It 100% is politics. For example in the US, our government is incapable of doing anything on a time scale of longer than 4-8 years because the party in power shifts and undoes everything the other party did during that time. Nuclear power is inherently authoritarian because it works best under unchanging centralized governments that can plan out a 30 year program without interference from other parties.

It's just ridiculously capital intensive. If the government throws money at it it happens.

Some of the costs of a nuclear weapons program can be shared. This is probably partly why France invested heavily in it and why countries keen on it coincidentall almos always have nuclear arsenals. It's unlikely it's because they're secretly authoritarian.

> 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 (~$67-95).

Way cheaper than nuclear in USA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#:~:t....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

I find it quite worrying that this cost is not disclosed, this makes me think it's higher than we assume.

solar panels killed more people in their short history, than nuclear power plants in their much longer history.

if you count roof installers dying/getting injured on the job. do they count or we can just discount them?

I have seen some dubious statistics that downplay the number of deaths from nuclear accidents caused by cancer and play up the number of deaths caused by installing solar panels (e.g. by counting the number of people dying on roofs and assuming that most of them were up there installing panels).

Why not provide non-dubious statistics then?

Looking forward to you providing us with hard numbers.

~30,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl.

Can you find 20 people who have died installing solar panels? I found about 7 examples on google globally (3 in the US).

The rest of the pages were the dubious statistics calculating "deaths per TWh" that both downplay cancer deaths from nuclear power and extrapolate tens of thousands of falling-off-rooftop-deaths if we generated as much electricity from our residential rooftops as we would from nuclear (which we wouldnt, rooftop solar will always be comparatively minor).

This says very little about solar it just says that clambering about on roofs kills people.

> ~30,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl.

According to what number? This WHO article says it is estimated to be about 4000 deaths:

https://www.who.int/news/item/05-09-2005-chernobyl-the-true-...

There were many much higher estimates made in 1986 when the disaster happened, but they turned out to be wrong. Apparently small amounts of radiation spread out over many people doesn't increase cancer rates. There were very noticeable increases in cancer near the disaster area, but most of those cancer patients survived.

> A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.

While Chernobyl was a disaster , “ ~30,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl.” is just ridiculous.

Utility scale solar is built on the ground, no roof work required, very safe. The panels can be recycled almost entirely, similar to the utility scale battery storage that can back it. Tesla is scaling up utility storage manufacturing, Redwood Materials is scaling up recycling to close the loop and provide cheaper feedstock once there’s enough raw materials in the loop. Europe’s entire wind potential could power the world.

New nuclear is a pipe dream (~10-15 years from breaking ground to first kWh produced), but old nuclear generators should be ran as long as safely possible. Big fail on Germany’s part here, although natural gas price spikes will force their hand on more renewables, transmission (including cross border interconnectors), and battery storage.