"Back in the 1970s, when France decided to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, the climate problem was not even on the agenda. And yet, within about 15 years France had almost fully decarbonized its electricity sector and had electrified a lot of other stuff (such as electrical heating and high-speed trains). Countries like France and Sweden have demonstrated in real life that it is possible to eliminate fossil fuels without sacrificing economic growth and prosperity. The reason why the carbon intensity of German electricity, even after two full decades of Energiewende, is still more than five times higher than that of nuclear France is [...] because anti-nuclear environmentalists [...] have more political clout in Germany than in France and have convinced their political leaders that it’s an excellent “climate policy” to abandon atomic energy and close down all of their remaining reactors.

https://quillette.com/2022/01/27/why-environmentalists-pose-...

The largest, and essentially only, anti-nuclear movement that exists is it's own economics. Blaming "environmentalists" is a cop-out instead of facing the reality: If it was profitable private capital would build it, if not in Germany then in other countries, further reducing cost. As have been seen since the 1950s that is not the case, nuclear has never been economical to build.

Nuclear has a place to do what the French did, massive subsidies to achieve a national security motivated energy independence. With renewables at the fore front that argument does not exist anymore. Now nuclear only exists to share an industry base with naval reactors in submarines.

It is a highly political sector as well as a capital intensive one. You can sink as much money into your prep-work as you want, but if you don't end up getting the permits and regulatory approval, it is all for naught.

Contrast that to any other kind of power generation, and the regulatory uncertainty alone is enough to sink any interest in spending a large amount of money up-front on something so uncertain.

Half of the reactors the US ordered have ended up being cancelled due to the economics.

> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]

> Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.[53]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

As said, the only enemy nuclear faces is it's own economics.

"If it was profitable private capital would build it"

Ah yes, the magical private capital, we should trust in it's infinite wisdom and do no national policy or planning ourselves.

Thats why the greatest infrastructure projects, like tbe hoover damn or interstate highway system, or Netherland barrier system for holding back the sea, are all private capital, right?

Electricity is a commodity, it does not matter how it is produced. The examples you bring up are something which is purely sunk cost, but is a benefit for the common good of the population which are exactly the projects governments should get involved in.

The auctions for off shore leases for wind power are getting up into nuclear power range. This does not include the constructions of them. The capital exists, it simply seeks alternatives which can actually bring a profit.

"New York Bight Offshore Wind Lease Auction Smashes Offshore Energy Record with $4.37 Billion in High Bids"

https://gcaptain.com/new-york-bight-offshore-wind-lease-auct...

Good luck trying to auction the possibility of building a nuclear plant.

And when will this private capital builds the multi-gigawatt energy storage required to go to renewable? My guess is never.

Yeah private capital is great at cookie-cutter projects, like buying factory-made pre-built windturbines or solar panels and operating them, this a low-risk operation and every bean-counter can model it's profitability in excell. But when it comes to developing new types of solar panels and suddenly without government research dollars there is zilch.

It is also nowhere to be seen when we need actually risky and difficult projects like build a massive hydroelectric damn or multi-gigawatt power storage which will be required to support these renewables. It is nowhere to be seen in Tidal and Geothermal, which you can't buy premade from a factory in China. It is also useless in keeping reserves of grain, gas, or any other critical resource.

So why should anyone take seriouslty this point about private capital if it only contributes in areas of least concern?

If the human race was sitting around for private capital, we'd have gone extinc by now.

It is happening, in the least regulated of all US energy markets.

> As of Oct. 2021, ERCOT had about 1100 MW of grid-connected battery storage in service with a pipeline of 4,000 MW by March 2023.

https://www.power-eng.com/energy-storage/batteries/texas-add...

The point is that nuclear is not risky or difficult. It is simply awfully inefficient.

The risky nuclear move, which states should take, is investigating the possibility of supercritical CO2 turbines and similar technologies. That is to get away from the dead end of boiling water into a steam turbine which haven't have not been economical for 40 years.

First steam turbines was out competed by gas turbines and now gas turbines themselves are having a hard time competing with the solid state components of PV or an axle right into a generator for wind turbines.

Nuclear is expensive due to red tape and onerous regulations. Those exist in such exaggerated amounts because of green's antinuclear lobby.

Turns out environmentalists of the 20th century are directly responsible for global warming.

Given that we seem to have a nuclear accident every 10 years, which was always supposedly impossible to happen, it seems like we still haven't figured out all the edge cases. Combine that with that currently only ~500 reactors exist world wide, it paints a pretty bleak image.

We could have a nuclear accident every year and it still wouldn't equal the damage we are doing burning fossil fuels.

But as airplane crashes became rarer the more we flew, so will nuclear accidents the more we build and use nuclear power plants. The ones we have are a very old and early technologuy.

Why set the baseline at an accident a year when we have renewables?

The French famously had some negative learning by doing in their nuclear build out.

> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Good chance that Green Party received significant support from outside forces to derail a sensible energy policy. Relying on fossil fuels / gas makes Germany way more dependent on the US and Russia, then otherwise.

the green party wasn't part of government in the last 16 years and had little to no say in energy policy

Nuclear also needs to be paired with gas to meet demand shifts. I'm not sure why nuclear supporters are so oblivous to this fact, they constantly mention 'baseload' but it seems like they may have only a vague understanding of what that actually means. The non-baseload also needs to be generated somehow when people are awake and doing stuff.

So how do we reduce gas use the most, building $X Billion nuclear or $X Billion solar, wind and batteries? The expert consensus is the latter.

> So how do we reduce gas use the most, building $X Billion nuclear or $X Billion solar, wind and batteries? The expert consensus is the latter.

Where can this expert consensus be found? I don't think this is accurate

You could look at your own country's plans to reach net zero for example.

A readable summary of the latest info is "Electrify": https://www.rewiringamerica.org/electrify-the-book

Random paywalled book does not qualify as a basis for "expert consensus".

Can Germany put its nuclear waste in your backyard? No? Where else?