Renewables are scaling at 15% a year, storage is scaling at 20% per year. Nuclear has not scaled because scaling requires fast iterative development cycles tha

Renewables are scaling at 15% a year, storage is scaling at 20% per year. Nuclear has not scaled because scaling requires fast iterative development cycles that allow learnings that decrease cost. Because nuclear plants are enormous you can only build a few at a time and design changes are super risky because billions of dollars are at stake. An R&D line for solar cells is cheap to run and enables rapid cost efficiency. Batteries are even easier to scale at the moment because we are nowhere near the theoretical limits of those technologies and it's easy for material chemists to experiment with new ideas for only a few thousand dollars. Today it may seem like there is a case for nuclear, but in ten years even existing nuclear plants will be uneconomical because electricity will be zero cost while the sun is out. Instead of being able to sell their power 24 hours a day they will only make money for a declining part of the day. This profitable period will continue to shrink as batteries get cheaper allowing for the arbitrage of electricity stored while the sun is out. This financial reality is the real reason no one will ever build another nuclear plant in the US.