> “People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said. It's still a valid criticism if:

> “People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said. It's still a valid criticism if: - They could get those high interest rates from the return on other capital projects (nuclear less return than something else) - All externalities are included in costs We only have so much labor/material/energy available, and we do have to have some way of allocating them to the things with the most return. The big issue, obviously, is that tons and tons of negative externalities aren't priced in to most economic endeavors, that might make fission look a lot better. It might make it look a lot worse. Personally I'm hoping Elon/Mackenzie/Gates/Buffet/etc decide to throw a few dozen billion at fusion. I think its time truly is nigh. If you haven't watched this yet, it's definitely worth your time. Rather than being a super opinionated think-piece, it instead does a fantastic job walking the viewer through: - high level nuclear fusion engineering performance curves / the engineering design contraint space - the current state of nuclear fusion research (as of 5 years ago) and - breaks down why some new smaller reactors will likely begin construction soon and counter-intuitively, the most recently started ones may be completed before a fusion reactor that first broke ground 25 years ago and is still very much being actively built https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 Also worth noting that interesting things happen when you assume you can have "large" amounts of low-externality energy. Things like "we could use a ton of this energy to remove dispersed pollutants from the atmosphere/groundwater"... things which are very, very, very impractical if you have a limited amount of energy, or if your energy sources have their own negative externalities.