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None of those technologies has ever been cheap exactly. It always costs someone a lot of money. But because it is desirable it can be justified. Nuclear powe

• bborud 4y ago
  Lots of technologies have gone from "not cheap" to dirt cheap in my lifetime so this isn't really an argument. Let me give you an example. Right now I have at least half a dozen 6-9 channel IMUs on my person. Most of which cost from a couple of dollars to a few cents apiece. When I was a kid a much less precise IMU could cost more than a decent car. If you asked people who worked on equipment containing IMUs back then they would probably not have predicted today's price point and the fact that billions of these devices are owned by people of all levels of wealth. Before the advent of MEMS devices, cheap chip manufacturing and a mobile market to drive up volumes and drive down costs it was fairly hard to envision that you could make a decent precision IMU and make a profit selling it for pocket change. In fact, when I was a kid, nobody very few people who ran numbers really believed that mobile phones could be had for less money than a dinner at a not-even-fantastic-restaurant within our lifetime. If you are to argue that something can't happen, you kind of have to find compelling argument rooted in fundamental limitations. I don't think fission is ever going to be cheap as it deals with materials that are tricky. But I'm not ready to make the assumption that they can't be made cheaper per kWh than, say wind or solar (as you have to combine these with storage to solve the same problem).
  • 7952 4y ago
    The kind of investment you see in those areas is not because the technology is amazing value for money (although it is), but because of the extrinsic value to a user. An iPhone or a Tesla is a very different value proposition than a landline phone or a petrol car. But nuclear power does not give that kind of value to a user. The product is perfectly fungible with other sources. That makes it harder to bootstrap an industry. These kind of technological jumps forward require lots of different factors to align. We absolutely should be optimistic and maybe nuclear can differentiate itself. But it is really not the same as an iPhone. An absolutely collosal amount of money went into the supply chain that makes a modern phone possible. That was not done because having IMUs in your pocket is amazing.
    • bborud 4y ago
      > But nuclear power does not give that kind of value to a user That wasn't the point. The point is that right now people can't even envision that nuclear can be done more efficiently because there isn't being invested much in nuclear. Just as people couldn't imagine cheap IMUs or electrical cars that were actually as good, and often better, than cars with combustion engines. It was an observation about people. Not things. If you look at the current energy crisis in Europe, that's one of those wakeup calls that could, and should, change our awareness of energy mix. Even before the Ukraine war, Europe was heading for an energy crisis because it was not investing enough in constant power sources. Focus has been on renewables, which is well and good, but wind and solar are intermittent. And as Norway is discovering, with changing weather patterns, hydroelectric becomes a challenge as well. To illustrate how serious the crisis is: a lot of businesses are energy intensive. For instance a grocery store requires enormous amounts of cooling. Bakeries require electricity to drive huge ovens. Some of these businesses see nearly an order of magnitude higher electricity costs. There are farms where crops get plowed into the ground because farmers can't afford the energy to process the produce and bring it to market. This doesn't scare people nearly as much as it should. So the value is rather obvious at this point.