9 ms·

It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy. If they could just be self-suff

It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy. If they could just be self-sufficient with a load of nuclear power plants then they would have less political leverage problems

nicoburns 4y ago
> If they could just be self-sufficient with a load of nuclear power plants Given that most countries don't have a source of uranium, I don't see how this is any better from a geopolitical security perspective.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  From my understanding you don't need a lot of uranium to run reactors for quite a while. That's one of the reason it is such a promising lead.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    An unfortunate part of human cognition is we're pretty bad at assessing small but widespread and constant risks/damages so the impact of pollution pales in comparison to the mental impact of singular events like the various nuclear disasters or near misses we've had between TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima, et al. So they receive outsized push back compared to their actual reduced risk. (Also to be fair when a nuclear disaster does happen it renders an area unusable for a lot longer so the events tend to stick in people's memories) Building them is also unfortunately a many decades long endeavor so we need shorter timeline solutions to bend the curve of climate change. I think a lot of environmentalists have also been burned by long term projects that sit in planning and approval hell for years to decades then get cancelled or funding redirected when a new administration decides to try to make their mark on a project. A similar thing has hampered NASAs Moon and Mars programs where options are pursued and cancelled constantly. SLS is not the first plan for a Moon return NASA has worked on for years it's just the first one that managed to spread the pork around enough to avoid cancellation.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      > Building them is also unfortunately a many decades long endeavor That’s only true now. We used to build them in a few years.
      - rtkwe 4y ago
        That's partially a bureaucratic and political issue but also designs are also much more complex than the were during the glory years.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  You can stock it though, in case foreign countries cut supply short you're not suddendly out of power but instead have time to plan a negotiation or attempt to source it from elsewhere.
  - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
    Not so great when the foreign powers decide to bomb the nuclear reactors though.
    - demindiro 4y ago
      Or cut the cable.
    - diordiderot 4y ago
      Anyone capable of bombing a nuclear reactor in the UK would just nuke the UK so a reactor doesn't really play into it
    - throwaway742 4y ago
      I don't think that's a realistic problem.
- cobaltoxide 4y ago
  At least uranium can be stockpiled.
- AngusH 4y ago
  Uranium is a mineral and can be purchased from many places and stored then used as needed. 15 countries mining it currently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p... There are also more countries with estimated reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r... While an undersea cable requires continuous operation and the agreement from a single country where it starts. If they suddenly decide for whatever reason to turn it off (say they're short of electricity) then the supply is immediately stopped.
  - caf 4y ago
    Equally relevant only 13 countries are fabricating nuclear fuel rods. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/fuel-fabrication.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
    - preisschild 4y ago
      You could use a CANDU PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor) if supply chain safety is that important to you, but don't want an enrichment industry. CANDU reactors can use natural Uranium.
  - belorn 4y ago
    Sweden do have uranium in the ground and could be mining it, but they created a law forbidding it.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The UK presumably does, as it maintains nuclear weapons.
  - WJW 4y ago
    The UK does not mine its own uranium though. There used to be a uranium mine in Cornwall but it stopped mining in 1930. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country)
- pyrale 4y ago
  If the issue is just geopolitical independence, it's easy to stockpile uranium reserves. I believe France has several years worth of uranium stockpiled, so even if relations soured with all of our providers, which are pretty diverse, we would have a few years to react.
NKosmatos 4y ago
I fully agree with nuclear fusion power plants, but there is so much free solar power that is currently being “wasted”. Nuclear fusion reactors are many decades away and hopefully that’s when our global power problems will be (hopefully) solved :-)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
consumer451 4y ago
I very much dislike how these posts often result in a very predicable "but nuclear..." binary argument. Here is a crazy idea: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Try to do both. This project only addresses 8% of UK needs, plenty of room for other sources in the portfolio. How is this a bad thing?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  It depends. Hopefully they source say 150% of requirements and not max them out so that losing 8% takes you yo 142% and not a single led gets dimmed. Redundancy. But I also read how it is hard to stop / start generating power on demand so it might be costly to have so much redundancy.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    You just don’t scale nuclear power up and down. You run at full capacity all of the time outside of maintenance shutdowns. If you shut down or reduce power at all, you essentially have to wait two days to turn back on. There’s a decay chain of isotopes that only stick around a couple of days which are normally burned off by neutrons when the reactor is running which build up when you turn the reactor off. They eat up neutrons making the rector much harder to control until they decay naturally. In order to restart the reactor you essentially have to double the output for a while and slowly very carefully reduce it at just the right rate… and if you make mistakes the reactor melts down. This xenon poisoning was part of the Chernobyl disaster where operator actions and mistakes causing it and then their responses and mechanical failures led to the meltdown. Rectors are just not designed to do this because it’s too risky and complicated to be worth it. So when you stop the reactor it just stays stopped for a couple of days. Similar for any throttling down which I understand is done carefully in some circumstances but absolutely not continually to respond to demand.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      We have perfectly good reactor designs that can go down to half power or even lower without problems, and that's plenty of scaling. And they can scale in real time too. The biggest issue is that it increases the average cost per watt, which is not that big of an issue.
vkou 4y ago
This is exactly why France went all-in on nuclear in the 20th century. (That, and nuclear weapon ambitions.)
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  And learned a very expensive lesson in negative learning by doing. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
  - pyrale 4y ago
