Cost, not safety, is the reason that nuclear is not really going to be part of getting to a carbon neutral energy sector. We need to shift a few PWH of electric

Cost, not safety, is the reason that nuclear is not really going to be part of getting to a carbon neutral energy sector. We need to shift a few PWH of electricity production away from (mostly) fossil fuel based energy generation world wide. That's going to take a few decades. Most of the planned new capacity is solar and wind based at a cost that basically is an order of magnitude lower than the typical nuclear setup (just to even build them). The total global nuclear capacity is about 400GW. Or about 3.5PWH/year. The total electricity production is around 25PWH/year. We'd need about 7x more to come close to what we need (discounting market growth). 10x to play it safe. Probably more long term. The cumulative investment for that existing capacity is trillions of dollars spread out over many decades. Off shore wind on the other hand is basically very scalable. A couple of million per turbine (4-5). There are some turbines coming to the market with a 20MW capacity. Let say they cost 5M each (nice round number). 50 of those is basically a GW. And would cost about 250M. Most modern nuclear plants manage a few GW at best and the tend to cost tens of billions of dollars. About 20000 turbines would match existing nuclear capacity. Of course they don't operate at peak performance all the time. So lets call it 30000 turbines. Times 10 is about 300000 turbines. Or about 1,500,000,000,000 $. 1.5 Trillion $ would be the cost of getting to 25PWH production. They last about 25 years. So we'd need to spend about 60 billion per year on adding new capacity to replace the existing capacity. Sounds doable to me. Just last year, about 260GW of wind power was added. The amount of new nuclear capacity was probably closer to 5GW. Do the math. Nuclear is not going to matter. The cost just does not add up.