> Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale. Do we really know the real costs?

> Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale. Do we really know the real costs? How many countries outside of Canada has designed and built reactor cores without a nuclear weapons programme? How do you untangle the huge amount of money poured into nuclear weapons programmes from nuclear energy? Do you account for education/training of nuclear engineers and scientists? I know what you'll say - that we must account for it with the alternatives too. But those educations are more general purpose, so it's not directly comparable. You don't need to educate lots of "wind power scientists" to continue to scale wind power, and their education wouldn't be wasted if it turned out that wind power reached a dead end. The costs of future nuclear power is absolutely hypothetical costs. You simply can't just magically reproduce the exact same conditions as the mid/late 1900s. At the very least, I'm sure that most countries will demand reactors that are fundamentally more safe than the reactors built during the golden area of nuclear power. So the reactor technology will not be the same. You might call it irrational, and I'd be inclined to agree. Most reactors of that era was incredibly safe. But you can't wish away human irrationality. Maybe you can educate people, but not without massive resources poured into education and public relations. Add that to the indirect costs. We don't have strong government countries in the west anymore, governments that can just push through huge multi-decade bets like that. And I don't see any chance of that changing. So the most likely path for a nuclear renaissance is through small modular reactors, since you might find applications with shorter return on investments, and then gradually scale it up. But that's a a fundamentally different model from the golden area of nuclear power, so historical lessons about costs do not apply.