    I wouldn't say the lesson was expensive for France, we've enjoyed cheap energy for decades due to this buildup. The conclusion of this study isn't that France made a costly mistake, it is that it is extremely delusional to forecast ever-increasing efficiency gains when deploying a new technology. I wouldn't be surprised if the very same lesson was learned by countries planning to go full-renewable.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Either you pay on the tax bill or electricity bill. France chose tax bill.
      - pyrale 4y ago
        That's an often repeated falsehood. While there are costs shouldered by the public [1][2], they are similar to what any industry gets. In the following, I compare 2013 costs with the 400TWh produced in 2013: * Research costs, which are partly funded by private companies and partly funded by the state. These projects currently don't focus on the current infrastructure but on potential new projects. Same as any domain, before a new industry can exist, there's research to be done. With about 784M€ [2] in 2013, that's just under 2€ per MWh. Spending was always within that order of magnitude ever since 1957. * The surveilance authority is publicly funded, just like any regulatory body. In 2013, it cost about 217M€ [2] which is about 0.5€ per MWh. So, as you can see, the money spent by the state on nuclear energy in 2013 barely registers compared to the power produced by nuclear plants the same year. [1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/thematic_public_report_costs_nuclear_%20power_sector_012012.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/themat... [2] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/20140527_rapport_cout_production_electricite_nucleaire.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/201405..., p. 135-146
frognumber 4y ago
If I were a planner, I'd go for both. Impossible in capitalism or with modern politics, but I planning for failure makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't mind having a power grid support 2x capacity. Same for food, medicine, and general-purpose manufacturing (e.g. machine shops), for that matter.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  The electricity actually _has to_ go _somewhere_. You could make a lot of batteries but double usage every day would build up fast
  - crote 4y ago
    The market will compensate for it. We might end up seeing peaker plants. We might see companies taking advantage of the price difference to cheaply run energy-intensive industry like aluminium smelting. We might see companies trying to take advantage of the price difference by building storage batteries. We might even end up incentivizing consumers to shift their usage patterns by providing cheaper electricity during low-demand periods.
  - frognumber 4y ago
    Power plants can be kept offline.
kinnth 4y ago
The UK in particular has a vast abundance of wind power off it's coasts. It makes more sense to double down with 22bn investment in wind! These solar projects are good to start as they could empower more african nations with cheaper electricty. We just need more electricity everywhere if were going to drop the reliance on oil.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  From what I understand, the UK actually has private companies ready and more than willing to build wind farms with their own money. The government is just inexplicably being slow at handing out the permits.
  - adaml_623 4y ago
    They've (the right wing government) underfunded the government so much there aren't sufficient staff to run the beaucracy. The recent (failed) rocket launch from the UK was massively delayed because of slow government processes
    - diordiderot 4y ago
      They also price energy in a way that props up fossil fuels
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    The market for wind in the UK is unusually profitable due to a quirk of the UK electricity market. Specifically, the power price across the UK is the same everywhere. However, there isn't infinite transmission capacity. So, if you generate power in one place, but the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it, but you still get paid, and you get paid compensation on top. You know what's better than producing power... being paid to produce power, paid extra compensation, and then not need to actually have those wind turbines spinning (so much reduced maintenance too!). The government is delaying lots of permits till they can figure out how to change these perverse incentives... Needless to say, the wind industry isn't happy about the fact they might no longer get paid such large amounts, so they're demanding the old scheme be kept in place for existing producers for 25+ years, and having the new pricing rules only apply to new builds...
micromacrofoot 4y ago
> It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy. Versus going across international borders for most other aspects of their economy? if the UK stopped international trade it would completely collapse anyway.
incone123 4y ago
This planned link is very long distance, but UK is still part of a European power grid: it's normal for power lines to cross national (or State) borders.
nottathrowaway3 4y ago
Some people don't like nuclear power plants and somehow that's more important to them than national/energy security. UK (and France) already have the bomb; going renewable here rather than nuclear has nothing to do with proliferation. I don't see how (for the UK) it's anything except people's feelings are hurt by nuclear power plants. For the rest of Europe maybe it's about proliferation. And maybe economies of scale make tagging along cheaper than local nuclear for Britain.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Pure cost. Paying Hinkley Point C $150/MWh for 35 years is just bonkers waste of money. Flamanville 3 is a similarly amazing project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
  - nottathrowaway3 4y ago
    Average electricity prices (edit/correction: in dense urban areas) in the U.S. are ~$250/mwh https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Which includes the transmission grid. Nuclear costs that, and then you have to build a grid.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Your chart shows residential prices for the total us average ~$140/MWh, not $250/MWh. Plus, this is the total cost including transmission and distribution, which is roughly half the retail cost. Generation costs average less than $70/MWh, including expensive peaking power in the average. You want to compare the £150/MWh to generation costs of the alternatives in the UK, which are a fraction of £150.
      - 4y ago
thrashh 4y ago
Most countries are small and have to choose between being neighborly but dependent or self-sufficient but much more modest. The UK, for example, imports nearly half of its food.
epistasis 4y ago
The UK has been valiantly trying to build new nuclear, but it's hard to find anybody that can do it, and it's unbelievably expensive if it even does get built. I think that there was a narrow window in time where labor costs were low enough for nuclear to make sense, but in more advanced economies, highly labor intensive energy sources, as required by nuclear construction, are no longer viable. Advanced manufacturing capabilities have eclipsed construction technology.
- likecarter 4y ago
  On the money. Nuclear is too expensive and fragile, especially in this political environment. Also much more susceptible to sabotage in the event of a war, which is becoming a more relevant reality.

