4 ms·

Because it works, today. Sure, it's hard to build and expensive, but that's much better than being nonexistent as grid-scale "green" technology is today.

• epistasis 5y ago
  I think you've got that reversed. Grid scale wind solar and storage are dominating all new equipment on the grid. Check out the interconnection queue for ERCOT or PJM, the few competitive markets where there's public information like that, and where the choices are made purely based on profit, rather than the preferred whims of crafty utility executives that get guaranteed profits and don't have to pay for bad capital allocations. In contrast, new nuclear is nearly impossible to build. Nobody even wants to attempt to build it unless they get massive blank checks from governments to backstop all the massive cost overruns. Even China, the one country that has the capability to build big things still, is only building a tiny tiny fraction of nuclear in comparison to their massive renewables builds. Building new nuclear in the UK means either going with designs that have proven to be very difficult to construct, like the EPR, or going with completely unproven SMR designs, that are the last ditch effort to save nuclear as an energy source.