[pravus]

> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.

That's why we aren't getting nuclear right now. Once the regulatory hurdles come down and all of these questions get answers it'll be clear how to make a return on nuclear investment and that will attract investors.

Also, solar (and all other "renewables") are only quick to build assuming you have raw materials. We are probably going to be hitting a raw materials crunch soon because virtually all new technology is pulling from the same resource pool (copper, molybdenum, nickel) and cheap extraction is effectively gone.

Also, from an investment point of view, I'm not sure why you'd prefer a more volatile commodity. All commodity markets were set up to reduce volatility and base-load power is a huge reduction of electric grid volatility. You are telling me you'd prefer a world where you have intermittent failures because you could set it up more quickly than have reliable, constant, always-on base power for cooling/heating, food, hospitals, etc. Most people think that's a bad trade-off, hence the desire to have nuclear become the base-load provider fuel of choice.

[tremon]

Also, the more the personal transportation fleet electrifies, the more electricity we will need during the night/evening: everyone will want their car/bike/scooter/autogyro ready for commuting in the morning.

[asadotzler]

Transportation charging at night will be a drop in the ocean, something like 10-15% of our total energy needs, much of it happening during the day time. If half of vehicles are charging for a few hours of the night night, that's a couple percent of night time demand coming from transportation. A couple percent, maybe maxing at 3-5%, will be far less of a worry than the double digits required by home heating and electricity or industry or agricultural needs.

[Qwertious]

Yet another reason we need more trains. Trains don't need batteries, and are far more efficient than cars anyway.

[pydry]

The regulatory hurdles are already low enough and nuclear is usually lavished with subsidies and good PR as well. This is because it shares a lot of the costs of running a nuclear-military industrial complex.

Baseload with 5x the LCOE of intermittent sources that takes 10-15x as long to build just isnt valuable to civvies when there are plenty of cheap enough storage options.

It's valuable to the military though.

[Qwertious]

It's not 5x, it's more like double AFAICT. Which isn't great, but compares reasonably to fossil fuels once you factor in greenhouse emissions.

It shouldn't be the default, but it has plenty of niches where it's clearly the best choice - for instance, in Japan/Korea/etc where the bulk of their energy is imported liquefied natural gas. There's very little space to build solar/wind and so nuclear makes a lot of sense there.