-
Solar used to be too expensive until we dumped resources and incentives into it, and scaled up manufacturing. Nuclear is expensive partly because there has been so little nuclear development or research in the last several decades.
For example nuclear energy has been working well in France since the 80s - 68% of their generation is nuclear making their carbon emissions far lower than other countries, and they recycle nuclear fuel. But declining resources being put into nuclear means that they didn't keep up with building new reactors so they are currently building the first new reactor in many years. That project is way over budget, and over its time estimate because the people with expertise building these things have retired, and the industries supporting reactor construction dried up. But now France is planning to build 6-14 new reactors so we will see if costs come down as experience and supporting industry ramp up.
To fully replace fossil fuels renewables require energy storage or supergrids which are in a promising-but-hypothetical state at the necessary scale. Meanwhile nuclear is a proven baseload producer - renewables + nuclear could provide all our energy needs. We should absolutely pursue energy storage and supergrids with all available resources. This is a time when we need to do all that things that can help us get to zero carbon. IMO that includes nuclear alongside the other options.
-
"Why we should continue burning fossil fuels as long as we can while we trying to figure out energy storage solution. Sure it might never come, or we might boil the oceans before we figure it out, but on the upside the government will save a bit of money, and saving money is what's important."
-
New nuclear takes about 15 years to get built. Time is not an argument in favor of nuclear
-
New energy storage facility capable of storing enough energy to keep a small city going through the night takes [NaN] to build. Because it doesn't exist. There is a number of probable solutions that might need to nowhere, and if they don't, they need unknown amount of years to even go to the first commercial prototype. All the while we will be burning foccil fuels and enriching the same people who brought us to this mess.
Moreover, 15 years is a time to build your first nuclear power plant if you are in isolation and you start from fundament recearch. Thankfully the world is interconnected, and the engineering of the regular nuclear plant was perfected decades before you were born, so I strongly suspect the time will be way better.
It will be expensive, way more expensive than continue to burn oil, and shareholders of oil companies will be very unhappy. But I hope I don't need to tell you why it's not a good argument
-
-
