I have preached until I was red in the face that nuclear is the only solution we have currently that will get us to zero emissions on a proper time scale when it comes to global warming. I am all for wind and solar, but you have to be practical as well. We don't have anything that is even close to being able to provide stable 24 hour power like nuclear. Obviously we want a mix, but there are safe nuclear designs out there. And the feds will just have to overrule the NIMBYs on an official site or three for properly controlling the waste.
Neither the US not UK has built and finished a new nuclear plant in 40 years, and the single one (1) in progress in the UK is a 15-20 year project with a construction cost of £23Bn and a subsidy of £50Bn.
Trying to turn the small UK nuclear like this would cost £1Tn private construction, £2Tn government subsidies, and take 700 years.
Assuming it actually gets finished and not shelved by economic collapse/Brexit as its being built by a French company.
It goes with Patrick Collision’s question about why the West can’t build big projects quickly and affordably anymore.
Rolls-Royce were in the news recently with a mass-manufacturing small nuclear reactor design, but at this rate the political arguing will see us with Lithium battery storage for intermittent renewable years before 50 new nuclear plants for baseline/backup capacity. Or buying Russian nuclear power surplus in 2050.
> Neither the US not UK has built and finished a new nuclear plant in 40 years, and the single one (1) in progress in the UK is a 15-20 year project with a construction cost of £23Bn and a subsidy of £50Bn.
This is a great point and its why we should urgently be analyzing the failures of new nuclear projects to understand what’s going wrong and why we can’t do something that we could do in the 1960s and 1970s without issue (France nuclearized its power sector in less than 2 decades!)
