But investing in wind, solar and storage would be much cheaper still. The fukushima cleanup effort has cost close to $100 billion. Imagine where we could take renewable and energy storag tech with that level of investment.

Just looked up some numbers from Wikipedia:

"Japan had 282 GW of total installed electricity generating capacity in 2010"

"A 2010 study by the Japanese government (pre-Fukushima disaster), called the Energy White Paper,[citation needed] concluded the cost for kilowatt hour was ¥49 for solar, ¥10 to ¥14 for wind, and ¥5 or ¥6 for nuclear power.

Masayoshi Son, an advocate for renewable energy, however, has pointed out that the government estimates for nuclear power did not include the costs for reprocessing the fuel or disaster insurance liability. Son estimated that if these costs were included, the cost of nuclear power was about the same as wind power.[49][50][51]

More recently, the cost of solar in Japan has decreased to between ¥13.1/kWh to ¥21.3/kWh (on average, ¥15.3/kWh, or $0.142/kWh).[52] "

And:

"Photovoltaic prices have fallen from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to nearly $0.102 per watt in October 2019, for multi crystalline silicon solar cells and module price to $0.21 per watt."

so ~10W/$ for photovoltaic gives 1TW for $100 billion, about four times larger than the 2010 installed energy generation capacity.

realistically there will be more costs than just the panels.

10 years ago? It's 2020, wind/solar have dropped by significant percentages every year since then.

Wind/solar are cheaper (LCOE) than everything except natural gas, which it is on parity with right now, and shortly will pass even for installed generation (meaning it will be worth it for electric companies to invest in replacing the natural gas generators)

Yes renewables have gotten cheaper but nuclear isn't outlandishly expensive either.

If it doesn't match expectations and the price doesn't significantly drop further from today (seems unlikely), going nuclear would be a good decision. If renewable continues to drop, we have a bit more expensive power depending on the percentage of nuclear to renewable power. However, if we don't build nuclear, I'm really not sure how much CO2 we're adding to the air and how many more people had to die from pollution before we managed to build enough renewables. If it's ballpark reasonable I don't see that we can afford to wait.

I'm a very enthusiastic LFTR stan that wondered why we weren't full on into Thorium reactor research at the beginning of the Obama administration.

But wind/solar have just changed the face of energy generation.

I agree that in theory, nuclear can provide cheap and plentiful energy in a large number of applications. But in practice it has not, and the regulatory structures and entrenched interests (fuel rod reprocessor companies, US military wanting weapons grade isotopes, NIMBY) simply make it really really hard to do a new reactor.

I think small scale reactors that fit in a shipping container or pallet box is what should be pursued. A "disposable" reactor that can simply be sent back for recycling is the way to go.

As someone else has noted, a new nuclear project is a five year lead time. Look at the improvement curves in solar/wind EROEI / LCOE. Five years will be another annualized 10-20% savings in panels / rotors / batteries. Nuclear won't be able to compete.

When the main curves for solar / wind finally stabilize, then nuclear can probably target something that might be competitive.

> However, if we don't build nuclear, I'm really not sure how much CO2 we're adding to the air and how many more people had to die from pollution before we managed to build enough renewables

To me the achilles heel in this scheme is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power station. This article [0] says that modern nuclear plants are planned to be built in 5 years (this assumes no time overruns which have been common in practice in recent years). I'm not convinced that nuclear will still be relevant in 5-10 years times once it's actually been built.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

I'm aware of the building time unfortunately (10-15 years iirc, seems to match what you wrote), but yeah I'm still expecting it'll be helpful to at least plan for a third, maybe half the power to come from nuclear plants. It's not as if we are likely to be using less energy than today, and on top of that we need a tenfold amount as we use today to replace the petajoules currently coming from oil (e.g. for transportation, I don't know the exact uses, just that NL in 2014 used 10x more kWh or mtoe than we produce+import in electrical power).

Looking at how much renewable power we managed to build in the past ten years, we need to ramp it up massively, while at the same time we just did the low hanging fruit in terms of where to build. A video I watched a few days ago mentioned that Germany had been debating over laws regarding the placement of wind turbines. Germany, the big country (to me), where there is still a lot of nature and space (compared to where I'm from, the Netherlands, here I can find a big forest not far from home and housing is also cheaper due to lower demand for the space). Apparently they were debating over a 1000 meter minimum distance between dwellings and a wind turbine for noise reasons, but that would apparently already have left nearly no space. Now it's 300 meters but some states have higher distance requirements and so you see few turbines there. It's a real pickle...

How do you know that the storage investment will produce something viable? Investments still have risk and nuclear can fill that hole.

It's true that there's always risk involved. As we know, that is true for nuclear as much as any other energy technology.

My view on this is that we are not particularly far away from this being viable even with 2020 technology. And that this is especially true if we are creative in how we apply technology, for example by decentralising the grid and installing storage capacity in people's homes, and by being aggressive with load shifting to reduce the storage capacity required. And there are dozens of promising new energy storage technologies. It seems unlikely that none of them pan out. I thus consider the risk of going all-in on renewables fairly low.

Sure, but the stakes are human existence on the planet. I don't know why you would turn away from solutions we already have with boundable risk.

Because I consider the renewables solution to have comparably bounded risk.

It's still not clear what basis you're bounding that risk on—it seems like optimism that one of the investments would pay off. I would strongly prefer pessimism in this case!

Investing nuclear, wind, solar and storage is be cheaper than leaving nuclear out.

Nuclear has it's place in the mix.