I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations. Fusion is kind of unknown to the larger public and is still described as the magical unlimited power source and safe alternative to fission, so it still has a chance.

No, it's because it's too expensive. The idea that fission is losing because of wrongthink is a comforting tale told by nuclear fans.

Comfort tale or not, my country banned it completely 40 years ago by popular referendum. I don't think the economics were what people had in mind one year after the Chernobyl disaster.

Correlation is not causation. You would need to show that in the absence of that ban, nuclear would have been successful.

The "nuclear would have worked except for the meddling kids" theory needs to explain why all sorts of other destructive technologies plow right along, even in the face of massive campaigns against them. The distinguishing feature is those technologies are economic winners. Large profit flows trump activism. Unprofitable technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend them.

It's pointless arguing whether it could have been economically successful, we'll largely never know because people got scared.

> pfdietz: It's also pointless then to make a claim that (as you state) cannot be demonstrated. Airy unjustifiable nothing.

I said my country effectively banned nuclear power with a popular referendum that was completely biased by the aftermath of Chernobyl [1], economics hardly played any role in it. This is a fact. Similar referenda were also held (or tried to be held) in other countries like Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, and if you look you'll find the concerns were not economical, but about the safety and waste management.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_Italian_referendums

The unjustifiable part is the connection of this ban to any consequence. The assumption you try to pass off without justification is that without the ban, nuclear would have triumphed. But then you admitted this conclusion cannot be justified.

So, your pointing to the ban is just dishonestly trying to connect the dots without actually connecting any dots.

Me, I think the raw cost figures speak for themselves. Even if nuclear had not been banned, it would have failed, although perhaps lots of money would have been wasted trying to maintain the pretense it wasn't a failure.

> The assumption you try to pass off without justification is that without the ban, nuclear would have triumphed

I never said that, I said I think economics have little to do with the downfall of nuclear power. At least in most european countries, nuclear was banned or phased out for other reasons.

You said:

> I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations.

That is, you are claiming that the CAUSE of nuclear's state is the public reaction, not economics. If nuclear would have failed anyway, how can that "because" be valid?

Nuclear seems to have worked out well for France over the last 50 years.

But not cost-effectively, afaik ?

It depends what you consider as costs. France power generation (and consumption as well) is one of the very few with reliably low carbon intensity. You can play around with https://app.electricitymaps.com/map and see how bad the emissions are in the rest of Europe.

So not cost-effectively in the universally understood meaning.

I think carbon should be taxed and the externality should be moved to balance sheets, but that's another discussion.

France didn't solve the problem of cost-effective nuclear power.

It's also pointless then to make a claim that (as you state) cannot be demonstrated. Airy unjustifiable nothing.

>Unprofitable technologies don't have the stakeholders who would defend them.

I think this is the key observation. I have no doubt that the referendum mentioned in this thread was unfairly biased by Chernobyl. But if nuclear were a trillion dollar industry, such a referendum would never have been allowed to take place. Nobody was holding referendums to ban oil after Exxon Valdez.

But I think it's also worth mentioning that a big part of the reason that nuclear is difficult to turn a profit with is regulation (and public opinion) that unfairly holds nuclear to a much higher standard than fossil fuels. In a "nuclear context", any radiation is seen as an environmental catastrophe. Meanwhile coal plants belch radioactive waste out of their smokestacks and nobody bats an eye. Why, just a few days ago an article hit the front page about the US Army burying store bought tape dispensers in 55 gallon drums as hazardous waste, because they contained a small amount of a certain type of beach sand with radiation oh-so-slightly above background. All that pointless burying of harmless crap has got to cost!

> I don't think fission is loosing because it's too expensive: it has acquired a reputation of being dangerous and it's probably too late to convience people otherwise, maybe younger generations.

I just saw an article about financiers not being willing to invest in current fission plant construction, because they don't make business sense - they are not profitable.

Financiers don't just look at current costs, either. They look at the trajectory of costs. A nuclear power plant constructed today will be competing against renewable and storage technologies a half century or more in the future. It's a poor bet that those technologies won't be even cheaper than today, when they've been improving by an order of magnitude in cost each decade.

Any technology that predicates its economics on paying out over 40+ years doesn't make sense in an environment of rapid technoeconomic change. Renewables have accelerated the rate of change in the electrical power industry to a rate not seen since the early 20th century.