nicoburns 4y ago

> If they could just be self-sufficient with a load of nuclear power plants Given that most countries don't have a source of uranium, I don't see how this is any better from a geopolitical security perspective.

kneebonian 4y ago
From my understanding you don't need a lot of uranium to run reactors for quite a while. That's one of the reason it is such a promising lead.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  An unfortunate part of human cognition is we're pretty bad at assessing small but widespread and constant risks/damages so the impact of pollution pales in comparison to the mental impact of singular events like the various nuclear disasters or near misses we've had between TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima, et al. So they receive outsized push back compared to their actual reduced risk. (Also to be fair when a nuclear disaster does happen it renders an area unusable for a lot longer so the events tend to stick in people's memories) Building them is also unfortunately a many decades long endeavor so we need shorter timeline solutions to bend the curve of climate change. I think a lot of environmentalists have also been burned by long term projects that sit in planning and approval hell for years to decades then get cancelled or funding redirected when a new administration decides to try to make their mark on a project. A similar thing has hampered NASAs Moon and Mars programs where options are pursued and cancelled constantly. SLS is not the first plan for a Moon return NASA has worked on for years it's just the first one that managed to spread the pork around enough to avoid cancellation.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > Building them is also unfortunately a many decades long endeavor That’s only true now. We used to build them in a few years.
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      That's partially a bureaucratic and political issue but also designs are also much more complex than the were during the glory years.
doodlesdev 4y ago
You can stock it though, in case foreign countries cut supply short you're not suddendly out of power but instead have time to plan a negotiation or attempt to source it from elsewhere.
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
  Not so great when the foreign powers decide to bomb the nuclear reactors though.
  - demindiro 4y ago
    Or cut the cable.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    Anyone capable of bombing a nuclear reactor in the UK would just nuke the UK so a reactor doesn't really play into it
  - throwaway742 4y ago
    I don't think that's a realistic problem.
cobaltoxide 4y ago
At least uranium can be stockpiled.
AngusH 4y ago
Uranium is a mineral and can be purchased from many places and stored then used as needed. 15 countries mining it currently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p... There are also more countries with estimated reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r... While an undersea cable requires continuous operation and the agreement from a single country where it starts. If they suddenly decide for whatever reason to turn it off (say they're short of electricity) then the supply is immediately stopped.
- caf 4y ago
  Equally relevant only 13 countries are fabricating nuclear fuel rods. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/fuel-fabrication.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
  - preisschild 4y ago
    You could use a CANDU PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor) if supply chain safety is that important to you, but don't want an enrichment industry. CANDU reactors can use natural Uranium.
- belorn 4y ago
  Sweden do have uranium in the ground and could be mining it, but they created a law forbidding it.
quickthrower2 4y ago
The UK presumably does, as it maintains nuclear weapons.
- WJW 4y ago
  The UK does not mine its own uranium though. There used to be a uranium mine in Cornwall but it stopped mining in 1930. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country)
pyrale 4y ago
If the issue is just geopolitical independence, it's easy to stockpile uranium reserves. I believe France has several years worth of uranium stockpiled, so even if relations soured with all of our providers, which are pretty diverse, we would have a few years to react.

