I don't think that's the case. I think a lot of people here just realize that nuclear plants are expensive. It's 1 to 5 billion optimistically for the new designs provided you don't have any taxes or regulations at all. It's multiple times more for designs that we actually have experience with. If the government wanted to build some, at government expense, I'd be all for it. That said, I'm not at all surprised that no private energy investment groups have put their money on the table for nuclear. (Especially after the financial disaster that is Vogtie).
Nuclear really is just too expensive right now, and therefore too risky, for many of the energy players in the private sector. Again, if the government was to shoulder the majority of that risk, I think you might have some takers maybe? But as it stands? No way.
I'll even go so far as to say that if the nuclear supporters on HN were the energy billionaires, I'd give good odds that they wouldn't put their money on nuclear either. Even if you spotted them a no tax and no regulation environment. The nuclear supporters on HN would still wait for government help in the same manner as the big energy players today.
If you need twice as much power, then rather than building twice as many nuclear plants, you can just build one plant far less than twice as big, to output twice as much energy. (I believe it scales logarithmically, actually.)
Spreading nuclear energy is costly (insofar as you eventually need to build more plants, because no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances); but scaling nuclear power in response to densification of urban areas is cheap (as long as you do it in advance.)
The problem is that, in places where it’d make a lot of sense to just plop down a nuclear plant, there’s either heavy existing investment into e.g. coal; or the nearby area is as yet too small to “pay back” the costs of nuclear investment.
Really, what nuclear power fits hand-in-glove with, is centralized urban regional planning (i.e. planning a large global city 50 years in advance.) But hardly anyone does that. Even the USSR didn’t do that.
There’s one region that is doing top-down regional planning right now: Dubai. But, ah, they don’t need the energy.
(Though that raises an interesting point: a large uranium deposit could be exploited on the global market in a very similar way to a large oil deposit, if a country so desired. Harvest the electricity locally with nuclear plants; create some fuel out of it [hydrogen? ethanol?]; and sell+ship the resulting fuel globally. There could totally be a “nuclear Dubai” built on the resulting resource-extraction economy.)
> no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances
Power loss is actually just around 5% per 1000km. So if electricity is made twice as cheap it can be transferred virtually anywhere in the US from a single point in today’s price (of course we won’t build a single power plant, that’s just an illustration of the fact that transmission cost is not prohibitively high).
The US (and/or China, Russia, and Canada) are bad examples, because most countries are not nearly as large, and most countries want some measure of "ensured by our own hand" electrical-grid independence/fault-tolerance (even though they share a power-grid with their neighbours), just like most countries want a standing border-defence force (even if they participate in a defence alliance.)
So what you'd get in practice, in a nuclear-first world, is O(K log N) power plants: i.e., log(N) plants per country, for each of K≥195 countries.
The EPRs under consturction fraught with cost overruns and huge delays (some started 15 construction years ago) are evidence that big reactors in the real world are not very economical.
You get those very same cost overruns and huge delays in smaller reactors (at least, as long as you're building on the same fundamental technologies.) You can build cheaper by building e.g. a Thorium breeder reactor, but that just defers the problem of project management—building a thousand Thorium plants, like building a wind-farm with 1000 windmills, is still fraught with bureaucratic principal-agent problems.
Really, the problem isn't any specific technology, but rather the fact that any industry where projects cost a billion dollars apiece, is going to result in a natural monopoly/oligopoly, which creates perverse incentives.
The renewable energy sources you think of when you think of "renewable energy", aren't lower-overhead because of what's required to build them. They're lower-overhead because they're often built/sold as individual interchangable units that can be purchased on the open market at different times from many different companies; which creates an efficient, liquid market for such devices.
Contrast with e.g. a hydro dam. Hydro power is also renewable energy! But a dam is just as large an infrastructure project as a nuclear plant; and so dam-builders and dam-buyers form just as small a market; and so said market is just as fraught with cronyist back-room dealings; and so the market ends up just as inefficient as nuclear, or coal, or oil-and-gas, or any other cartel-driven business.
I'm not sure if we are reading the same sources. The smaller ~1 GW BWR projects (using eg VVER-1000) have been completed with much smaller delays and overruns in recent years, with construction start to operation times around 5 years.
Nuclear really is just too expensive right now, and therefore too risky, for many of the energy players in the private sector. Again, if the government was to shoulder the majority of that risk, I think you might have some takers maybe? But as it stands? No way.
I'll even go so far as to say that if the nuclear supporters on HN were the energy billionaires, I'd give good odds that they wouldn't put their money on nuclear either. Even if you spotted them a no tax and no regulation environment. The nuclear supporters on HN would still wait for government help in the same manner as the big energy players today.