I continue to be radically pro-nuclear (but I'm also pro-solar and pro-wind). Especially given Elon's example with SpaceX, how you can drop the cost of some technology by a factor of 10 or 100. Elon's idea was that the floor on the price of something is the cost of the raw materials. Everything else can be optimized. The cost of a nuclear power plant is most likely one thousand times the cost of the raw materials. Can we drive it down by a factor of 10 or 100? If not, why not? And if we can, can we increase the world's energy production by a factor of 10, or 100?
There was an excellent article here a few months ago about what drives the cost of nuclear power up so much, at least in the US. The US Navy has managed to develop relatively cheap nuclear reactors for submarines, so the technology exists. Commercial reactor costs are constantly driven up by regulations that become stricter during the process of building power plants, to the point where they often have to dismantle things to comply with new regulations that came into effect during construction. Nuclear plants go way over budget consistently, and it sounds like the economic case is actually getting harder for them.
Ultimately these regulations are driven by the large fraction of the public that is terrified of nuclear disaster. Unless that changes, costs may not go down significantly.
You make the ultimate point. In a "sane?" world, once nuclear has been discovered, every country should have gone the way of France or the Soviet Union. Build nuclear everywhere with over-capacity built-in.
The problem is, once Chernobyl happened (which might have bankrupted a struggling USSR), every country became wary of nuclear as some hidden costs are now more apparent. The Fukushima disaster didn't help either: Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb.
So we are back to basics, collecting photons from far away. Using quantity instead of sci-fi stuff. It's quite safe too, at least the panels themselves.
For Chernobyl to happen, the team on the NPP had to do a number of crazy things, and disable a number of security systems which otherwise would stop the crazy things from being done.
Certainly RBMK reactors are old and have some shortcomings, but a number of them is still running without incidents. Newer designs are significantly more safe by construction.
But the public, sadly, is beholden to legends and emotions, as it has been for millennia. Having an educated opinion is work, it takes time and effort, and a human only has a limited amount of both.
Fukushima was extremely minor though. Chernobyl is the worst and even that was not that bad, yeah we dramatize it a lot in media, but at a societal scale measuring physically (what actually happened vs how you felt about what happened) it was a blip on the radar.
