> Yes yes. Renewable proponents really love trotting out costs while ignoring the only reason costs have gone up is because we significantly ramped down our nuc

> Yes yes. Renewable proponents really love trotting out costs while ignoring the only reason costs have gone up is because we significantly ramped down our nuclear production efforts. Same would happen if we did that for solar. But that’s a choice we get to make. The huge difference here is that each individual nuclear power station is a megaproject while solar panels are mass manufactured items produced in the hundreds of millions per year. > Also nuclear construction costs are particularly outsized in the US where regulations are intentionally constructed to strangle it. Japan, China, and Europe build it much more cheaply. Europe is not building new nuclear cheaply or quickly either. All three EPR projects in Europe are hugely over budget (at least $10B per reactor) and more than a decade behind schedule. China has been able to build new nuclear more quickly but the factors that make building new nuclear faster in China also make building new renewables faster: "Every year, the combination of wind and solar, and usually both individually, outstripped new nuclear generation, both in raw nameplate capacity and in additional TWh of annual generation." https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-trend-upward-while-nuclear-trends-flat/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre... > Denmark is an absolute best case because they are geographically advantaged for wind. Wind is much more resilient and cheaper than solar but is also more geography dependent. Fission can be installed anywhere. Onshore wind and utility scale solar seem to be pretty similar cost-wise now, which is cheaper will depend on the site. Northern Europe is really bad for solar given the northerly latitude, but southern Europe and the US are far more suited to it. Offshore wind is expensive for renewables though getting cheaper. It's now about the same cost as gas (before prices went up when Russia invaded Ukraine) in Europe and under half the cost of new nuclear. > Got any existence proof for this claim? We’re building renewables as fast as we can and countries seem to generally tap out at ~20% ammortized across the year and are growing extremely slowly (~1% each year). Between 2000 and 2020 renewables went from 2.8% to 43.1% of UK generation. It's being built at 2% a year. That's about 25% in the time it takes to build a new nuclear reactor. China is increasing the percentage of both solar and wind in its energy mix by about 1% each per year (much faster than nuclear.) In 10 years wind and nuclear have gone from neck and neck to wind being almost double, while solar has gone from nothing to neck and neck with nuclear. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time=2012..latest&country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time... > By comparison France runs 90% carbon free and that’s because of their nuclear grid. I pretty much lost hope in nuclear when it turned out even the French can't build it cost effectively anymore. 20 years ago nuclear looked like the only realistic option. Since then nuclear build costs have spiralled while renewables have gotten cheaper and cheaper.