The economics argument has to be understood in the larger political context.

Nuclear doesn't have a big support base. It's basically only supported by educated technocrats.

And those educated technocrats are already holding their nose, because they know big government projects are often late and over budget. And the designs that are intrinsically safe haven't been built before. And if there was a meltdown, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill. And nobody's going to want the plants built in their area. And a permanent waste repository has been a political football for longer than most of us have been alive.

At the same time, if you squint hard enough when you look at the figures, solar+wind+batteries look cheaper.

Squinting that way is pretty tempting if you were on the fence anyway.

Yeah, renewables have gotten a lot cheaper. They weren't viable, but now they are, and waiting is a sunk cost.

I think it's unconscionable that we chose to emit ~20 gigatons of CO2 instead of pushing nuclear from 20% of our electric supply to 100% -- we would be there today if we had just kept up the pace -- but what's done is done. We killed nuclear and waited for renewables to become viable. We paid the price. The CO2 is in the air. Now we can move forward.

I think that the economic argument is that it isn't viable for a private company to start a nuclear power-plant, it would require government involvement, and lots of people don't want the government to get involved in something that they think no-government entities can handle.

You don't nee the government to get involved in the nuclear plant if you don't want them to be - you can have the government make sure that the cost of global warming is paid by the coal plant. Either climate change and global warming are serious issues, and then properly accounting for their cost would significantly disadvantage coal power - or they are not serious issues and we can keep burning coal and oil.

That's silly for electricity.

Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations.

Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.

One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is?

Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again.

On the back end I think the UK market works reasonably well with a light regulatory touch allowing for microgenerators. The retail side is more of a problem. You can't really expose retail customers to the spot price (that went wrong in Texas), so there has to be an intermediary, who is vulnerable to bankruptcy instead if the spot price shoots up.

> One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is?

Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry.

What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition.

For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.

Electricity is a free market on a huge portion of the world, including EU, which is working hard to make it even freer market.

> with corporations there is zero accountability

This is not Somalia, lol. There is rule of law here and it works fairly well. The only problem is who people vote for.

Yeah, distribution is a huge can of worms. But production (and storage, as soon as it makes economical sense) are quite easy to entry. There are many cars that are more expensive than a small sized hydro or solar plant.

Note that managing lots of small generation is much harder than a few big ones that are contractually bound to behave according to certain rules. Distributed generation is extremely exciting, but it's also a big challenge.

In the US, private companies have built all our nuclear plants. And reactors like this little one in Canada will make it a lot easier.

With entirely public money and underwriting.

You're claiming that the government paid to build the reactors? Do you have a source?

Is EDF a "private" or "government" entity?

If a form of carbon free energy costs 3x as much as carbon free alternatives, takes 3x as long to build and occasionally goes boom requiring an $800 billion clean up bill why build it?

The additional pumped storage needs of solar and wind are more than offset by their vastly lower cost.

If nuclear power could compete on a level playing field it'd be great but it sucks up subsidies like nothing else and puts the taxpayer is fully on the hook for dealing with all and any 800 billion dollar fukishima events.

Crappy reactors from the 1970s occasionally go boom. We have much better designs now, like the one in the article:

> The radioactive materials stay fully encased for their entire life and beyond. It's a very robust, strong fuel that's designed to make sure it indefinitely keeps the fuel safely inside the pellet.

> Some of the main differences that the MMR has from conventional nuclear plants is that the reactor cannot meltdown as the heat is passively released into the environment, does not need any active systems to remove heat, and requires no on-site fuel storage, handling, or processing.

This reactor would have been completely unaffected by the events at Fukushima.

I'll be convinced once they start shouldering the accident liability. Not before.

Crappy reactors from the 70s are the only financially viable reactors these days. Also the ones Germany is being raked across the coals for trying to shut down.

The remaining reactors in operation in Germany are Konvoi PWRs, neither a crappy design nor from the 70s.

"occasionally goes boom requiring an $800 billion clean up bill why build it?" is an absurd way to describe the small number of incidents we've had in the past - they can all be attributed to egregious chains of human errors and/or bad planning. To quote:

But some 18 years before the 2011 disaster, new scientific knowledge had emerged about the likelihood of a large earthquake and resulting major tsunami of some 15.7 metres at the Daiichi site. However, this had not yet led to any major action by either the plant operator, Tepco, or government regulators, notably the Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). Discussion was ongoing, but action minimal. The tsunami countermeasures could also have been reviewed in accordance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines which required taking into account high tsunami levels, but NISA continued to allow the Fukushima plant to operate without sufficient countermeasures such as moving the backup generators up the hill, sealing the lower part of the buildings, and having some back-up for seawater pumps, despite clear warnings.

We already know that the Chernobyl incident was due to even more egregious human error and poor planning.

What makes you think that Australia wouldn't have egregious chains of human failure or bad planning?

Pretty much every country with civilian nuclear energy had some big scandals or incidents around them[1]. Humans just can't be trusted to build a 100% safe process.

[1] Just to name a few: Three Mile Island (US), Sellafield (UK), Brunsbüttel (DE), Saint-Laurent (FR)

It's a good argument.

Australia absolutely would have egregious chains of human failure and bad planning.

You've only got to look at the present state of this country to see that that is how we, evidently, prefer to do things.

Isn't human failure and bad planning an even bigger concern for the handling of the 1000000x larger amount of coal that nuclear could replace?

No, not really. If a coal plant is designed or run badly, it might burn down, and that's it. If a nuclear plant is designed or run badly, whole countries might be unlivable for centuries. The risks are not the same.

> No, not really. If a coal plant is designed or run badly, it might burn down, and that's it.

No, coal plants have spent-fuel disposal problems due to "human error"/poor management too. This one cost over $1b to clean up and required them to scrape off the topsoil and rendered the area essentially uninhabitable, just like fukushima. TVA ended up having to buy out the inhabitants and move them elsewhere.

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

And the fun part is: that shit is actually radioactive too. Coal plants put out as much radioactive waste as nuclear plants do... but they put it straight into the air, and then put a bunch more into spent-fuel pools besides.

That's only if you look at the worst case of individual incidents. You also need to consider the rate of incidents (due to the hugely greater consumption of coal plants for example) and other failure modes like long-term mishandling of fuel and waste.

But I think this is still a point against it. Its maybe not "fair" but if the regulators can't be trusted to properly maintain and protect nuclear power installations isn't that something that has to be accounted for?

The fact people in government and private industry knew the risk 18 years without addressing it it probably the most damming thing about nuclear power. The public simply can’t trust the industry or regulatory bodies. Which means they must assume avoidable disasters are going to be a regular thing.

I don’t have an issue with nuclear power but IMO the industry should be forced to pay for a ~1T insurance policy to avoid bad incentives rather than the government simply taking on the associated risks.

> IMO the industry should be forced to pay for a ~1T insurance policy to avoid bad incentives rather than the government simply taking on the associated risks.

Good idea; let's start by applying that incentive to the externalities generated by the fossil fuel industry first though, so that the playing field is fair.

Ed: spelling

Sure, I agree with pricing externalities for both.

Unfortunately, fossil fuel externalities cross national boarders which creates perverse incentives. Do only price in the costs to your own country or accept an economic disadvantage? Essentially countries need to start doing pollution tariffs not just taxing externalities.

Economically the correct choices are obvious, but politics is rarely so simple.

> The additional pumped storage needs of solar and wind are more than offset by their vastly lower cost.

This is seriously glossing over details. The cost of pumped hydro is highly geographically dependent. If you happen to have an alpine lake handy, then yes it can be cheap. But building pumped hydro in flat terrain is much more expensive.