I'm 100% convinced there is an oil/coal lobby conspiracy here. Nuclear used to cost $3000/kw in the fucking 80s, still does in China.
America needs 700GW of Nuclear power for 100% nuclear energy AND to charge EVs. That's just $2.1 trillion to COMPLETELY decarbonize both energy and transport. That's 3 years of military budget, we could have done this 40 years ago :agony-consuming:
For the UK, even assuming a conservative $5k/kW cost of construction, it would cost $250 billion to fully nuclearize the electricity grid. That's 1% of the GDP over 10 years. This 1-2% over 10-15 years figure applies more or less to all developed countries.
There is ample evidence of coal/oil interests frustrating nuclear power construction through sockpuppet environmental NGOs, lobbying to hamper nuclear development, anti-nuclear propaganda etc.
Here are 5 reasons why capital doesn't want nuclear:
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Nuclear is structurally unprofitable. It requires massive initial capital investment, and there are very little running costs to profit from. Nuclear power has never been profitable anywhere, BUT IT DOESNT MATTER. It is still massively beneficial to humanity. It is living proof that profitability is not the only metric for a better society, and in fact can actively hamper building a better society.
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Nuclear lasts 60-80 years, modern designs could even last 100 years. Coal, Oil and even wind turbines, solar, need continual gradual replacement. See why fossil interests support wind and solar, and oppose nuclear? It's better for them to have a constant stream of revenue. :capitalist-laugh:
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Virtually all reactors are owned by the state, for reasons of profitability. Nuclear is a socialist source of power, private corporations HATE that! There is a reason why China is going all in on nuclear. The Soviet Union also was planning on making nuclear it's primary source.
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Resource extraction industries also extract rent, i.e super profits (according to Ricardian theory of differential rent). Uranium is a tiny fraction of nuclear costs, can't have that, gotta get that oil/coal/gas rent.
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Solar/Wind requires trillions in energy storage, that's another massive cost to humanity, but for capital - a massive source of profit :capitalist:
Edit : China built a 6000MW nuclear power plant for $10 billion. At that cost, it would cost USA just $1.2 trillion to go full nuclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangjiang_Nuclear_Power_Station
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Nuclear also requires fuel extraction by mining, and also a ton of concrete.
More to the point it really need a lot of up front money. Only the people you don’t like can pay for nuclear, and by the time those plants have finished being built it’ll be too late.
it takes like 5-8 years to build modern nuclear plants, that's not too late at all
Are we going to start building 120 nuclear plants in the next 3-5 years?
are we going to start invading every poor country with lithium on the planet, genociding their population, and using them as slaves for building tens of billions of solar panels in the next 3-5 years? i sure hope not.
You have to mine for the materials to do nuclear power, and solar panels don't require lithium. Solar panels actually seem pretty simple in terms of materials (aluminum,. glass, silicon). Sure storing energy is a problem, but that will have to be tackled no matter what, and solar panels can at least be placed anywhere including on buildings, which means energy travels less distance, etc.
solar panels certainly do require lithium if you want to power things at night time
There's also development of alternative energy storage like gravity based storage. They only have to store the energy that will be used during the night, and there's always wind and other forms of renewable energy that can further reduce energy storage needs (at least I think that's how it works).
reddit voice Lithium is for the batteries, but yeah I appreciate your point. Energy storage is a different and equally irritating problem. That said, same thing with mining happens for uranium and other needed materials for nuclear.
There’s problems with every method, but pretending nuclear is the best one doesn’t help anyone. There’s been one nuclear plant built in the US in the last 25 years.
to much lesser degree, though. and mining uranium is not the ideal for the vast majority of countries, there are other fissile materials that are more common
no but we could build a few dozen while also massively expanding wind and solar energy, I don't think our whole energy supply should be nuclear because the world only has like 80ish years of uranium left for nuclear power and expanding the amount of nuclear energy used will reduce that obviously, but we can definitely up our nuclear energy usage alot from what it is now
Yeah that’s fine, a few is helpful sure. But OP is saying 1.2T to make the US all nuclear? I’ve posted elsewhere in the thread the pros and cons of nuclear and how it needs to be looked at critically for a bunch of reasons. Mainly I’m arguing because leftists need to shed themselves of this monolithic techbro solution in nuclear.
dont need uranium for it, there are other options which are far more abundant
Per capita, nuclear results in less deaths than solar. It's not too late, we can build both nuclear and solar/wind together. China and South Korea solved the cost problem through standardization, economy of scale and removing political bottlenecks ike being forced to accept high interest rates
Yeah and sharks are less deadly than vending machines but there are some factors that obscure why.
Long term nuclear may be a good idea, but it won’t help us wrt the IPCC report when it takes at least 10 years to get a plant online. We need faster solutions to realistically staunch the bleeding.
SK is weird and China is not really a capitalist country either, which is part of my larger point. Responsible and ideal nuclear power requires political and economic reform.
It's already too late, we can do nuclear as a long term option as well as more short term options
Do you want to go into the dark future relying on Virgin Nuclear(R) to power the oxygen scrubbers though?