NKosmatos 4y ago

I fully agree with nuclear fusion power plants, but there is so much free solar power that is currently being “wasted”. Nuclear fusion reactors are many decades away and hopefully that’s when our global power problems will be (hopefully) solved :-)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

consumer451 4y ago

I very much dislike how these posts often result in a very predicable "but nuclear..." binary argument. Here is a crazy idea: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Try to do both. This project only addresses 8% of UK needs, plenty of room for other sources in the portfolio. How is this a bad thing?

quickthrower2 4y ago
It depends. Hopefully they source say 150% of requirements and not max them out so that losing 8% takes you yo 142% and not a single led gets dimmed. Redundancy. But I also read how it is hard to stop / start generating power on demand so it might be costly to have so much redundancy.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  You just don’t scale nuclear power up and down. You run at full capacity all of the time outside of maintenance shutdowns. If you shut down or reduce power at all, you essentially have to wait two days to turn back on. There’s a decay chain of isotopes that only stick around a couple of days which are normally burned off by neutrons when the reactor is running which build up when you turn the reactor off. They eat up neutrons making the rector much harder to control until they decay naturally. In order to restart the reactor you essentially have to double the output for a while and slowly very carefully reduce it at just the right rate… and if you make mistakes the reactor melts down. This xenon poisoning was part of the Chernobyl disaster where operator actions and mistakes causing it and then their responses and mechanical failures led to the meltdown. Rectors are just not designed to do this because it’s too risky and complicated to be worth it. So when you stop the reactor it just stays stopped for a couple of days. Similar for any throttling down which I understand is done carefully in some circumstances but absolutely not continually to respond to demand.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    We have perfectly good reactor designs that can go down to half power or even lower without problems, and that's plenty of scaling. And they can scale in real time too. The biggest issue is that it increases the average cost per watt, which is not that big of an issue.

vkou 4y ago

This is exactly why France went all-in on nuclear in the 20th century. (That, and nuclear weapon ambitions.)

Gwypaas 4y ago
And learned a very expensive lesson in negative learning by doing. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
- pyrale 4y ago
  I wouldn't say the lesson was expensive for France, we've enjoyed cheap energy for decades due to this buildup. The conclusion of this study isn't that France made a costly mistake, it is that it is extremely delusional to forecast ever-increasing efficiency gains when deploying a new technology. I wouldn't be surprised if the very same lesson was learned by countries planning to go full-renewable.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Either you pay on the tax bill or electricity bill. France chose tax bill.
    - pyrale 4y ago
      That's an often repeated falsehood. While there are costs shouldered by the public [1][2], they are similar to what any industry gets. In the following, I compare 2013 costs with the 400TWh produced in 2013: * Research costs, which are partly funded by private companies and partly funded by the state. These projects currently don't focus on the current infrastructure but on potential new projects. Same as any domain, before a new industry can exist, there's research to be done. With about 784M€ [2] in 2013, that's just under 2€ per MWh. Spending was always within that order of magnitude ever since 1957. * The surveilance authority is publicly funded, just like any regulatory body. In 2013, it cost about 217M€ [2] which is about 0.5€ per MWh. So, as you can see, the money spent by the state on nuclear energy in 2013 barely registers compared to the power produced by nuclear plants the same year. [1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/thematic_public_report_costs_nuclear_%20power_sector_012012.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/themat... [2] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/20140527_rapport_cout_production_electricite_nucleaire.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/201405..., p. 135-146

frognumber 4y ago

If I were a planner, I'd go for both. Impossible in capitalism or with modern politics, but I planning for failure makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't mind having a power grid support 2x capacity. Same for food, medicine, and general-purpose manufacturing (e.g. machine shops), for that matter.

