Giving nuclear power access to the same clean energy subsidies as solar/wind seems like common sense policy that all sides can agree on, at the very least. Saf

Giving nuclear power access to the same clean energy subsidies as solar/wind seems like common sense policy that all sides can agree on, at the very least. Safety regulations are extraordinarily robust one-way ratchets so the price of nuclear power will probably be forever burdened by excessive regulation*, which is unfortunate. I do believe if nuclear power is pursued it will quickly benefit from many of the economies of scale and technological advancements that have been seen renewable power, especially solar - although whether this will be enough to counter-balance safety regulation costs is unclear, leaning towards pessimistic. Unfortunately, the strongest argument against nuclear power is simply that its time has passed. The ‘window’ for nuclear power opened in the 1960s, and it closes forever when battery technology gets good enough to cover baseload/offpeak requirements using stored solar power. If we assume that’s 20 years away, we can conclude that nuclear power has squandered three quarters of its ‘window’ (this is a more conservative estimate than you might think - recently the entire state of South Australia has posted several seven- and ten-day runs of solar and wind providing 100% of power needs, partly due to hundreds of megawatts of large battery storage). On the topic of Australia, incidentally, one of my hobby horses is for Australia to become a ‘nuclear fuel superpower’ country. It is estimated that we have almost a quarter of the planet’s total uranium deposits, and we have a significant mining industry capable of extracting it, even after its decline from its former vibrancy. All we are really missing is a significant nuclear fuel processing industry, we instead simply export mined nuclear ore. We will probably never be a nuclear power superpower (nuclear power plants are banned in every state and territory), but it is still quite practical for us to become an ethical and trusted supplier of nuclear fuel to first-world countries pursuing nuclear power, relieving them of their dependency on Russian nuclear fuel. *: It is possible to perform low-touch retrofitting of most (base load) coal power plants by simply replacing their coal-burning heat source with a nuclear heat source, leaving every other part of the power generation and transmission infrastructure in place. The plant would produce the same power output, but cut emissions by ~100%. However if you did do this, the retrofitted plant would immediately be forced to close, because the radiation levels from prior years of coal-burning pollution would already exceed some regulated standards for nuclear power plants. I have seen estimates that living in the shadow of a coal plant is roughly 0.1 mSv while living in the shadow of a nuclear plant is roughly 0.02 mSv - both well below the 1 mSv exposure limit, which is in turn well below the total radiation load of ~3 mSv natural background and ~3 mSv manmade radiation experienced by an average US citizen in an average year.