3 ms·

It'll become politically inevitable as this climate catastrophe proceeds.

• tfourb 3y ago
  I doubt that. A couple of reasons: 1) just based on real world observation. The country with the most ambitious nuclear power buildout program is China. It has the perfect combination of incentives: nuclear power is needed to maintain status as a nuclear weapons power, it needs to expand its energy production dramatically while at the same time limiting CO2 emissions, nuclear fuel is a domestic resource and they have a domestic nuclear industry and a generally quite innovative tech sector. But even China only plans to produce 7.7% of its electricity output from nuclear in 2035, barely more than now, while renewables are slated to expand dramatically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China EDIT: China also doesn't need to worry about domestic political backlash to new nuclear construction. 2) cost and political risk. There is not a single privately owned or listed company in the world that is willing to take on the risk and cost of building a substantial nuclear reactor. And governments are not keen on spending billions of dollars on potential boondoggles either. In comparison, renewable power generation is already cost-effective and can be built out rapidly with available technologies. If you want more, you can simply spend more. Energy storage is somewhat unsolved, true, but you can probably get 90% of where you need to go in terms of climate change mitigation with existing energy storage technology, while nuclear has no viable financial or political path to your goal at all.