle. They are not happy at all about the cost overruns and failures. Would the next reactor cost less? Probably… so long as it starts construction soon before those couple thousand of newly-trained workers all find new jobs and progress is lost, as usually happens. But it won’t, because no one wants to feel like the next sucker.
I’m totally pragmatic about this. It nuclear stops being ludicrously expensive, we definitely ought to pursue it. And if a new technology shows actual evidence and promise of making it more affordable, it’s worth the R&D. But at least so far, it shows no signs of doing so. It’s definitely not going to keep following the nearly Moore’s Law-like learning curve solar has been on. The french are uniquely good at building reactors because of their long history and even still they are clearly signaling in e.g., their NECP plan that renewables are the primary technology of their future. They’re pretty much the best in the world at it and they’re still plainly chasing solar because of its affordability.
Nuclear is really just metal in a big water tank. The cost comes from trying to maximize safety. It can be cheap if we mass produce it. People are pretty much engaging in special pleading every time they declare nuclear to be uneconomical.
If you really believe that, then you’d support nuclear power. It is extremely safe these days and is a much better option than to deal with more climate change. You want more options, not less options, in this fight.