diordiderot 4y ago
The electricity actually _has to_ go _somewhere_. You could make a lot of batteries but double usage every day would build up fast
- crote 4y ago
  The market will compensate for it. We might end up seeing peaker plants. We might see companies taking advantage of the price difference to cheaply run energy-intensive industry like aluminium smelting. We might see companies trying to take advantage of the price difference by building storage batteries. We might even end up incentivizing consumers to shift their usage patterns by providing cheaper electricity during low-demand periods.
- frognumber 4y ago
  Power plants can be kept offline.

kinnth 4y ago

The UK in particular has a vast abundance of wind power off it's coasts. It makes more sense to double down with 22bn investment in wind! These solar projects are good to start as they could empower more african nations with cheaper electricty. We just need more electricity everywhere if were going to drop the reliance on oil.

nicoburns 4y ago
From what I understand, the UK actually has private companies ready and more than willing to build wind farms with their own money. The government is just inexplicably being slow at handing out the permits.
- adaml_623 4y ago
  They've (the right wing government) underfunded the government so much there aren't sufficient staff to run the beaucracy. The recent (failed) rocket launch from the UK was massively delayed because of slow government processes
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    They also price energy in a way that props up fossil fuels
- londons_explore 4y ago
  The market for wind in the UK is unusually profitable due to a quirk of the UK electricity market. Specifically, the power price across the UK is the same everywhere. However, there isn't infinite transmission capacity. So, if you generate power in one place, but the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it, but you still get paid, and you get paid compensation on top. You know what's better than producing power... being paid to produce power, paid extra compensation, and then not need to actually have those wind turbines spinning (so much reduced maintenance too!). The government is delaying lots of permits till they can figure out how to change these perverse incentives... Needless to say, the wind industry isn't happy about the fact they might no longer get paid such large amounts, so they're demanding the old scheme be kept in place for existing producers for 25+ years, and having the new pricing rules only apply to new builds...

micromacrofoot 4y ago

> It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy. Versus going across international borders for most other aspects of their economy? if the UK stopped international trade it would completely collapse anyway.

incone123 4y ago

This planned link is very long distance, but UK is still part of a European power grid: it's normal for power lines to cross national (or State) borders.

nottathrowaway3 4y ago

Some people don't like nuclear power plants and somehow that's more important to them than national/energy security. UK (and France) already have the bomb; going renewable here rather than nuclear has nothing to do with proliferation. I don't see how (for the UK) it's anything except people's feelings are hurt by nuclear power plants. For the rest of Europe maybe it's about proliferation. And maybe economies of scale make tagging along cheaper than local nuclear for Britain.

Gwypaas 4y ago
Pure cost. Paying Hinkley Point C $150/MWh for 35 years is just bonkers waste of money. Flamanville 3 is a similarly amazing project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
- nottathrowaway3 4y ago
  Average electricity prices (edit/correction: in dense urban areas) in the U.S. are ~$250/mwh https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Which includes the transmission grid. Nuclear costs that, and then you have to build a grid.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Your chart shows residential prices for the total us average ~$140/MWh, not $250/MWh. Plus, this is the total cost including transmission and distribution, which is roughly half the retail cost. Generation costs average less than $70/MWh, including expensive peaking power in the average. You want to compare the £150/MWh to generation costs of the alternatives in the UK, which are a fraction of £150.
    - 4y ago

thrashh 4y ago

Most countries are small and have to choose between being neighborly but dependent or self-sufficient but much more modest. The UK, for example, imports nearly half of its food.

epistasis 4y ago

The UK has been valiantly trying to build new nuclear, but it's hard to find anybody that can do it, and it's unbelievably expensive if it even does get built. I think that there was a narrow window in time where labor costs were low enough for nuclear to make sense, but in more advanced economies, highly labor intensive energy sources, as required by nuclear construction, are no longer viable. Advanced manufacturing capabilities have eclipsed construction technology.

likecarter 4y ago
On the money. Nuclear is too expensive and fragile, especially in this political environment. Also much more susceptible to sabotage in the event of a war, which is becoming a more relevant reality.