[yholio]

Nuclear had roughly 60 years to deliver clean, cheap and reliable energy. If it did all that, no amount of green lobby could have derailed it. Unfortunately, and I feel that deeply as an engineer, it did not achieve those goals.

What we have currently have are slightly evolved designs over those of the 60s, which are fantastically expensive, take up to a decade to build and three more decades to recover investment, and present a large economic failure risk - see the Nukegate fiasco. No sane financial investor wants to approach nuclear, no one wants to insure it, so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states.

Yes, we had a window in the last 20 years to reinvent fission, have new, secure and cheap reactors which cannot proliferate, are passively safe and fast to deploy. The industry and regulators remained paralyzed, structurally risk averse. That window has now closed.

Renewables are cheaper then nuclear, fast to come online and have very low risk. Storage is quickly dropping in price. Together, storage and renewables, coupled with a smart grid, will be able to cover more and more of the demand and require fossils to be fired less and less. It does not matter if you go fosil for a whole week in a year where there is no sun, wind or rain, that's still only 2% of the production and you can use very expensive mitigations like CCS, as long as you have cheap renewables in the rest of the time.

[Juliate]

I don't know where you're from, but in France, we did it.

Electricity was, and is still, rather clean, and cheap, and reliable, thanks to nuclear (see https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR ).

And the most striking example of that is how terrifying the rise of cost of electricty is coming ahead for consumers and enterprises, mainly because of other energy sources, rather than because of nuclear itself.

Renewables are all nice and thanks (and definitely to grow and improve), but they cannot, from a long way, deliver the sheer and stable massive amount of base energy that nuclear can.

Without monstruously large storage capacities that we don't have today, cutting ourselves from nuclear is a civilisational collapse guarantee.

[Gwypaas]

Government subsidized.

> In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.[47][48][49]

> As of 2015, France's household electricity price, excluding taxation, is the 12th cheapest amongst the 28 member European Union and the second-cheapest to industrial consumers.[50] The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.[51]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Manage...

[WithinReason]

France did it

[yholio]

"so the only ones willing to eat the risk are states."

Sure, if you can cook the accounting books to pay for a military nuclear industry, and also get a civil sector that has no need to pay for capital, insurance and cleanup. I doubt it's a scalable model, and France had its own share of fuckups and close calls.

[DrBazza]

In the UK, every single time there's been a proposal for a reactor, there are local protests, and CND/Greenpeace turn up en masse. There's been no opportunity to deliver 'cheap' energy in terms of up-front cost, because there are so many artificial hoops to jump through - legislation, planning, and so on.

As for clean and reliable. No CO2 right? And the nuclear power stations in the UK pretty much have run continuously since they were switched on, so I'm not sure what 'reliable' means here.